I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.
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In the past few months I have been almost obsessed with consuming everything he wrote and published. It is exactly my way of thinking. Of questioning reality and turning it upside down so it works even better.
I will miss him. And I will continue to learn from him. We all knew this was going to happen, he was most transparent in keeping us informed about it. So I am sad, yes. But I am also immensely grateful and positive.
Pieter, it was an honour and a privilege to have shared time with you. Peace for you.
His writing is just what I needed right now, at this time in my life. Particularly about how to be happy.
I think when you've lived such a prolific life, you don't need any last words. His life's work speaks for itself.
>His life's work speaks for itself.
Very much this! A loss to all - but a life well lived.
This is the particular blog post in which he talks about 'how to be happy'
> Stop wasting your time on commuting, boring jobs, meetings, TV. Do only things that you feel are worthwhile, with people you like. If this means a cut in income, so be it. Be the person you really want to be. Don't take it all too seriously, we all die.
Thank you.
Quote hits very close to home.
> 10. Want nothing, accept everything
> Above all, explore the world without desire or demand, and be tolerant of whatever happens. Most people are nice, and even the others teach us. When you want nothing, you cannot be disappointed. When you accept everything, you will see beauty in every moment.
But when these things start looking more imminent, I hope I have the courage to do what he has just done, I really do.
Incredibly brave decision.
[1]:http://www.glasgowcomascale.org/
Edited to Add: Added link to the Glasgow Coma Scale, shouldn't have assumed knowledge of it.
I am really convinced that every advancement is connected somehow and the collective improvement in efficiency and livings standards makes it possible to commit more resources and train even more students to work on hard problems.
Even the work on something unrelated like React might somehow help if you observe humanity as a whole.
Also f*ck cancer (i read the guidelines and i found no statue against insulting cancer, if there is a user named cancer its a misunderstanding and you should really consider changing your username)
Obviously you can't live your life in fear like that, but I think there's good reason to be more fearful or at least angry about cancer than something like a stroke/wreck.
The cynic in me assumes that with children and a spouse, you're most likely too busy filling out forms and applications that ensure that they will not be screwed over by insurance companies and medical providers.
Being a defensive driver can drastically change your odds of being killed by some random yahoo. Further, the kind of car you drive can make a significant difference and improvements in car design are largely responsible for a huge reduction in fatalities.
Remember, our dealing with V^2 and slow reaction time so a 50MPH car has half the energy of a 70MPH car.
For what it's worth, we have also drastically reduced exposure to carcinogens for most people.
Getting older doesn't increase your changes of getting in a car accident.
1: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
I beg to differ.
> In 2012, there were almost 36 million licensed drivers ages 65 and older in the United States.1 Driving helps older adults stay mobile and independent. But the risk of being injured or killed in a motor vehicle crash increases as you age. http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/older_adult_drivers/
Hm. I wonder your age. Young folk seem to think death impossibly foreign, and fear it / ignore it all equally. Older folk, that have had more first-hand experience with the decline of the flesh in themselves and those they grew up with, have more an appreciation for the difference between an abrupt death in a car accident, and a slow dissolution like cancer. Quite a lot of people fear dying more than they do death.
I've seen too many relatives and those close to me perish in various of ways before old age not to care about it. To me all forms of it ... just feel equally bad in the end from the point of fearing some personal fate or another. My view is not of someone oblivious to life's hardship. Life hits you, you take the punches, and stand as long as you can.
"Cancer" in general does not mean a slow death. Some forms can kill within weeks of a diagnosis due to quickly arising medical complications.
My intent was certainly not to be dismissive of the fate of Pieter and other cancer victims.
Depending on the type of cancer, you can go in a few weeks, months, or fight the battle for years.
Even if you endure and persist, which gets progressively easier for a lot of cancers thanks to more advanced therapies, you have to fear recurrence.
I'm not at all opposed to ending one s own life if done without severe psychological issues and done thoughtfully after plenty consideration.
Of course, if you regulate assisted suicide, as some countries in Europe have done, it leads down a very slippery slope. Who makes the decision on whether you are allowed to end your own life?
Most current religions frown upon suicide as a sin. Life is god given and not yours to decide upon (Islam, Christianity). Or suicide is viewed as an unjustified interference in the natural order (Hinduism). And therefore most of our societies reject it.
