RIP Michael Jackson

http://www.tmz.com/2009/06/25/michael-jackson-dies-chat/

by jmtame • 17 years ago

248 158 17 years ago

tmz.com

bcater• 17 years ago

CNN says that he is in the hospital:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/06/25/michael.jackson/...

buugs• 17 years ago

bbc as well http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8119951.stm

abossy• 17 years ago

Twitter states otherwise:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=michael+jackson

The last tweet about it is 14 minutes ago. The search page was refreshing with 1000 new tweets/5 seconds when I first heard the news. This is such a hot topic that Twitter can't keep up!

BRadmin• 17 years ago

CNN just updated that link... confirms he's dead.

paulgb• 17 years ago

I think it's a pretty sure thing at this point, but for what it's worth, CNN still hasn't confirmed it, they're just reporting that others (LA Times and AP) are reporting it:

"CNN has not confirmed his death."

edit: they're now reporting on the broadcast that they have just confirmed it.

swombat3• 17 years ago

AP, LA Times, and other reputable sources saying he's dead.

icey8• 17 years ago

How is this even remotely hacker news?

dabeeeenster• 17 years ago

Surely if it's modded up it is?

staunch• 17 years ago

No way. If we went by that rule the site would be full of [pic] submissions.

swombat3• 17 years ago

Complaining about submissions is against the guidelines, I've been told.

icey8• 17 years ago

It's not a complaint, it's a genuine question. How is this even remotely hacker news?

abstractbill• 17 years ago

Flagging is the right thing to do - it's more effective, and doesn't add even more noise.

axod5• 17 years ago

It'd be hard to ignore it. He was a giant in the music world, and influenced a ton of stuff.

He was so far ahead of his competition it was silly.

I remember the music video to 'smooth criminal' as a kid and was simply blown away by it.

icey8• 17 years ago

Sure, but it's also on the top of every single news site in the English speaking world right now. One of the things that's always been nice about HN is that we've historically let news organizations be news organizations and we could stay on topic here. Clearly, I'm in the minority here, and I'll have to either accept the redditization of HN or find somewhere else to go.

lyime2• 17 years ago

Michael Jackson was probably the great hacker of all time (in DANCE).. sidewalking.. moonwalking.. he was good :)

johnnybgoode3• 17 years ago

Also, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=674647 for a mechanical hack of Jackson's.

WilliamLP• 17 years ago

Also you can't deny the man was a body-hacker.

IsaacSchlueter• 17 years ago

If you don't think it is, then flag it.

rglovejoy• 17 years ago

If you don't like it, flag it. I did.

Keyframe2• 17 years ago

Flag does nothing - I've flagged it too. HN turned to reddit, I'll stick to reddit then, since it is a better choice for this kind of topics. RIP MJ

TomOfTTB• 17 years ago

Obviously only pg can decide for sure and to be honest I personally wouldn’t have submitted this. That said...

There are events in this world that permeate the public consciousness. They are so big that they make all other topics seem irrelevant. Michael Jackson, whose prime was before my birth by the way, is the Icon of icons. His exit from the world is a once in a life time event that affects everyone.

I choose to make Hacker news my community of choice because it’s a community that holds rationality above all else. It is not rational to stick to strict rules no matter what. The corner stone of a community is shared experience and an event that has a profound effect on almost everyone should surely justify a rare exception to the "Tech only" rule.

So, if we assume it is rational to occasionally put the rules aside, the question becomes "is this event big enough to justify such an exception?" As has been pointed out several times here this story is the lead on every news based web site in existence. It’s being covered on every news station and even radio stations built around aloofness (JackFM) have dedicated commercial free hours to play only Michael Jackson music.

To me that signals an event that justifies a rational exception to the rules.

icey8• 17 years ago

That's about as good an explanation as I think anyone could give. Thank you for shedding some light on it. Seriously.

scott_s• 17 years ago

I agree with this reasoning. I'm just surprised at the event that gets the exception.

aquateen3• 17 years ago

Michael Jackson was a celebrity has-been who made mediocre music.

