20 comments

  • japhyr 1 hour ago
    Growing up in the 80s, I've known (and sung) this song all my life. But I just saw this flowchart for the first time today:

    https://jeannr.tumblr.com/post/165291081/i-made-a-flow-chart...

    I believe that's the original source, but it looks cut off. Here's a full version:

    https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b1/82/dc/b182dcc291495c013c98...

    • petcat 27 minutes ago
      Steinman was a genius. One of the greatest rock composers of all time and he picked his performers brilliantly.
      • dreamcompiler 14 minutes ago
        TIL Bonnie Tyler was the female Meat Loaf.
        • mikestew 5 minutes ago
          At the time it was pretty obvious, having just come off Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell being played on the radio ten times a day.
    • IAmGraydon 54 minutes ago
      That's actually a really interesting visualization of a professionally structured verse.
      • chasd00 5 minutes ago
        Not sure why you were downvoted, it is super interesting. I know nothing of songwriting but it seems like that could be read by a singing performer in similarly to how sheet music is read by an instrument performer. In the graph, there's additional information than just the words that a singer would need to perform the song accurately.

        /re-iterate i know almost nothing of music except what i like which i've been informed over and over is incorrect hah.

  • parkersweb 2 hours ago
    I once worked with a guy mixing TV programmes and live DVDs; I knew he’d been a studio engineer at one point in his career. We were re-arranging our studios one day and as I picked up a pair of NS-10s he casually said “I mixed ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ on those…”
    • IAmGraydon 1 hour ago
      Did he mean on a set of NS10s or on THOSE NS10s?
  • auslegung 2 hours ago
    Literal music video of Total Eclipse, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsgWUq0fdKk

    RIP Ms Tyler, you will be missed

    • chasd00 1 hour ago
      That is so great. My wife and i love to annoy our teenage kids by getting Alexa to play this song and then singing along very dramatically haha.
      • embedding-shape 33 minutes ago
        How old are you, for curiosities sake? I'm born early 90s, fondly remembering me and a friend shaming all the rest of our group by singing this song (dramatically as well) as a duet whenever we were in (already loud) public spaces.
    • petercooper 1 hour ago
      Back in 1999, the UK had its first total solar eclipse for several decades and VH1 played the music video (though, not this one ;-)) on loop for an hour while it was happening.
    • nostrademons 2 hours ago
      If you like meta-songs, you may be interested in "Title of this song" by Da Vinci's Notebook:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgmUgFEFzco&list=RDHgmUgFEFz...

    • defrost 1 hour ago
      The back story of the writing of Total Eclipse ain't bad either: https://youtu.be/LGqYnj_Y3CI?t=70
    • pavlov 2 hours ago
      There’s also one of A-Ha’s “Take on Me”.

      “Haaaand comes out…”

    • funnybeam 2 hours ago
      I like to pretend that was filmed in the Hogwarts sixth form commmon room in the eighties
    • imzadi 1 hour ago
      Sony tried so hard to kill this when it was new
    • Decabytes 1 hour ago
      I had never seen the music video until the news started playing it. Super funny
  • wigster 1 hour ago
    I went to the Reading Rock Festival back in the 80s. she was viewed very much as middle of the road and when she came on, got roundly booed and many bottles of nefarious liquids were tossed at her and the band.

    she and they were total pros, shrugged it off, she hurled some abuse back and within a couple of songs had the crowd eating out of the palm of her hand.

    RIP Bonnie. A class act.

  • urbsgpw 2 hours ago
    My mum had a cassette with some of her songs. We'd have it on for long trips. I loved the long version of Faster than the speed of night. it's basically just "carpe diem" in a different format, but i loved her voice and the slight melancholy and almost call to action that the song brought with it. Also, the video (of the shorter version) is peak 80's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm4CgwRxw3Y
  • petcat 1 hour ago
    Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf, and now Bonnie Tyler. It truly all has come to an end. I think Celine Dion is the last one still carrying on Steinman's legacy.
  • codelikeawolf 1 hour ago
    Ugh, what a bummer. I'll be listening to Holding Out for a Hero on repeat today. Nothing gold can stay.
  • gwbas1c 41 minutes ago
    This broke my heart:

    > Despite coming from a big, musical family, Tyler and Sullivan never had children.

    > I absolutely adore children.

