Searching for Mark Pilgrim | Hacker News Reader

Searching for Mark Pilgrim

meyerweb.com

228 pointsjlbruno61 comments

https://twitter.com/#!/textfiles/status/121436177298493440

"Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring."

Annoyed someone called the police when he vanished? What a schmuck...

He deliberately deleted some files from websites he had admin access to. Not exactly the behavior of someone in need of help from the police.

It sure scared a lot of people into thinking that perhaps he was going to commit suicide (or already had), which is something that cops get called about and try to stop.

I'm actually kind of surprised about how many people are not aware of the suicide concern. But then, I worked for a couple of years at a large training site where suicide awareness was a Very Big Deal so perhaps I'm just suffering from transference.

The symptoms displayed by Mark here are very similar to some kind of "classic" pre-suicidal actions (i.e. "putting his affairs in order") so I can definitely see why suicide would be a concern among his friends.

He'd specifically rigged his servers to return 410 Gone, a status code an aside in one of his most famous works equates with the Impermanence of life.

It's not a huge stretch to follow that train of thought to the notion that his actions amounted to a somewhat obscure suicide note. And giving away your stuff/deleting accounts en masse/shutting your life down is a fairly classic behavior among suicidal individuals.

That man knows how to flounce. Much respect.

I should note that the concern isn't without merit. If you read Howard Rheingold's "The Virtual Community" which is one of the earliest discourses on Internet and online community, the concept of "virtual suicide" isn't new.

http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/1.html

In this case, someone created a tool to eradicate their online identity, then did the same in real life.

I've had this issue twice in my 16 years of running Murmurs.com. In one case, the person was in chat on a Sunday and threatened suicide before deleting all her posts. We had to track down her university police department and they found her on the lawn outside her dorm overdosing on sleeping pills.

The other was more sad. The guy disappeared and posts were removed. Only later did we find that he had left his suicide note on Flickr. He was Norwegian and we had to do a lot of digging to find more info. In the end his mom emailed me a very poorly translated English message, and it was heartbreaking.

The moral is: I don't think there was any over reaction. This pattern has precedent and not a good one. I've never felt that in my 16 years of doing online community work I've ever over-reacted when I saw this behavior transpire.

In one case we saved someone's life, and in the other we didn't.

His GitHub projects have been mirrored:

    https://github.com/diveintomark/

Dive Into Python 3: http://diveintopython3.ep.io/

    GitHub: https://github.com/diveintomark/diveintopython3

Dive Into HTML5: http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/

    GitHub: https://github.com/diveintomark/diveintohtml5

Thanks for this. I've been going through the new "Dive Into Python" book online everyday for the past few weeks, so I got pretty worried when the page wasn't loading and I saw this thread.

I hope Mark is alright, and he knows just how much his contributions are helping people like me.

Mark Pilgrim is an awesome dude.

I remember stumbling upon http://web.archive.org/web/20110724223826/http://addictionis... years and years and empathizing and feeling moved. I hope he's alright.

That is moving. And now I'm worried.

I came across that a while ago as well and had no idea it was him (this was long before Dive Into Python, if I remember correctly).

I always found this post of his to be very moving too: http://web.archive.org/web/20100624000256/http://diveintomar...

Maybe he was addicted to internet too. So he delete all his online presence.

I think most of us here also are having the same issues.

That seems very likely.

Given that a) Mark is known by his real name, employed by a major company, and presumably has numerous friends, coworkers, and acquaintances in meatspace b) none of his friends, coworkers, or acquaintances are stepping forward either with information or panicked questions

is it safe to assume that our interest and attention at this time is unwanted?

The moral of the story is that if you are well-known on the Internet and want to disappear quietly, you need to leave a note saying "I'm fine, I just don't want this stuff here anymore. Please respect my privacy in doing so."

Or just add an archival tarball to your 410 page.

... and that's why you always leave a note!

Not only that, but it's just slightly less obviously melodramatic.

HTTP 411, I suggest.

It's completely understandable that someone would ask the police to do a welfare check, given the circumstances (signs reasonably interpreted as indicators of possible impending suicide).

I'm sure he understands that he brought this annoyance on himself, probably with a good reason that's none of our business.

But, now that his welfare has been established... Let's give this Googler privacy and space. If only we could expect Google to do the same for all of us when we need it. How about it Google? Consider this a feature request: Google Cocoon, an on-request service that hides your personal information from search and perusal in special circumstances. Sounds like a can of worms, but interesting to think about.

https://twitter.com/#!/textfiles/status/121430050930298880

"Pass along - several people have called Mark Pilgrim's local PD for a welfare check, and they've sent a car just to knock on the door. #hope"

https://twitter.com/#!/textfiles/status/121436177298493440

"Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring."