His death truly affects few, let alone profoundly.

The fact it's covered on every news station indicates it's probably not news and reason enough not to include here.

davidmathers3• 17 years ago

There can be only 1 best selling album of all time. And that album is Thriller by Michael Jackson.

justlearning• 17 years ago

One of the best comments in HN about HN-Eligibility.

May I add by saying that everytime there is a question of HN-Eligibility (every other day!),we should hot-link it here to this post by TomOfTTB. Better yet add it to the FAQ!

Leon• 17 years ago

I hacker is, by definition, lazy in the smart meaning. A good hacker knows when you don't have to repeat work, and what is going on here? More discussion of the same thing; empty vagaries on the life of a strange man. This conversion of what MJ has left behind as a legacy and his life experiences is discussed elsewhere. For that matter it is being discussed /everywhere/.

We've all heard all about this subject, is it necessary to discuss a topic that can't be brought meaning through technical discussions or rational discourse?

ananthrk• 17 years ago

it’s a community that holds rationality above all else. It is not rational to stick to strict rules no matter what

Wow! Well said.

And as others suggested, its worth providing a link to this from the FAQ.

lucumo2• 17 years ago

> the question becomes "is this event big enough to justify such an exception?"

If that's the question, what's the added value of putting it here as well. If it's already big enough to justify an exception, it's big enough to be mentioned everywhere.

Surely the question should be: "Will the discussion on HN be interesting?" Since the discussion is mostly meta-commentary, I'm inclined to say it isn't.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

There are events in this world that permeate the public consciousness.

No there are some events for which Mass Media swarms like piranhas. It's some sort of demonic combination of cheap to cover and lowest common denominator.

The result is a absolutely horrifying. It's death gawking.

Since yesterday the MSM has been all about this admittedly tragic event. And not just the TV, the radio too.

My alarm in the morning is the radio news summary. Except today with all that's going on the world, all that's happening with Iran, the ENTIRE news block was about this.

The reporters were throwing to each other each reporting some detail of the death, with the last sentence being: "Preliminary autopsy results are expected as early as tonight!"

How fucked up is that?

And the radio during my morning commute, yep wall to wall coverage.

Michael Jackson's tragic death makes all other topics seem irrelevant? WTF!

As you yourself say, this is thoroughly covered in every other media outlet. This is not a signal to gawk at this tragedy here as well.

This is sad, but it is NOT important. And it certainly isn't in need of extra attention.

This: http://iran.whyweprotest.net/keeping-your-anonymity-iran/114...

On the other hand IS important and hacker related.

jamesbritt• 17 years ago

"Michael Jackson, whose prime was before my birth by the way, is the Icon of icons. His exit from the world is a once in a life time event that affects everyone."

His prime was during my lifetime, and while I respect what he did, his passing makes zero difference in my life. As best I can tell, he reached and passed his peak. (Not that his not-quite-peak stuff wasn't or wouldn't have been good, but it could not match the effect of Thriller)

His death is sad, as are most deaths, but hardly earth-shattering, and certainly not "once in a lifetime", given that people such Elvis, MLK, and JFK died during my lifetime as well.

Maybe it's our age difference.

sbt• 17 years ago

Hacker news is not about hacking, not about news, and not about news about hacking. It's about posting links that apparently have become interesting to the community evolved here recently.

This includes, not limited to:

- iPhone news (if you live outside the US, disregard this as nobody gives a shit).

- Web frameworks (bonus if it uses an esoteric language)

- Anything distributed (CouchDB or MapReduce)

- Functional programming musings bordering on the philosophical by people who are contemplating writing a functional program.

If you are lost for news, but want to build credibility (points), you can consider doing any of the following.

- Go to TED, BBC, NYT or any of the other major feeds and add the newest item to HN.

- Post some course notes from MIT OCW (usually anything with a MIT or Stanford label on it translates into instant cred).