Admittedly, most suicides that are not connected to terminal illness manifest due to psychological / neurological illness and despair that might be cured or managed with proper therapy and medication, making a return to a happy life possible.
It's a fascinating and very multi-facetted issue to think about.
I'm even mixed with psychological issues on this. We can help a lot of depression; some folks with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and a slew of others. But some, help is just barely help. If they've been trying treatment for 15-20 years as an adult, and have found life to be agonizing for the most part, and they've talked it over with a psychiatrist (who could have proceedures for due consideration)... yeah, I can't say I oppose it.
This does lead back to: Who is allowed to decide whether you live or die? The slippery slope you were speaking of : To me, those are simply beginnings. It is a step above complete illegality.
And granted, when talking about mental illnesses that are considered treatable, like depression, you can't expect assistance for suicide. But when talking terminal illnesses, like cancer or dementia, then not legalizing assisted deaths is not only dangerous to others, but also an act of extreme selfishness.
We're basically condemning people to suffer extreme physical pain and/or insanity until their last breath. And as a non-practicing Christian, I suspect the reason has less to do with God and more to do with not wanting to take on some fucking responsibility for others.
They'll have to explain their sins themselves, but by observation I think its giving up that they oppose.
Going up to OPs question of who gets to decide, decades ago when my father died of some weird fast moving liver cancer no one religious had any issue with the numerous treatment options all somewhat fatal or with the concept of being able to select a treatment plan. So the oncologist says chemo option A means X amount of pain and 90% chance you'll be dead in Y months, and option B, C, D, all different tradeoffs, or we could try whatever else and you'll get Y months with X amount of pain, or do nothing and you'll be gone in about Y weeks or etc etc. Basically the patient and team of doctors pick a death date which results in an associated level of pain and medical treatment (medical profit). The Christians don't seem to mind "pick a death date" they just seem very unhappy with the idea of the treatment plan being "give up completely" "game over".
There seems this weird assumption that people can't handle picking a death date or it would warp culture too much, but any cancer patient with more than one medically approved treatment option is pretty much picking their date as it is today. Especially if its terminal cancer. Adding a third, fourth, fifth treatment option of "once we agree your quality of life is below level X then you're done" isn't going to be a huge addition or huge problem.
My wife has power of attorney or whatever its called over her Alzheimer's damaged great uncle, she has full control over all of his medical treatment plan. The only real moral or ethical argument I can think of is if it were made legal maybe only only legal agreements drafted after the law change should be valid. Although then again, the whole point of her being in charge is he trusted his niece the most so if he were competent he would likely continue to trust her the most anyway.
A young person generally hasn't seen (many or any of) their close friends grow infirm and die, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with the fact that they don't see life through that lens yet.
I wonder your age. Old folk tend to assume they have some sort of wisdom and that they can't possibly be wrong simply because of extra years spent on Earth.
Young people tend to assume they know a lot about things they have never experienced.
Rest assured, what misconceptions time does not fix for us, death certainly will.
edit: changed 'you' to 'us', none get out alive.
I'm not "old folk," but I do work in medicine. I may have seen a bit more death and death-fear than you. Then again, maybe not; I don't know you.
The only thing actually on my radar is being aware I have limited time, and am past half-way.
For those who die slowly, or lose faculties, the process seems unfair. For those who have a sudden exit the event seems unfair and can leave much unresolved and unsaid.
Euthanasia, to me, seems to be the least worst option if I should ever find myself facing a drawn out exit. I get a bit frustrated those professing relgion like to play the "you must not" card. It's not their business unless I share their belief, which I don't.
So I'll get the exit the universe decides. One day I'll be part of a star.
And even if you do share it, it's not.
See how virtuous I am empathizing with lower-order animals' suffering.
See how virtuous I am championing the sanctity of human life.
A lot of the latter can be mitigated: make those who want human life preserved "at all costs" pay cash-over-the-barrel into that "at all costs" effort, on an individual basis. Voluntary, elective euthanasia becomes an option when no one steps up to pay for the extraordinary efforts. They either withdraw their opinion immediately when they can no longer externalize their social virtue signalling choice's costs onto everyone else, or they go broke very soon and those who are suffering can make a free choice.
