Researcher Sam Roweis took his own life last night. Here's one of his lectures. | Hacker News Reader

Researcher Sam Roweis took his own life last night. Here's one of his lectures.

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82 pointsraganwald55 comments

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A few memories of Sam from a Toronto machine learning student: http://blog.smellthedata.com/2010/01/sam.html

And from a fellow researcher: http://hunch.net/?p=1172

Thank you for sharing this.

He was head of science club at my high school and also preceded me into the same college program.

I really admired his talent and drive. This is terrible and sad news.

This is sad. He was a co-worker of mine.

Here's more info: http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2010/01/13/nyu-computer-scienc...

Sam was a prominent contributor to the field of machine learning and given his young age he held so much promise. He will be missed.

http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2010/01/13/nyu-computer-scienc...

with these kind of sad news, a phrase always come in to mind; "Permanent solution to a temporary problem"

It's unlikely to have been a temporary problem. Depression is pervasive, all encompasing, and, seemingly, far outside your expreiences to have made such an uninformed comment.

If it's far outside his experiences then by definition his comment will be uninformed. Might be nicer to inform him. No need to be condescending.

It's an emotional issue, and when someone dismisses it as a casual case of melancholy, it can push some buttons.

Yes, it is a serious emotional/chemical/psychiatric issue, but there are alternative solutions that are less drastic. (Even though one may not see them as valid or helpful at the time.)

using the word "but" was unnecessary because you didn't disagree with anything i said, and it just makes you come across as kind of an argumentative asshole

Are you out of your mind? He doesn't sound like an argumentative asshole, his sentence flowed perfectly normally with the word "but". Not to abuse the cliche, but have you looked in the mirror?

This is the point where pg would usually say "please stop". Please stop.

It's sure not outside my experiences, and I agree with him. It's a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I struggled with depression for most of my life, and I'm still glad I now manage it and have a successful life.

Some people can cope better than others. I've been suffering with bipolar disorder for about 7 years now (signs were there before that, but it didn't really start affecting my life until ~15 or so), and while I've managed to find ways of dealing with the swings and using both sides to my advantage, it's not always easy.

In a particularly bad depressive period, it's not uncommon that'll isolate myself and feed into it, eventually ending up with suicidal thoughts. Thanks to a solid support network and years of learning to cope, I can typically at least pull myself up to the point where I can tell myself "this isn't really what you want, you're just in the throws of depression". If my support network were to crumble at the same time as a major event occurred (like what seems to have happened to him, w.r.t. the very premature babies), getting through this would be very, very difficult.

I can't so much as imagine what he was going through, and my condolences go out to his family and friends.

Battling through the downs makes me feel better about myself. Lots of people actually never feel depressed to any significant degree, and that fact that you can push through it means you're made of pretty solid stock. Quite motivating for an introverted dweeb like me:)

I'd like to point out that your comment itself is telling. "I'm still glad I now manage it".. implies that it is still a problem that requires an active solution (your "management" as it were.) I do not want to belittle your struggle or minimize your accomplishment of successful management, but most people who go on anti-depressants will end up back on them again later in life.

Being on anti-depressants IS managing it. Deep depression--the kind that makes you commit suicide--is like being a hole so deep that you can't see any way out. You lose all motivation to do anything, even things that would help you out of it. You can't see through the darkness. Anti-depressants are just a tool to help you out.

Exactly. And the fact that most people will go on them again (and the re-use rates go up exponentially as the number of times an individual relapses) was meant to demonstrate the ongoing nature of the battle with depression. "Managing" implies an active relationship with the condition, proving my point that it is not temporary.

In many major depression cases though it really IS a permanent problem. You can sometimes manage it with therapy or drugs but for many people the depression will last their entire lives. There is often no 'cure' and therapy / drugs will not always help.

Calling it a 'temporary problem' is not fair.

See my post above. The depression may well not be temporary, but the span during which suicide seems like a good option often is. It's not unfair to point this out.

I think that a person can decide they have had enough suffering in their life.

I agree that often people are able to gain hope.

