Yes it does need to be filled, for the journalist and tech writes who scour hacker news for their latest blog posts. Not too leave out the random person who discovers Hacker News today.
I've never seen a news post which exemplifies the idea that the comments can be worth more than the article. Obviously this isn't news to any-one here but it gives a place to discuss the changes.
Actually, I had no idea it was blacked out. I use a CSS reset to make the whole website green-on-black without images like it's an old mainframe system.
Even though it could mean the end of what we now call the internet I have to agree that having the front page covered with SOPA blackout pages is silly.
People on HN are already aware of the risks this legislation brings.
It's more important we make people who use the internet regularly but don't know much about the legislation aware of what's going on and what the problems are with it.
These top news stories are likely news to only about 0.1% of HN.
If the correlation between SOPA awareness and HN user is indeed 99.9%, we need to find a website that has close to 0%. cough MySpace cough Could this bring web attention back to the decaying social network? Stay tuned.
Really - Does the front page need to be filled with this stuff? We're aware of it already. Is it really that exciting?