Or we can pursue the sane choice and legislate elective assisted euthanasia with safeguards like Switzerland's or other rationally-chosen parameters. It is long past time to recognize that our medical technology has far outstripped our ability to reliably deliver an acceptably high quality of life.
Generally euthanasia is considered an ethical option when medicine can't help anymore, and any prolonging of life would either be useless (patient is braindead) or unable to mitigate the pain of the patient.
Personally I think bringing economics in wil obfuscate the moral discussion.
Obviously neither justification is valid as a basis for making laws that apply to us all, but on the other hand, how do you tell them their concerns aren't worth listening to? Some cultures have practiced selective involuntary euthanasia in the recent past, so you can't say "It'll never happen."
I entirely agree - prolonged suffering is not life, it's misery. That decision should belong to people going through this, and not anyone else (they can discuss with those they feel appropriate).
One of the most memorable transports I ever did was for a woman with terminal metastatic cancer, taking her home where her husband had set up a bed in the living room so she could watch the sunrise.
To understand the amount of pain she was in - the movement of the ambulance driving her home about 20 miles exacerbated her pain such that her morphine dose which was already at 450mg/day was pushed to 600mg/day.
For comparison, if you're a 200lb person with a broken bone, you will likely get 15mg.
I have seen the prolonged suffering patients, and their families. Whatever happens, it's not easy.
It may be hokey but I believe the only way to win is to play excessively ;-)
Another option that most people are not aware of (that I personally consider the best way to die), is to simply fast (i.e., no food but with water) for the 30 or so days.
Thought this might not be an option 100% of the time - given the circumstances of the ailment.
This process allows you to meditate on the self, and to let go in a steady way, instead of ending in an abrupt halt.
It has been known to produce a sense of immense relief and oneness with everything.
I think "death" is just another condition like disease or disability that will eventually be defeated through technology. Someday we will have medical immortality and maybe even mind-backups, to "restore" a person (or a very close approximation of them) in the case of accident/violence.
We should be looking at death as something surpassable and not necessarily grim or morbid.
Backing up your brain does not prevent you to die. Your organic form will die anyway and you will have to go through death, it's just that a copy of you will continue without you. That's not defeating death at all.
Even without such "resurrection", medical immortality in the form of immunity to aging and disease and disability could be considered as "defeating" nonviolent death.
Memories. All you get is memories. To imagine something else is delusional. Losing a loved one hurts like hell but life goes on. Denial is one part of the processs but most of all the difficult part of the process is remolding oneself into a world where the loved one is no more.
The queen of the King of Sweden, Gustaf Adolf could not accept the passing of her husband and in her grief she stored his heart for years in a jar.
While science fiction flirts with various kinds of immortality it offers no assistance forming a philosophy for todays world.
If we ever manage to find a way off-planet, being able to live for half a millenium (or "forever", or until-I-decide) sounds AMAZING.
It does sound like quite the economic problem, though, and would certainly make earthbound resources more troublesome.
If they sit around doing nothing but eating and playing video games, that would be a waste.
As for the environmental issues and being selfish, this doesn't have anything to do with how long you live, but rather with how you live. Obviously, a society with life expectation that is so long would have to reduce the birth rates substantially (or, rather, keep them the same in the births-per-lifetime department). But if you can do that, then there's no reason why it's any more straining on the environment, whether its 1 person living for 500 years, 5 people living for 100 years each, or 10 people living for 50 years each.
You could say it's "selfish" to live one life where there could be ten, but how can one be selfish with respect to non-existing persons? How is it different from someone being "selfish" and not having children, for example? And why wouldn't it apply to ourselves with our current lifespans? Why not, say, euthanize everyone at 30, and use the existing resources to sustain more short-lived people, if the number of people having lived is the metric?
It's more selfishly using the resources younger people can use. If you're eighty, I'd rather feed the eight year old. Until we move beyond resource constraints (lol) this is going to be a major effect of the rich being able to afford long lives AND food and the poor affording neither.
The only objective metric I can think of is that today, 80 is usually not an age at which a person can do much. But if we have technology that lets you live much longer, and people at 80 would be physically like, say, 20-year-old today, that goes away.
And, of course, the number of young people "in the pipeline" can be regulated by controlling birth rates.