It is unfair to categorize the problem of Depression as temporary because ephemerality is not an intrinsic quality of depression; the opposite is frequently the case.

> It is unfair to categorize the problem of Depression as temporary [...]

I'm not. I explicitly addressed this.

i'm considering this option. what often stops me is the urge to punish the world for creating me on the way out.

The depression IS the problem though, and calling it 'temporary' is what you're doing when you say 'suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem'. These people contemplate suicide every day of their lives.

Trivializing the problem like that by calling it temporary is not helpful.

A large number of people who make failed suicide attempts don't try again, it's why making changes such as making it harder to kills yourself with a household gas supply has a significant impact on suicide rate. Depression isn't a temporary problem, but the final suicidal impulse often is.

A large number of people who make failed suicide attempts don't try again, ...

I doubt the truth of that. There are studies that suggest otherwise: http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2008/08/on-permanence-of... .

That blog suggests that instead of 4% going on to commit suicide as the earlier research showed, that 13% do commit suicide later on. That still leaves 87% of aborted suicidees who don't commit suicide afterwards.

Go easy. For many people depression comes in cycles. While the threat is always there, I think the parent poster has a good point.

Yes, when someone is in the throes of depression, it's all-encompassing. However, when they're feeling okay, they might well have a hard time even remembering how or why they got so close to the brink. That's what I understand by the parent poster's use of "temporary problem".

One can't un-suicide, but one can potentially endure until a brighter day, although if one is truly suicidal, it doesn't seem that way.

I.e. The depression isn't temporary. It's the crisis point where suicide seems like the only good alternative that is temporary.

One can't unsuicide, but dead people don't feel the desire to unsuicide anyway. Even if they were about to win the lottery (i.e., see a brighter day), they don't regret being dead. No matter how good life can be, it's always worse than death.

I was not thinking about this particular situation but suicide as a general. At the end of the day either i am informed or not, i would conculude with the same thought

How do you know that being dead isn't better than being alive?

I took his Information Theory course at U of T. He was a brilliant guy. I remember him young and full of life. This is shocking and very sad.

RIP Sam. You will be missed.

Nothing much I can add. I didn't know him personally, but I was a huge fan of Sam Roweis and I learned a lot from reading his papers. It's very sad to think that there won't be any more.

http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2010/01/13/nyu-computer-scienc...

"His wife recently gave birth prematurely to a set of twins."

Usually I'm sympathetic to this kind of thing, but that's a pretty horrible thing to do to his wife.

I don't think it would be fair or accurate to attribute it to post partum depression. The challenges Sam and his wife faced were/are extraordinary.

From the comment by "fr_of_sams" (http://www.nydailynews.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=84311):

Their children were twin girls. Born over one year ago. Severely premature: 24 weeks gestation. Severely disabled. Require 24-hour nursing care for their entire lives. Cannot eat, and will be on feeding tubes for the rest of their lives. Constant medical treatment and medical crises. Maybe someday they will walk. Maybe not. They will never really talk. The financial pressures on this couple were severe: they had already used up all insurance benefit limits, and burnt through their own personal savings with their retirement savings following rapidly...

Full comment (in case link no longer works):

"Their children were twin girls. Born over one year ago. Severely premature: 24 weeks gestation. Severely disabled. Require 24-hour nursing care for their entire lives. Cannot eat, and will be on feeding tubes for the rest of their lives. Constant medical treatment and medical crises. Maybe someday they will walk. Maybe not. They will never really talk. The financial pressures on this couple were severe: they had already used up all insurance benefit limits, and burnt through their own personal savings with their retirement savings following rapidly. We should put the blame for Sam's death where it belongs. We have the technology to keep little girls like that alive. We have a society that pretty much insists upon doing so. But we put the financial and organizational and emotional burden entirely on the parents. We allow insurance companies to cap benefits, and we have no social system for rescuing people from these straights until they are literally homeless and bereft"

Sometimes the ancient Roman practice of exposure seems almost humane.

No it doesn't. But, refusing to keep people on perpetual life support and letting them pass on (not making them die) surrounded by loved ones is human.