Surely someone reading this thread works for GOOG, and can find out if he's still around.

This is a really amusing comment if you read it w/o knowing where he worked.

Mark Pilgrim seems to have disappeared from the Internet. Eric is searching for anyone who might know him personally to make sure he is ok.

> ... to make sure he is ok.

Sure people aren't just being nosy? If something happened to him, it is highly unlikely he'd remove his entire web presence.

When someone removes their web presence isn't the implicit message that they don't want to be contacted?

February 13: Ten years ago I would never have walked into something like this. A bear trap so poorly camouflaged a child would have seen it. But I didn't. I pried it open and got my leg out, but there was no way I could make it back. I was prepared to die out here. And to be honest, I felt I deserved it. A man gets too old for a job, he should know it, and stop. But then Buck found me. I don't know how. No one knew where I was going, but he found me and carried me back. Three days over terrain a mule couldn't navigate, laughing his ass off the entire way. Riding like that, completely helpless, slung over Buck's shoulder and staring down his back, I came to understand two things. One, at a certain point in life a man's hips spread and there's nothing you can do about it, and two, there's a very easy way to define friendship. A friend is someone who won't stop until he finds you and brings you home.

Wow. Where is that from?

Apparently from Due South http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108756/quotes

If you want to send that message, why not make it explicit?

If you dislike good stories, why don't you just say so?

What I'm saying is, if you really intend for people not to try to find you, leave a message saying not to try to find you. If that's the intention, the person removing all their stuff is not trying to tell a story, they're trying to remove themselves from one.

If, however, you're trying to cause endless speculation about your motives, and for people to wonder whether you're dead or alive (and I do hope he's alive), I suppose this way works.

Sorry - I though you were responding to the nice story about the bear trap, and wondering why all that story stuff was necessary, and whether the conclusion wouldn't stand on its own.

i don't think anybody believes that he got hit by a car and all his internet presence suddenly went poof. there's more ways of not being OK than just physical injury.

That's too bad. I checked his Wikipedia page and noted that he requested that it be deleted several years ago, only to be denied.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mark_Pilgrim_(software_dev...

The talk page mentions his involvement in a computer tampering case nearly 20 years ago...if it is the same Mark Pilgrim (and the ages seem to match) then he seems to have redeemed himself with his subsequent work. I had no idea.

my hope is that he has retired to an ashram and hasn't been abducted by cyber-terrorists bent on killing f/oss and torturing him by deleting his accounts.

or maybe he has evolved to the point that our invisible alien overlords saw fit to promote him.

be well, mark, wherever you may be.

Maybe he is trying an experiment to see whether it is possible to remove yourself from the Internet. Would be an interesting experiment for Google to run.

@textfiles Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring.

The firehose and feeds pages on diveintomark are still active.

http://firehose.diveintomark.org/

http://feeds.diveintomark.org/

This is probably one of my favourite Mark Pilgrim posts: http://web.archive.org/web/20110514133252/http://diveintomar...

"Do not misunderstand me. I don't think the personal web has become boring. I think I have become boring. I've spent too much time tracking statistics, living up to the meaningless ideals of others, and pontificating on matters of no importance. When I should have been writing about lighthouses."

As I've commented elsewhere, there's a precedent for this. He disappeared from his blog for a while in 2004. Check the Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:diveint...

This is the URL from one of the comments from the Ask HN thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3073836

Not sure it needs another dedicated story.

via @textfiles "Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring."

here is the .pdf of Dive into HTML5

http://www.jesusda.com/docs/ebooks/ebook_manual_en_dive-into...

Does anyone have an html copy of dive into html 5?

I found a fork on github https://github.com/jlbruno/diveintohtml5

https://github.com/met/diveintohtml5 looks to have a few more Mark Pilgrim commits.

http://diveintohtml5.info/

Can't a dude just disappear in peace anymore?

I don't get why, noticing that all his accounts are disabled, you would worry about him being harmed. If he got hit by a truck and died, all his stuff would still be online.

People can & do harm themselves.

There are ways of dying that don't involve surprise demises.

Oh, wow. I just sat back in my chair. I had not even considered that.

Atlas shrugged

Deliberately taking down such a highly seo indexed site is an act of terrorism as far as I'm concerned.

Haha, HN never appreciates irony

Irony implies a reversal or an opposite. Your comment was stupid, not ironic.

Yup, that's true. I welcome a verbal debate.

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