Finally, if you really need points and have exhausted other options, you can post the link to the SICP videos or pdf. This happens quite often but people seem to vote it up out of fear of neglecting their religious duties.

johnnybgoode3• 17 years ago

> This happens quite often but people seem to vote it up out of fear of neglecting their religious duties.

This made me laugh out loud. The truth can be hilarious sometimes.

eznet2• 17 years ago

No relevance whatsoever - I am confused at how the #1 and #2 front page stories (of HN) are about MJ.

I understand exceptions, but aside from relevant science posts, I can't think of too many that would be merited.

sielskr2• 17 years ago

Quick question for those who maintain that this story should not be on Hacker News: where else can a person get timely notification of extremely notable events without being barraged with lots of noise? Don't say BBC Dot Co Dot UK or Wikinews or Wikipedia Current Events. I tried those -- way too much noise.

lucumo2• 17 years ago

Extremely notable events will pop-up everywhere. Before I saw it here, I had heard it on two IRC channels, saw it on a few news sites and I did a Google News search for it (which didn't add anything at all, because all those news things said nothing other than "MJ rushed to hospital" and after that "MJ died").

If HN is your only source of world news, I suggest you find at least one more. There are many things that don't pop up hear, that probably are relevant to you.

minalecs• 17 years ago

for younger people on this board its hard to understand how michael jackson's music has truly been a soundtrack to our lives.. for those of us growing up in the late 70's , 80's. Hearing certain songs, can bring back memories, that I could only associate with his songs. So if anything.. he's hacked the sounds and memories of my life, and his life should be celebrated.

baddox• 17 years ago

Because the submitter and most visitors to this site are hackers?

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

It isn't. But there's more to life than hacking, and I spent just as much time trying to perfect my moonwalk one teenage summer as I did trying to get my programs to run.

schnalle• 17 years ago

i agree. tmz and hn rarely have common interests, and it should stay that way.

jsz0• 17 years ago

I'm quite disappointed to see it here. Completely out of place. Comments are 90% people bickering about the meta non-sense of the story existing here. Here's something to think about... Cat Fancy magazine won't cover this story. They will cover fancy cats as usual. Do we want to have less integrity than Cat Fancy magazine? Really?

menloparkbum• 17 years ago

Kudos for the first ever Cat Fancy reference on Hacker News.

petercooper3• 17 years ago

Well the guidelines say "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

eznet2• 17 years ago

This is a pretty broad guideline - One that, if applied at face value, would dramatically decrease the quality of this board. Although I see a fair share of Reddit bashing from time to time on HN when discussing this degrade of quality in discussion, I have to admit that I like Reddit. This said, there is already a Reddit and I think most of the HN community would agree that HN is not supposed to be 'that type of board'. I feel pretty safe in saying that one's intellectual curiosity can often times serve to be another person's bird cage lining. Further, is there anyone here claiming that posts pertaining to MJ's death are actually intellectually stimulating? Sure, the posts of the Internet slowing MAY be relevant - but only because of their relation to networking and Internet trends and traffic patterns... not because a pop singer died...

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

Well, we get a reminder for every holiday. So if we're going to make the site a calendar, we might as well make it an obituary too. Next up: classifieds.

lyime2• 17 years ago

I hope this is not true.

pg• 17 years ago

http://www.scoopler.com/search/#%22micheal+jackson%22

axod5• 17 years ago

Thanks, that's actually quite a bit more useful than search.twitter.com good job scoopler :)

search.twitter.com - "25,415 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them." - Refreshing to show 25,000 new results at once doesn't seem the best way...

JulianMorrison• 17 years ago

Seeing them at full speed doesn't either. Firehose much?

johnnybgoode3• 17 years ago

I'm trying to figure out if you misspelled his name on purpose, to slow down the rate of results being returned or something. ;)

aristoxenus2• 17 years ago

Funny: after a couple minutes of watching that feed for both spellings, the "Micheal" one is actually a lot more active.