One of the things that are necessary to attain the next level of civilization, or perish. Yes, achieving a post-scarcity industry/economy is also necessary, and goes hand-in-hand with sustainable immortality.
At a certain scale, those that don't have these technologies may be seen as primitive.
I suppose there'll some kinds of biologies where immortality won't be necessary, like a insect-like hive-mind species, where each member is more or less already a copy of each other, but in species that have concepts of individuality and value them, achieving immortality is inevitable.
Hell yes. Kids are grown. Fat life insurance policy. I can accept having a fatal heart attack under the right circumstances :) The slow, painful fade is the thing that scares me. It's better to "burn out, than fade away."
I am 100% confident that within the next two hundred years (baring some massive war, dark age, etc.) We will be able to use gene therapy to reduce cancer risk to negligible levels. We will probably even master the ability to program cells to do what we want... At which point all diseases where the body breaks down will likely be gone. That's not to say, we won't have issues regarding illness - just our bodies won't break down as quickly if at all.
If you try to keep it for yourself you can bet the population-at-large will be gunning for you (literally).
Global warming could cause some nasty food shortages.
Well. We evolved to be a collection of cells. Before, we were unicellular organisms, fighting against other organisms for resources and ultimately, survival.
Some cells just decide to revert back to the old ways. I'd say it's a form of evolution, one that's pruned by natural selection, when the host organism dies.
I somehow ended up in a academic Genetics lab, writing software. We use a lot of languages here (Php, python, perl, java, R, javascript and even some C) and various web frameworks to let people use our tools to do science. I don't know if the creators of these tools imagined they'd be used for science, but they put the tools out there in the public and they were used.
You contribute, because its the right thing todo, that makes you significant. You never know how significant what you put out there will end up being, but it helps you grow too. The open source community inspires and you by contributing are part of that. Every little bit helps.
"Bioinformatics" is a general term of the use of computing in Biology. Its an interesting field.
Medicinal chemistry and high throughput screening is (becoming) a data science.
Workcells (search for "automated biology workcell"
As I mentioned in another comment, I actively decided to seek out a company in the space to join. I didn't know anyone really in bio before that. Another option is to get involved with an academic lab that is trying to bring software into their work (and there are many). Below are some interesting folks /projects merging bio and code (disclosure: I work for Transcriptic):
Using nothing but code to engineer proteins. blog.booleanbiotech.com/genetic_engineering_pipeline_python.html
Autoprotocol -- JSON specification for defining biological protocols autoprotocol.org
Using visual programming to describe bio protocols http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/14/081075
Engineering bacteria with code and automation. www.zymergen.com
ADAM (Big Data Genomics, code-base I think worked currently by UC Berkeley AMPLab and Microsoft Research group focused on cancer research) https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam/labels/pick%20me%20u...
BioConductor (R package that is very popular for crunching different genomic analysis, RNA-Seq)https://www.bioconductor.org/developers/
Galaxy (Platform for reproducible genomics workflows in the cloud)https://wiki.galaxyproject.org/Support
Public Available Data Sets:
Cancer Genome Atlas (contains expression data for different kinds of cancer) http://cancergenome.nih.gov/
NCBI Short Reads Archive (contains the genome assembly of a lot of published papers): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra
European Nucleotide Archive: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena, e.g.,
For a recent major paper, "The Simons Genome Diversity Project: 300 genomes from 142 diverse populations"; you can grep for "accession code"(http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...), follow the link and download the whole raw assemblies of all samples here: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/PRJEB9586
MOOC:
https://www.edx.org/xseries/genomics-data-analysis
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/bioinformatics
StackOverflow:
Jobs:
NYGC, JCVI, CRB, Sanger, BGI, Broad, NIH, NCBI, Janelia Farm; any research group in universities; any informatics job at pharmaceutical or pharma startups.
I'd feel that I let down my children and couldn't give them a happy and careless childhood without having to deal with the cruelty of reality.
So, may his kids have the strength to deal with it without losing their light-heartedness.
Although this is a poor comparison for a million reasons, I just put my beloved dog down a week ago. Helpless is the word here. Its incredible how many game-enders we casually flirt with everyday, how powerful illness can be, how illness makes us make tough decisions, how poorly we handle end of life issues, and how badly grief hits us. We purposely avoid thinking about this stuff, consider it taboo, and engage in gallow's humor for a reason.