    > I did have a miscarriage when I was 40, I left it too late, you know?

    I feel like, if you get into that situation, try to adopt or become a foster parent.

  • throw7 31 minutes ago
    This isn't hacker news... but whatever i guess.
  • madcaptenor 1 hour ago
    "Strong Songs" podcast breaking down Total Eclipse of The Heart: https://strongsongspodcast.com/blogs/episodes/s07e06-total-e...
  • vardump 1 hour ago
    Little by little, memories of the 1980s fade.
    • goda90 1 hour ago
      "Every now and then, I get a little bit nervous That the best of all the years have gone by"
    • WillAdams 1 hour ago
      Sadly, Jim Steinman passed away half a decade ago:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Steinman

      I still want to see the dream realized on Broadway of a Native-American inspired musical.

  • al_borland 1 hour ago
    The version from the wedding band in Old School will forever be in my mind.

    https://youtu.be/FfUU1wJKXDc

  • SideburnsOfDoom 2 hours ago
    And let us not forget "Holding Out For a Hero"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWcASV2sey0

  • toomuchtodo 46 minutes ago
  • PurpleRamen 2 hours ago
    RIP legend.

    I'm curious now when this was announced. Yesterday, out of nowhere, TikTok showed me a video about someone praising "Total Eclipse of the Heart", despite not having this bubble in my profile. Kinda spooky to see the news now.

    • derwiki 53 minutes ago
      Probably one of those coincidences, like you talked about bouncy houses and now you’re seeing ads for bouncy houses
  • deadbabe 1 hour ago
    Too soon, she could have had a lot more life left to live these days, but a bad surgery ended it. Sucks. Try to avoid needing surgery as much as you can.
  • alex1138 2 hours ago
    Wow. Holy crap.

    Edit: guys, I get that it's not a "substantive comment" but there's no excuse for 3 downvotes. Get a life

  • cramer4next 2 hours ago
    How is this hacker news worthy? Never heard of her or the song. Is from a time when people carried boomboxes on their shoulders?
    • nostrademons 1 hour ago
      Before that. Her breakthrough album was 1977 and Total Eclipse of the Heart came out in 1982, so it was more the 8-track era. It remained a staple of radio plays (remember those?) through the 80s and 90s though, and was remade by Nikki French into a chart-topping dance version in 1995.

      A lot of HN is folks in their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s (and sometimes even older!), so many folks here would've overlapped with the radio era. A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.

      • masfuerte 1 hour ago
        I'm old enough to remember Walkmans coming out in 1979, which was the start of the end of the boombox era. Approximately no-one was using 8-track at that point.
        • runako 1 hour ago
          I'm not quite that old, but didn't people look down on cassettes due to their lower audio quality? Weren't most home systems (hi-fis) still vinyl or 8-track for a while longer?
          • bluGill 15 minutes ago
            They did. However vinyl was considered better than 8 track. Cassette was a lot more portable than 8 track, and so where portability mattered it won. Elsewhere vinyl was considered better than 8 track and so it won (a few years latter CDs came and won).

            Those who really cared about sound quality had reel to reel tape, but that was very rare. Almost no albums were ever released on reel to reel. You typically bought the vinyl and copied it to your own reels thus ensuring there were no scratches.

          • MontgomeryPy 1 hour ago
            A big driver of cassettes then was the write ability, unlike 8 tracks. You could borrow your friend's new vinyl album, pop in a new cassette tape on your hi-fi, and record a copy of the album to the tape. Of course the Walkman then made listening to your new album fully portable.
    • heresie-dabord 36 minutes ago
      Next total eclipse, 2026-08-12.

      Total: Greenland, Iceland, Spain, Northeastern Portugal

      Partial: Northern North America, Europe, West Africa

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_eclipses_in_the_...

    • splatzone 35 minutes ago
      Nah, occassional non tech stuff is very welcome. It’s interesting to see HN’s perspective on other things
    • PurpleRamen 1 hour ago
      Death notices of famous artists are regularly on HN. If people upvote it, it should be worthy.
      • krapp 1 hour ago
        That's not how it works. If upvotes alone mattered, HN would quickly degenerate into Reddit. The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.

        Death notices of famous artists are the definition of off-topic: "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." If normies care about it, good hackers by definition probably don't.

        I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.

        • PurpleRamen 1 hour ago
          > If upvotes alone mattered

          I did not say upvotes alone matter, but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms.

