Hacker News Reader

"This was very recent, and the facts are not yet in"

Exactly. And yet you write "He was repeatedly beaten by the police" ... "this will be easily proven".

Your post is incredibly irresponsible. You know nothing at all of what happened, all you have are the posts of someone having a mental breakdown.

And you don't just stop at what he wrote on twitter. No, you continue with literally stuff from your own imagination:

"I believe this was murder: he died from a head injury sustained at the hands of the police."

People's lives have been ruined many many times by other people jumping to conclusions before knowing all the facts. I don't know if jumping to conclusions will hurt anyone here, but you should NOT do it. Ever.

PS. This: "but he made clear future plans which weren't executed, so this will be a lie" does not in the slightest rule out suicide. People committing suicide almost always have future plans.

> Exactly. And yet you write "He was repeatedly beaten by the police" ... "this will be easily proven".

To "prove" also means to "test", so especially with the "facts are not yet in" statement that you quote, it seems charitable to assume that "this will be easily proven" was intended to mean "this will be easily shown to be true or false".

Yes, this is indeed what I meant.

(Although, the fact that something is very easy to test also makes it less likely to be claimed falsely. I would be extremely surprised if there wasn't a recorded hospitalization.)

I don't think you should go around and bandy murder accusations without more facts, as well as to get so far ahead of reality that you already know what the police will say. There simply are no facts to support any of this.

The only data there is is Ian's tweets and they are strongly indicating police brutality but nothing in there supports your murder allegation.

He also literally said he was going to commit suicide, so perhaps we should stop speculating and wait for someone who actually has real information to share it.

Seriously, if ever comment on this page containing the phrase "I believe" or "I think" was deleted right now, we would not lose any objective facts.

I'd strongly prefer to focus on honoring the memory of Ian, but...

while googling, I found this page:

(warning, it's a 4chan thread, overflowing with hateful comments) https://archive.is/2Cdj1

In there, horrible people are inviting other horrible people to go on twitter and troll (i.e. harass) Ian.

If you're close to taking your own life, you want to be close to your loved ones, and the last thing you want is to get random people calling you names.

Really crushes my faith in humanity.

We need more people like Ian.

On a daily basis I see people making the most idiotic and insensitive comments backed by sophomoric reasoning, and it really hurts my hope. At the same time, I notice if I look for the good I seem to find a lot more, and it comes from typically much more intelligent/rational sounding people. Keep pushing forward the good. The kind of people who make it far in life will notice and follow, while the hateful juveniles will continue to fade out.

It's called politically incorrect on 4chan?!?! What did you expect?

> (quote from imurdock's twitter) Maybe my suicide at this, you now, a successful business man, not a NIGGER, will finally bring some attention to this very serious issue.

This sounds a lot more like 4chan trolls than it does one of the leading lights of OSS. I know people are trying not to speculate, but I wouldn't be surprised if his account was hacked. In any case, I think you can honor they memory of Ian and still try to find out what happened to him.

It's /pol/.

/pol/ was created as a containment zone for idiots because they were too much of a hassle on /b/ (the board where literally anything goes.). The only people taking /pol/ seriously on 4chan are the /pol/acks themselves.

> This to me strongly suggests a head injury.

Or, more likely in my mind, that if his chosen suicide method was overdose, the overdose had already begun at the time of this tweet.

(When I say "more likely" I'm not trying to suggest that I actually know what happened; merely that I can find explanations that are at least as convincing as your chosen one, so I don't think anyone should be claiming they have good ideas on what happened from reading the tweets.)

HN black bar?

Rest peacefully Ian. You will be missed.

Well, to be fair, he could have been really drunk or high as a cope with his angst... Only the autopsy can reveal head injury/substance presence.

EDIT: Have you never attempted to type anything on a keyboard/phone when really drunk? Its fucking HARD.

So to immediately conclude that he suffered from head trauma (as opposed to deep emotional trauma) is short sighted, and like I said can only be revealed (hopefully) in an autopsy.

Who will investigate Ian's death? Will it be the same police that beat him up? Or their friends?

You can't just diagnose a head injury like that. There is a simpler explanation, and unfortunately possibly more probable, as to why the tweets were written like that. I don't know why you would jump to "this is murder," we don't even know if there was even really anyone else involved. I mean come on, I understand it is very tragic and sad but not everything is a grand conspiracy.

What is the simpler explanation?

Personally I can't type properly when I'm really pissed off. I'm sure other people have the same issue.

A head injury or intoxication could have been the cause of the way he was writing, but it's too early to know yet.

IMHO, we need to find out exact timelines before jumping to conclusions.

It is well known that Ian was very PC, so using racial slurs would have been out of character. Could these tweets have been made during his incarceration by a third party? I think this needs to be ruled out.

BTW the typos strongly hint at Dvorak.

First RIP Ian. Struggles with society and interacting with people is a true problem with developers/founders, and something I've personally struggled with.

Head injury by police? Murder by police? Your absolutly feeding into the paranoid developer complex. Read his tweets on the PasteBin (http://pastebin.com/dX3VSPkM). Seems like he was under the influence during this.

I think you're being pretty naive, but let's both make a note to revisit this later when more evidence is available.