Death is difficult. It never gets easier.
Never think your comparison isn't apt because it's "just a pet" :)
Time does help.
Maybe you can't do something about one particular person today but millions of more future deaths can be prevented.
Some of the people here will be dying "early" deaths in 10 or 20 years. You won't be saying: "well, you've gotta go someday when you have a couple of kids", for example.
You see, cancer was a tiny spot on radar just 50 years ago. Or 100 even more. So the question is - what happened? Have we somehow changed overnight as a spices? No we haven't. Perhaps what we intake changed because after all cancer has to come from something - yes! our water get polluted, our food get packed with chemistry (Dupont produces your tires as well as ingredients for your breakfast bread and is more into food business than ever), and also our air got more polluted than ever.
So before you feel good writing check to a non profit or think that adding a $1 to your bill in food market helps fight cancer, do any of the following:
- call your local officials and complain. while your complain might be a blimp on radar, the more complains then more your officials will notices. at the end they want to know what people like/hate about their community -- not to help you, but rather to help themselves win next election. - sign petitions for better oversight into companies like Monsato who are in business to sterilize you and force your friend-farmer to suicide through dropping their attorney's fees on them. - buy a water filter but also check with your local water supply they run statistics on water pollution. make sting if they are out of chart (most counties, they are) - educate friends on food quality. Have them stop looking at price but more on ingredients. just because something is 40cents cheaper, doesnt mean its okay. - educate your friends and family on high corn fructose syrup and sugar substitutes. - promote and make your friends aware of non-gmo organic movement - research and educate yourself and your family on list of ingredients and products that EU bans. EU is the last bastion of common sense when it comes to your family's health safety but with laws like TPP in place, Monstato will be able to sue EU countries and force them to sell products with ingredients that EU had good reasons to ban in the first place.
First, variety is the species of life.
Second, the reason cancer wasn't "on the radar" is because we didn't know much.
If you look into the history of cancer, it has existed forever. Wikipedia claims Hippocrate himself wrote about it! [1]
And as late as the 19th century, survival rate was around 10%.[2]
Your concerns have very little, if anything, to do with cancer. Monsanto didn't even exist in the 19th century.
Plus, we often didn't live long enough for cancer to set in. It's hard to die of cancer if you drop dead of typhus or TB first. Cancer is the end stage of life; it's what kills you if nothing else does. We've finally reached the point where a very large percentage of the population is making it far enough to get there.
Do you know how cancer biology works?
Accumulated cell and nuclear damage from an endless assortment of factors cause cells to enter disease states. When certain errant states that regulate cell proliferation and apoptosis begin to accumulate, cell populations begin to drift into the cancer territory.
The number one cause of cancer is life. There are accelerating factors in the environment, for sure, but cancer is simply an error state of our biology. It's the machinery of higher order life breaking down and entering a pattern that doesn't self-regulate.
What you said makes sense, but it is only convincing if you already trust the scientific institutions and believe in reductionism. And that, is unfortunately much less common than we would think.
The guy believes that there are poisons in everyday products, telling them that "damage from an endless assortment of factors cause cells to enter disease states" is not at all a refutation of their belief taken from their point of view. In fact, I expect that it even looks like weasel wording for exactly what they said from their point of view.
I think that on topics like this, it's important to expose the premises, the concrete basic facts much more than the conclusion, the general abstraction.
if you have the trust of your client, and s/he has real power, you have done half the work already.
don't make stuff and then try to sell it unless you are growing an existing client base.
breaking into markets you don't know is probably impossible.
Build up trust with the client and sometimes they will reward you for it.
When you've paid for all the mistakes, you should know how to do it right the next time.
A good specification lets diverse people work together without confusion or conflict.
If you can test each piece alone, and you have reliable ways of putting them together, the whole should work.
Don't be afraid to charge the real cost.
be aware of your expenditure and manage your losses. You can survive a long time with less income if you are in tight control of what you spend.
What's good software? Good software is used by people to solve real problems. Good software saves people money, or makes them a profit. It can be buggy, incomplete, undocumented, slow. Yet it can also be good. You can always make good software better yet it's only worth doing when it's already good.