          > The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.

          If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.

          > "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities,[..]If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

          I guess the notable point here is "most" and "probably". The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes. Which is why there are also regularly political and sometime seven sports entries (once or twice a year).

          Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.

          • krapp 41 minutes ago
            >but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms

            They shouldn't be, and they aren't. The mods make the final decision and they will work against the consensus when they disagree with it. This is a very aggressively curated community.

            >If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.

            Maybe the majority of frontpage entries should be removed. Maybe the "HN is turning into Reddit" people are finally correct. But that is literally what the guidelines say. On topic - "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Off topic - everything else, with the minor exception of "some new and interesting phenomenon" to gratify that intellectual curiosity.

            I'm sorry but there is nothing new or interesting about the death of celebrities, and nothing about it to gratify intellectual curiosity. Their lives, maybe, but if someone wasn't worth discussing on Hacker News in life, they shouldn't be worth discussing post mortem.

            >The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes.

            The final decision, in that case, is entirely up to the moderators. Threads with plenty of upvotes get flagged and stay flagged all the time.

            >Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.

            Maybe. But if there are grey areas, this doesn't seem like one of them. I don't see why far more substantive stories so often get flagged for "politics" or being "non-technical" even when they involve a pile of dead bodies, or why we police humor and emotion like signs of cancer, but we get to wallow in the nostalgia of every dead celebrity that comes along.

        • xnorswap 1 hour ago
          I do think HN should have an obit: category and filter them out the main page.

          It's one thing to have obits for people who wouldn't be covered by regular news, but "75 year old celebrity dies" is not any kind of new phenomenon.

          It generates a decent amount of upvotes and discussion based on name recognition and nostalgia, but every thread is essentially the same, "Oh, that's sad, I liked their work, <personal anecdote of how they were touched by it>.".

          • budsniffer952 44 minutes ago
            Nobody forced you to click on the article or jump into the comment section, did they?
            • mcmcmc 6 minutes ago
              [delayed]
          • toomuchtodo 32 minutes ago
            Meta: More often than I should have, I have emailed HN and asked "Why can you not extend/build/etc" this? And, as expected, we'd get into a great email discussion about why that would provide a meaningful improvement over the existing experience. This is a forum of builders, makers, and hackers, to their unspoken point. The primitives provided are "good enough," Hacker News is feature complete. To build this on top of HN in a browser extension or mobile app is trivial, and so, I'd say "If you want this, build it and share with us."

            Ask HN: Any good replacements for "Refined Hacker News?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845676 is an opportunity, for example. Show HN awaits for whatever you build.

        • toomuchtodo 44 minutes ago
          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48614633

          > Anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity is on topic for HN! - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That doesn't mean it has to gratify your curiosity or mine - no single article can do that for everyone. But it's clear that that's what makes the article on topic.

          > One other aspect: the best HN submissions are the ones that are most uncorrelated with anything else that's gotten attention recently - or, as I used to put it, can't be predicted from any existing sequence

          There is a "hide" link for threads not of interest, I strongly encourage it's use to optimize your forum participation experience; if this forum is not to your liking, there are others potentially more suited to what you desire.

          > I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.

          Mods can turn off flag capabilities per account, keep this in mind. You won't know if your flags are effective or not.

          • krapp 5 minutes ago
            >Mods can turn off flag capabilities per account, keep this in mind. You won't know if your flags are effective or not.

            I'm well aware, but I still do it on principle.

        • budsniffer952 46 minutes ago
          >The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.

          Who put you in charge of what other people find interesting?

          Get over yourself, loser.

          • krapp 40 minutes ago
            You seem to be new here, welcome to Hacker News.

            Everyone is in charge of what you should find interesting and everyone will make it your problem.

    • swader999 1 hour ago
      Every now and then an article like this is fine.
    • sverhagen 1 hour ago
      Maybe it's not.

      Guidelines:

      > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, (...) If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

    • tekla 1 hour ago
      Very famous singer, multiple very famous songs, 40 yo song topped the carts during the 2024 Eclipse, was pretty much the theme song for a very small indie movie called Shrek 2.
      • asimovDev 1 hour ago
        I think Shrek would be pro open source software and hardware if he knew what it was, so this makes it HN worthy
    • awnird 1 hour ago
      [flagged]