Even so, the connection isn't in any way made clear. Your assumption that if people saw that Andy Grove died they would immediately identify the black bar as a sign of mourning is kind of, I dunno, culturally normative?

The site is in English, is based in the US and contains mostly news from certain regions of the world, of course it's going to be culturally biased

I agree an association would be helpful (is it for Andy Grove or for Belgium, for example)

But it is not hard to find the association

Whatever happened to "We exist without skin color, without nationality" and "Cyberspace does not lie within your borders"?

The site is accessible everywhere, but to expect it not to cater to a specific audience is disingenuous

It's tradition.

That ranks somewhere close to "I was just following orders."

Well, from experience I've seen the black bar for: Steve Jobs, John McCarthy, and Dennis Ritchie each in October 2011, so I assume most HN posters know (or should know: see this thread) that the black bar is a sign of respect for famed engineers, scientists and technologists who have passed.

Read the rest of the comments. There's plenty of confusion, and it's not applied consistently. Saying "it should not explain itself because of tradition" is only valid as a justification if you actively want to keep people out.

I didn't say that.

Luckily, the black bar doesn't appear as a weekly occurrence. When it does appear, the community can explain it well enough.

In this case, no one is saying that you can't mourn more than one event. Incidentally, the site administrators are most concerned with events that directly relate to Silicon Valley. That is just the context that they operate from and is not a statement of values.

There was also a terror attack this morning that has relevant articles on the front page.

Perhaps adding a tooltip would be a subtle way to provide more info.