The black bar has intentionally been kept obscure over the decades. (HN is almost two decades old now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1)

Unfortunately, the answer to your question is very likely "No." There are a few subtle reasons why this is the case, and I'm going to attempt to explain them. I've seen this situation many times, and the outcome is almost always "HN doesn't change." This isn't due to laziness; adding the feature is two lines of Arc. The reason is social.

Social software is hard. In fact, it's one of the hardest types of software ever to be built. Things that might seem like small conveniences or improvements often have counterintuitive effects. These effects are not readily understood by people who aren't running the site, because only the people running the site can see them in detail.

For example, suppose we were to implement the black bar link. Firstly, this means that the black bar now becomes a "superslot", pinned at the very top of HN. It turns what was otherwise a subtle gesture into a feature. It will inevitably raise questions about whether the black bar is really warranted for so-and-so, or whether it's fair that they get the superslot. But criticisms like that can be ignored.

The bigger problem is one that Dan has pointed out many times: it's good to have readers dig a little for information. Only people who are motivated will end up showing up in the thread. And those are exactly the kinds of people who you want showing up in that thread, because the point is to honor whomever died, not to catapult the entire community (and then some) at the thread. After all, every single person who ever visits HN will immediately click the black bar if it was clickable. Are you sure this is the kind of effect that would be a Good Thing?

Then there is the truth that doing nothing leads to the optimal outcome. Suppose the black bar was changed, and it was a mistake. This mistake costs time, because now the moderator has to deal with the consequences. It's not just a matter of reverting the change; when stuff like that gets reverted, people get curious why. So it'd be natural to have to write an explanation, which ends up sparking discussion about very tricky subjects. Again, community software is hard, and explaining subtle reasons for doing X is a delicate process. All of this translates to the potential of wasting some unknown quantity of time; time you won't get back, and time that you won't be doing your duties of running HN.

Then there's the most subtle point: it would break tradition. pg was the originator of the black bar, along with the christmas colors. It might seem cheesy to people who haven't been here since 2006, but there's something magical about seeing HN behave exactly as it was originally written, even when that behavior is sometimes arguably less optimal than it otherwise could be. Because, again, every change has social effects, and these are very hard to predict.

Lastly, the person who died might not want all of the attention. Are you sure you really want to be spotlighted by the entire (tech) world when you pass? It wasn't till I had some uncomfortable moments in the spotlight that I realized that fame is sometimes something that people choose to avoid.

For all of those reasons and then some, the black bar is likely going to stay as it is. If only as a hat tip to the person who originally created the tradition.