It's presumably the parent's tribute to him, which I can appreciate.
I just hope that when it comes time for me or my loved ones to go, that they will be able to do it on their terms.
Thanks for the your contributions and sharing the journey.
To fellow HN users: Please check out "Think of the Children" and donate if possible. thanks!
Please use this article to add your stories. If you have them elsewhere, or you emailed me, copy/paste as a comment. Feel free to write in Dutch or French if that's your language. I'd really like a single place where my kids can come and read what other people say about their dad.
Many people have asked my PayPal address ph@imatix.com, to send a donation for my children.
The world is losing another great hacker.
Would a black bar be considered?
As on top of HN? I guess somone would have to e-mail admins for that.
Same thing at funeral. I'm always trying to convince others to remember good things, not go into depression. You can't do much after it happened.
And now we have this tweet from someone I respect very much, someone who took part of his time too tell his feelings on how you could/should treat someone that is having his final moments.
Perhaps this is a very personal view - but as I've lost relatives to all sorts of maladies including cancer I find it really hard to see cancer as the absolutely worst bogeyman in the room. That's not to say it's not bad.
My father was not a kind man. He was petty, selfish person, but I still would have done anything for him.
Looking back, he was under medicated while in Palliative Care. He was at home, but that shouldn't be an issue? No one in the family could figure out why he wasen't given more medication. He saw a Hospice Doctor once, I believe, and a couple of nurses dropped by.
Getting him pain meds, and benzodiazepines was a battle. It's such a stressful situation, and getting meds should be difficult?
He never seemed to have enough. I look back, and don't know what the problem was with the lack of strong medication. Maybe the doctors didn't want too much around? I don't know? They should alleviated his pain better though.
I understand no cures, but alleviate the misery with drugs. We do have drugs?
There were times, I felt like, if I knew where to buy it; I would have bought him heroin.
I accept death. We can make patients comfortable when they are dying with medication? Maybe we were the the family that wasen't vocal enough? I don't know, but in my dads death; Hospice did a terrible job.
Hospice has a lot of money. I was surprised, because I heard they were a good organization.
(I didn't want to read this post. I had a feeling it was Peiter. I don't know the man, but truely admire his courage.)
Not a medical professional, though.
I think parts of me died for both of my parents death. All the strength.
My mother spent her last month as psychiatric patient at an alcoholics ward, and only after she had died autopsy discovered she had pancreatic cancer. She was mostly incoherent, frightened and delusional. They said she screamed through the nights. Despite her history I cannot even after years stop wondering was that really the correct place to tend to her-and why did her mental condition lapse so thoroughly before the end. Death and lack of dignity sucks.
Perhaps it's the productization of death?
I received this news as a retweet in my Twitter feed. Next to it was a bit.ly link about Configuration Management tools, the announcement of a speaker at a conference, and a famous quote from Einstein.
Right now on HN it's #4. Next to it is a blog post about tools and frameworks and a post about a PostgreSQL extension. The response to Pieter's tweet is lengthy and very kind. It would be a privilege to hear those thoughts in my own life before I leave. But the thoughts will still keep coming, probably long after he's gone.
I met a nice lady three years ago. She was a "social media consultant" in the local area, which basically consisted of teaching small business owners how to navigate the web. We met for lunch several times when I was in town.
Soon, though, she learned she had stage 4 lung cancer. I had lunch with her one more time. I'll never forget how weary she looked.
She held on for almost a year, then she passed.
For many weeks after that, however, Facebook was full of her many friends offering their condolences. Facebook would remind me that she liked certain things as a way to sell me on things. Every so often people would think of her and post on her wall. These posts appeared in my feed.
Last week I finally had to unfriend her. She was dead. But it didn't stop the computerized social network that Facebook to stop trying to monetize as much of her presence as they could. Even if somebody had set her account to deceased, Facebook will always own some part of her existence.
It feels like turning a tender, emotional, precious thing into a bucket of bits. I find that repugnant.
Personally, I feel death (and afterlife) has played an important role in popularising (selling?) religion.It is still a difficult subject to talk about, in some cultures even joking about your own death is a big no-no. Maybe this is the best way to break this barrier and understand that death is "normal" and it's okay to talk about it along with other normal things. Maybe this "productization" will get us all to a point where we are all okay talking about it openly and frankly, without making a big deal about it?
