The answer is no, people who say yes are wrong.

You black out your website to raise awareness to the cause. I think it is a fair bet that an extremely high number of HN users know a lot about SOPA / PIPA. So there is no point doing this to educate regulars.

Perhaps news will spread. Sure, it will spread in the tech community. In the tech community knowledge of SOPA / PIPA is well known. Shock waves from HN being blacked out won't travel to the general public or politicians.

But what if it does travel to the public / politicians. "A website called Hacker News blacked out? Hackers are bad right? A bit like pirates which this bill is protecting us against? Shouldn't this site be blacked out anyway?"

HN has an unfortunate name. You black out a website to make a statement. With HN which is so obviously anti-SOPA/PIPA I don't see the point.

Now.. if gravatar blacked out all of the avatars for a day. Or Google + Bing + Yahoo turned off the switch for a couple of hours at the same time... that would be a statement.

Suggestion: Add the subdomain when it is different from www

I wanted to vote no, because it seems so Pyrrhic, maybe a little gimmicky: "See, we shut down a site you don't use!"

But if you're asking people to make a sacrifice you're not willing to make yourself, you're a bad leader, period. I'm not saying HN is the bastion of the tech world. But if we're upvoting the Reddit shutdown (at least I did), and we can't turn around and do it ourselves, well, we're not made of very tough stuff after all.

This is a long overdue but very well put-together UI and Usability Guide for Android Developers. My only qualm from reading it thus far is the very last section under Navigation [1] regarding System-to-app navigation:

"For the Back key, you should make navigation more predictably [sic] by inserting into the task's back stack the complete upward navigation path to the app's topmost screen."

No. This piece of advice is the sole reason why the back button is confusing to users. Injecting activities artificially onto a user's Back Stack based on some arbitrary and imaginary path that they might have taken to get there is horrible. If I'm in the middle of reading a book and get an email notification, and I touch that notification to quickly read the email, that Back button better damn well take me BACK to what I was doing. Don't take me UP to the list of emails in my inbox. This is where the average user will become lost and not understand why they aren't taken back to reading their book, and will just end up touching Home out of frustration.

Bad Google!

[1] http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html