Actually, they're pretty identical. In both cases they die of starvation. At least with exposure you have a chance of freezing to death (depending on what time of year it is), which is a better way to go.

Now his wife is left to care for two high-need children, grieve for her husband, and figure out a way to pay for it all one day (maybe). Looks like he made the challenges facing his wife even more extraordinary now.

From the NY Post article:

"His wife had recently given birth to preemie twins, the sources said.

"They were in some kind of argument over caring for them and all of a sudden, in the middle of the argument, he jumped over the 16th-floor balcony," a source said."

This was a spur of the moment impulsive thing. It wasn't some sort of calculated plan to cause his wife distress.

Given how unimaginably hard caring for premature, permanently-disabled twins would be I don't think it's fair to take him to task for not being able to cope for one tragic instant.

That's one way to look at it.

Another way is to look around yourself and ask whether perhaps there's just a little something fucked up about a society that would force this couple to go bankrupt financially and emotionally because their peers will send them to a life of misery in prison if they refuse to keep two completely handicapped and malfunctioning children on feeding tubes for as long as is medically possible. Children so young that they, thankfully, are not even aware of their own miserable prison of an existence.

Most of the inhabitants of this planet unfortunately suffer from mass-delusion. We have not yet advanced spiritually or intellectually enough to grapple with these kinds of situations. When a society insists on keeping someone or something "alive" at great cost and for no purpose other than to satisfy their own neuroses, something is deeply wrong, and some people decide, "To hell with it all."

As someone who is considered sane, with no known issues of depression, and a parent, I can say unequivocally that under no circumstance would I let a child die, regardless of circumstances. Finances, mortgage, whatever don't factor for a second into that decision.

Once you have a child, you realize this world isn't about you, and absolutely all you have left when you pass is your offspring and those who you impacted in life.

This is a tragedy but in no way should they be condemned for trying to save their offspring. Everything is not black and white as you would like to believe it is, and even if it defies your logic, there is definitely more than one perspective here.

It's not necessarily society's fault. I don't think you understand how far a mother (and the occasional father) will go to save their children's lives.

It can be very hard for people to let their loved ones go, society be damned.

"... a society that would force this couple to go bankrupt financially and emotionally because their peers will send them to a life of misery in prison if they refuse to keep two completely handicapped and malfunctioning children on feeding tubes for as long as is medically possible."

Except that it is quite lawful and moral to let them die, and is routinely done. From what I've heard, what generally happens in cases like this is one or more family members flip out and become obsessive crusaders for endless medical intervention. Their loyalties and motivations are understandable, even if their loss of perspective has appalling consequences. It would be interesting to know which of the parents were the medical crusader(s) in this case.

Holy shit, that's awful!

My wife and I are new parents, and the one, one thing that kept us sane some nights was the hope that one day we'd be able to talk to our daughter and see her grow up healthy and happy.

A friend of mine described parenting as: "the highs are higher and the lows are lower". Sometimes a lot lower.

I don't think it's fair to speculate; we don't have enough information.

It's the nature of depression that he might have even thought he was doing his family a favour.

Suicide is often a reaction to a set of constraints that are perceived to be unsolvable. I.e. I can't fail, but I'm gonna. I can't let my loved ones down. I can't stand to face my friends after doing X. The pain is unbearable, so I'll just save everyone the trouble...

Imagine a warrior who commits suicide rather than admitting defeat, because he can't face the shame (quite possibly imagined) of failing in his duties.

In all of your examples, you are depicting suicide as a short-sighted or cowardly act.

An alternative explanation is that suicide is often committed in the pursuit of pain relief. It may be seeking relief from a terrible situation, a chronic illness, cultural damnation, or any other source of suffering.

If your example of a warrior committing suicide was meant to refer to seppuku then the warrior would not kill themselves "because he can't face the shame". I suggest you learn more about the ritual here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku

I don't think that it is right for one person to judge the level of suffering another is willing to endure.

Sad. I was at U of T before his time. What is it about (Toronto) AI researchers?

I remember him from grad school.

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