Maybe this "productization" will get us all to a point where we are all okay talking about it openly and frankly, without making a big deal about it?
What's a "big deal"? For my friend, I knew her and she seemed like a nice person. I did not know her that well, though. The first couple of times somebody posted how sad they were on her wall, I was moved. The second couple of times, sad to say, not so much. By the time we got to 20 or 30, I was both annoyed -- and angry at myself for being annoyed.
How about her husband? He got to watch her die, bury her, and then watch all this come in, day-after-day. Two months later he was dead.
Social networks take everything and genericize it. What was a big deal to me was probably a huge deal to him. Assuming those little bits were somehow part of who she was, you can't just assume that they were the same kind of "big deal" to everyone involved. To me, to the husband, to the still living kid. [ed: and it's not right to try to force it into the same kind of deal for everybody. That's dehumanizing.]
I'm a transhumanist and I think the singularity is coming and I'm okay with that. But as we evolve, we have to stop and take a freaking look at what we're doing. Software may be eating the world, but the world is not all the same stuff. The differences matter.
When I say "big deal", I meant it more like talking about homosexuality is now less of a "big deal" then it was back in the day. I am not saying that the loss itself is not a big deal, just talking about it shouldn't be.
Maybe, if we live in a society where it's easy to talk about death then maybe the grieving process would become easier too. Right now, people tend to act weird around people who has just lost someone (I have experienced that first hand), the people who are suffering the loss feel like they have to "stay strong" and not show their emotions to others because they don't want to be a burden. It's a vicious cycle which we can break by just talking about it.
Back when the U.S. Civil War happened, photography was still new. Some folks thought that the new tech would finally wake people up to the horrors of war.
Didn't work out like that. People already knew the horrors of war and dying. You could run a picture of ten thousand people dead on a battlefield and while people felt the severe pain of that loss -- it was not horrifying to them. They lived with it everyday. (In fact, some early uses of photography was taking pictures of the recently dead. So you could remember them.)
I don't know. I may feel completely different about all of this when it comes my turn. I am really glad that the voices of people about to be silenced forever can be heard. In fact I think it's such a special thing that it really shouldn't appear next to an ad for Spacely's Space Sprockets.
We should have open and honest dialogues about death, yes. That doesn't mean that we should think of death in the same way as we might think of buying a newspaper. There's a categorically different thing going on here, regardless of any extraneous baggage that anybody might carry into the discussion.
Here is the episode I am referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back_(Black_Mirror)
Information, writing, and media have the ability to convey information totally unrelated to our present reality from anywhere on the planet, and a few points beyond. But leave us with having to contextualise all of it.
It's quite jarring. Not the first time I've received a death notice by (nominally) social media. Still carries a shock.
As for the "after he's gone" -- that's what death is, so far as I've realised. Life for the deceased stops, for the rest of us, it goes on. We have experiences, and conversations, and reminiscences, in which the dead are only memories.
Society isn't used to this notion, and we don't really have any handholds to fall back to. Do you mourn with the person while he is still alive? Go on as if nothing really changed? Celebrate life with them while you still can? Euthanasia is becoming widely accepted; at least at the abstract levels of law and medicine, so we'll probably figure it out eventually.
Perhaps the Hallmarks of the world can introduce a nice line of cards for the occasion?
Best comment of the thread. Made me smile.
I assume that we'll be inventing new traditions as we go along. Should be fun to watch different ones being tried out.
(This really hits me, since my brother in law may be about to do the same in a few weeks.. days perhaps.)
Thank you. For everything. I'm sure the rest of the community shares my opinion that you've contributed so much to the field.
For all that it matters, I wish you a pleasant departure.
It's sad seeing Bob and Alice used in such a morbid context but at least we know we'll be thinking in terms of protocol, complexity, and CS even on our death beds. It's something that will never leave us.
I've read very little of his work. I think I'll change that.
I enjoyed his writings on community building most. He himself being a very approachable person, taught me everything we do is about people, not software. I'll definitely miss him in the days to come.
Peace Peter.
Thank you for being transparent about your condition. It makes me to remind about death. I am sorry. Thank you for contributing everything what you have done for people in the world.
Peace Pieter. You will be missed.