And indeed if you look at the "hot topic" list, the wrong spelling is winning ;)

JMiao• 17 years ago

for jmtame:

"thrilla" http://www.thesixtyone.com/Villains/song/Thrilla/493/

"michael jackson (calvin harris remix)" http://www.thesixtyone.com/TheMitchellBrothe/song/Michael+Ja...

jackchristopher• 17 years ago

A guy hacked the NES and sent his wife this classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px06aFDlJrs

apsurd• 17 years ago

Never thought I'd see the day when any link from TMZ would be on hacker news.

jmtame3• 17 years ago

tmz was the first/original on this one -- not nytimes, cnn, or anyone else in this case

JshWright• 17 years ago

So, is it just me, or has CNN been "Jackson-dotted"?

Edit: It appears to just be the mobile site.

Silentio• 17 years ago

TMZ is a pretty terrible source but the NYT is reporting this as well: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/michael-jackson...

socratees• 17 years ago

I feel bad for what the media has done to him, calling him names and what not. It's all over now. Rest in peace Michael. we loved you.

asimjalis• 17 years ago

Perhaps the technology take on this is that Twitter was also briefly dead. Also this might have implications for marketing: did news sites that announced his death before it was confirmed get more page views than websites that waited?

joel_feather• 17 years ago

That's just so...shocking. It always seemed like these type of people stay around forever to be made fun off and prodded - and then when you read about their death.

It brings things into perspective - we're all just blobs of flesh, here by chance, and we will all be gone, washed away and forgotten before very long.

rewind2• 17 years ago

Should be "RIP Your Posting Rights" for even considering putting that here. I'm having a good laugh over the fact that it's #1 though. I love hearing how people explain how something is relevant to hacker news when they post stuff like this.

I don't even care that you posted it, but I'd love to hear what your rationale for doing so was... if for nothing else than to get another laugh.

BvS• 17 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=674621

rewind2• 17 years ago

I think that can turn into a bit of a slippery slope form of justification, but on its own it's a good argument and you explained it well.

And by the way, when MJ was in his prime, we were all running around elementary school wearing silver gloves on one hand and thought we were the SHIT.

kingkawn• 17 years ago

man made such good music in his prime it still gives you shivers.

arien• 17 years ago

RIP :(

poppysan• 17 years ago

I appreciate him and his quirks... RIP

gnaritas• 17 years ago

You mean like liking children waaaay too much?

gjizzle• 17 years ago

i heard that they were going to melt him down to make toys so the kids can play with him for a change

brianmckenzie• 17 years ago

Well, now we know just how famous you have to be for the HN admins not to kill a TMZ link reporting your death.

jmtame3• 17 years ago

he sets the bar pretty high: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_wor...

dinkumthinkum4• 17 years ago

Yeah, probably most famous living person in the world would do it. I'd agree with you.

diego2• 17 years ago

This is somewhat hacker-relevant: During a 30-minute window, 22% of all tweets mentioned Michael Jackson (with the correct spelling).

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=michael%20jackson&s...

It's the highest peak we've seen for a person since we started tracking.

delano3• 17 years ago

Twitter has now disabled search altogether which is the first time I recall that happening. I'm sure that's one of the reasons for the decline in the graph.

diego2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Even now, 8 hours after the news broke, 6% of all tweets are still mentioning Michael Jackson. That's comparable to the peak mentions for the Lakers when they won the NBA title and Facebook during the name rush.

xsmasher3• 17 years ago

Don't read too much into that - "Twitter spammers" are already keeping an eye on trending searches and posting unrelated spam content with high-ranking keywords. Your data will be skewed by spammers trying to ride the popularity wave.

ctingom• 17 years ago

Just to clarify: The King of Pop died and not the King of Snap, Crackle and Pop.

yan• 17 years ago

As much as I like to distance myself and really not care about the deaths of people I don't know, I do feel myself saddened by this. He contributed a great deal to a huge number of lives and completely changed what people thought of pop and pop stars. Hacker news or not, I feel having this space as a place for discussion is worthwhile imho.

gruseom2• 17 years ago

I agree with Andrew Sullivan:

There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06...

