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Comment by antonzabirko | Hacker News Reader

What was the cod?

That was my first thought too. After thinking for a bit I decided that this sad news is meant to be about James, not about the cause of death. Leaving out the cause of death keeps our focus in the right place and I can respect that.

Leaving out the cause of death keeps you curious. It's clickbait not compassion.

so satisfying purely egoistical curiosity of strangers is compassion? and making it about the person is clickbait? wow Orwell would be pretty proud.

if it was health related sharing such information can potentially save lives by prevention

i don't care about details if it was accident or suicide, they could at least say if it was sudden death (unlikely caused by health at such age) or long disease

If its relevant to the people he interacted with, it will surely be shared with them. No need to put it into an obituary.

Many times the death is announced before an official cause of death has been published. The journalist can ask the family, but they may not receive a response in time for publication (or the family might decline to offer a cause of death).

In almost all of those cases, there’s information as to why that’s the case. For example “foo was found unresponsive and the cause of death has not been determined.”

When a high profile or public figure passes away and the announcement intentionally leaves out cod info, 99% of the time it was a drug overdose or suicide. That’s just the sad reality of these articles like this.

Not sure why this comment is being downvoted. It's just a factual statement, when you see a very conspicuous absence of information about the cause of death in a young person it's almost invariably overdose or suicide. I thought that was common knowledge.

Clickbait? Seriously? This is someone in a research institution publishing an obituary for a colleague they just lost. Do you really think that anybody involved in this cares how many clicks the page gets?

This is the university (his employer) celebrating his accomplishments and grieving over his loss. I don't think it's their job (morally or legally) to determine COD or even to speculate. Watch for an obituary in the Baltimore paper if you want to chase a funeral procession.

I feel like when one is omitted (and the deceased was relatively young) it's usually suicide.

Or it could be cancer. Sometimes families are private.

Given the community he was a part of that seems unlikely.

Nah. They would have said "after a long battle with......"

It's more a fact than a feeling though.

Lots of reasons that it could be omitted. Drug overdose, drunk driving, private family.

Lots of obituaries don't say. Although being so young, I'd argue in favor of what you said.

I think university obituaries usually keep it more to the eulogy side of things rather than the informative/COD side.

Definitely suicide.

If they don’t volunteer the information it’s extraordinarily rude to ask.

Normally I agree, but during a time of global pandemic, it would make sense to at least acknowledge if it was or was not the pandemic that caused it.

Why what are you going to do with that information?

Today? Nothing. But when someone looks at this 10 years in the future, they will be left guessing and assume it was the pandemic that was the cause as opposed to something else.

Actually, in the pandemic it becomes a lot more irrelevant. It's not like the cause of a single death is very relevant when people die left and right.

If the death of an individual matters (it does), it seems only reasonable that the cause does too.

dude he was 40 years old, extremely young. Seems perfectly reasonable to ask why a young person has died out of no where.

Yes! It’s a very obvious thing to put on an announcement. So if they’ve omitted it they have almost certainly already decided that they don’t want to share, rather than just having forgotten.

You'd think everyone would be aware of the Streisand effect by now though.

Most people can pick up the hint that they don't want to talk about the cause of death for whatever reason and will respect that.

Right, but this is the internet. Every time you write an obituary without a CoD and post it on the internet, a not-insignificant number of people will ask what it is.

There is no such thing as post-mortem privacy, and this is especially true in cases of high profile or public figures death.

I’m not saying this is good or bad, I’m just stating a fact.

Are you talking about the legal situation and public record?

I'm talking about manners.

Manners towards whom?

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