R.I.P. Pieter Hintjens. For more about Pieter Hintjens check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens
Heart-wrenching.
When he had chemo, he looked like he was dying any second now. A week after he looked like a normal healthy person.
Last time I saw him was a few weeks before he died, we were partying like he wasn't even sick and suddendly he was dead.
But it's generally a strange feeling to lose people around you.
In the last two years I lost about 4 people. One to old age, two to cancer and one was even murdered. I still have the last moments with them in my memories. We were like "yeah lets go do XYZ together in a few weeks/months" and now they are simply gone and won't come back.
He finished his book Confessions of a Necromancer recently. It's well worth a read:
https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/confessions-of-a-necro...
I don't really know what to say anymore. I will always admire him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApqI9XLRk4k
Thank you for the journey, Pieter.
Thank you HN for exposing me to worlds I would never otherwise discover.
On a personal note, I definitely will be using 0MQ in all my future projects. As a matter of fact, I'm glad I found it exactly this moment.
I'm a geek, I sort of get it, but aren't the people talking about themselves and their choices and their views even slightly ashamed? Could we have a fucking moment to just honor this guy? I don't even know him, I'm just cringing.
Take your post as an example.
Thank you Pieter and rest in peace.
I don't know you, and I don't even know who you are, but my heart goes out to you. Nobody should have to suffer in pain, and I deeply respect you for taking control of your last moments.
Fare thee well.
Farewell Pieter and may you live on in our memories.
Black bar on Hacker News, please.
This is not to argue your point of preference. It's just something that changed my perspective recently, and it may be interesting.
1. http://player.themoth.org/#/?actionType=ADD_AND_PLAY&storyId...
"Oh, thank god!" "Finally, some good news from this guy!"
"That's a great attitude. I gotta tell you, if I were getting this news I don't know that I'd take it this well."
"But, you said he was alright?"
"Yes. He's lost his left hand, so he's going to be all right"
Source: wikipedia
Also, who said it was random? What if they simply run out of money, for any of the hundreds of reasons why companies do? Laws can't magically force them to keep it running if they literally can't afford to.
All I'm saying is that these scenarios can be sufficiently covered by contracts with the institute you want to preserve you. You can specify that in the unforeseen event of needing more funds to keep you preserved, that you are terminated and buried or cremated in such-and-such fashion without even trying to seek funds from potential relatives or descendants or the government. If contract compliance trust is an issue in Europe, that seems like something to fix first.
Maybe I should rephrase my overarching point since it seems to be lost in the details. Concerns over scamming by exploiting family or in general not doing with your remains what you wanted to have done ought to be the least of one's concerns when making a decision on cryonics, unless there's a serious problem with contract law in Europe. I believe Alcor won't even accept you unless you have an official, legal will about it, precisely to defend against family members overriding your decision, since case law on upholding wills is pretty solid. That suddenly changing in 20-60+ years seems pretty unlikely. There are bigger threats to spend more time modeling. Even proponents only estimate around a 5% chance of successfully being revived, were they suspended today (see http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.ht...). I don't think anyone who is signed up thinks they have a sure shot at revival, let alone dying in a convenient enough fashion to be usefully preserved, and the two big cryonics orgs in America certainly don't market it that way. The calculation usually goes that for a modest monthly payment on a life insurance plan covering ~$80k, you have a small chance of cheating death, versus having no chance (barring truly magic-like powers like reconstructing you from others' memories/dna/browser history/etc.) if you die and get buried or cremated the normal way.
Cryonics is a very risky, and, with current technology, likely unreversable procedure, so relying on it to tie up your loose ends someday is silly. It’s almost religious in the unreasonable belief that someone higher – here "future humanity" – will be able to help you.
Cryonics works. The connectome of your brain, what makes you, you, is preserved. At −238 degrees almost anything organic can be preserved for a long, long time. And with careful procedures done to prevent the formation of ice crystals, the damage done by the freezing process is minimal. It's by far the best chance you have of surviving.
Personally, I find it much likelier that the current service providers screw up the process than that in the future we could not somehow bring people back to life.
The current actual scientific state of the art in cryopreservation deals with something far more simple than a human being http://www.nature.com/articles/srep18816
I'm all up for it once it gets some scientific credibility.