ComputerGuru• 17 years ago

And 3rd, he was a child abuser himself.

Downmod me only if you would have done the same while he was alive. Being dead doesn't forgive you what you've done.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

4th he was abused by millions of fans and continues to be abused after his death

On the subject of child abuse (it had to come up at some point) all I will say is he wasnt a child abuser in the sense of pure evil (met some, he was nothing like that :)). More like unable to comprehend right/wrong and emotionally regressed. He needed help and no one gave it to him.

gruseom2• 17 years ago

That's a good point; many (though far from all) abused children turn into abusers later. Still, I decided a long time ago in the absence of first-hand information to withhold judgment about Michael Jackson. It could be that the terrible stuff that was reported about him was true, in which case it was probably the tip of the iceberg. But don't underestimate our society's capacity to demonize a weird person, especially when you throw in an inhumane media and extreme celebrity. It's easy for the popular conclusion to be wrong in such cases, adding one injustice to another.

chanux• 17 years ago

So many RIP news on HN lately :( .

RIP MJ.

dinkumthinkum4• 17 years ago

You all complaining about this submission are being pretty ridiculous. Despite all the disgusting derision about so-called mediocre music, this is actually a big deal.

Probably the most famous living person in the world died a few hours ago. This is not just some other celebrity news story. It's just a HN submission. It's not as if someone, heaven forbid, changed the Google home page in memory of Michael Jackson, that would be crazy (rolls eyes). Furthermore, he was very talented; though such an evaluation is subjective, it seems somewhat strange and incredulous to deny this much.

I hope the people making these weird derisive comments aren't involved in any kind of social networking or related startups as probably your only hope is that understanding something about people has nothing to do with building social software for them.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

The most famous living person in the world?

Nah.

Maybe in the past but in recent years before his trial he had slipped out of knowledge. Even after the trial he slipped back into obscurity until recently.

I dont think he can be compared globally to, for example, David Beckham in modern times.

Goladus• 17 years ago

Jackson had been famous since he was 10 years old.

Sure, he hadn't been stealing recent headlines from Lindsay Lohan, but it's not like the millions of people familiar with him at some point during the 70s, 80s, or 90s just forgot about him.

tptacek• 17 years ago

The best summation I think you'll read of Michael Jackson comes from Bill Wyman; today, abbreviated but current:

http://www.hitsville.org/2009/06/25/michael-jackson-and-the-...

and from 1992, with much more detail:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/michael_jackson/

It's not a happy story (and not for the reasons you assume; for instance, search the latter story for "South Korea"). Bill Wyman tells it better than I think anyone else can, as an expert and well-regarded music journalist writing outside the confines of any mainstream music publication.

nav• 17 years ago

"Speechless", "I Can’t Help It"... "Another part of me" doesn’t want to believe it but as much as we want one can’t "beat it". You didn’t "stop till we got enough", "rocked our world" and "healed it"... - RIP MJ ...you’re "gone too soon"

luckyland• 17 years ago

MJ hacked music in his own little way during my childhood and I feel better for it.

eterno• 17 years ago

listened to free willy ost on way to office and then came the sad news.

RIP MJ.You were as genius as humans come.

zen53• 17 years ago

Wanna be startin something? http://bit.ly/aYDXm R.I.P Michael

johnyzee• 17 years ago

Strange that he would have a heart attack at the age of 50, particularly considering that he cared obsessively about his health and was usually at peak physical performance for his shows. There must be more to this story.

invisible2• 17 years ago

I guessed at the time of the event that he was on drugs. He lost everything and was in more debt than some may think is possible for an individual. Turns out that is likely the cause, but I'm sure we will be hearing about this for a long time to come.

RIP Michael Jackson

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