Hacker News Reader

Comment by parfe | Hacker News Reader

What purpose do stories like this serve? People consider asking for details to be rude. Other than tabloid style storytelling drama, why else should strangers care?

This man died young, but so did the local 19 year old young woman killed just after midnight by a driver just after she rescued an injured dog from the road.

You can already see someone saying the cause of death does not matter, but why does this death announcement matter?

edit: Poster removed his admonishment regarding questions about the cause of death.

People close to this person obviously will suffer due to their loss, but his death announcement gets posted here in some sort of limbo where no one (or very few) knew him. But we must respond with condolences to people we don't know about a person we only know though his involvement in a web application.

edit2: Twitter messages directed at the deceased indicate suicide.

View on HN

No, you must not respond; you are not obliged to make any comment on his death. In fact, it would be nice if you specifically refrained from making a comment arguing about whether his death was important in the middle of a thread where everyone else is offering their condolences; including, I would assume, some people who knew him personally. This is a matter of being human.

Respectfully, it's also about logistics. If we started posting deaths of everyone involved in startups or 'tech', that's all HN would be full of.

And if everybody was a plumber, society could not function. This is such an uninteresting observation. Making something universal is usually impractical — that doesn't reflect on the thing itself, except to say that it requires some amount of time or space.

I appreciate the tradeoff, but I don't think that's the case. There are probably only a few thousand people who are on a level of notability to this audience as the young founder of a heavily-hyped project like this. There are many threads on the front page that seem a lot less newsworthy or thought-provoking.

>In fact, it would be nice if you specifically refrained from making a comment arguing about whether his death was important in the middle of a thread where everyone else is offering their condolences

You just highlighted exactly what I tried to write about! Why have a thread full of condolences from strangers directed at strangers and shun any actual discussion?

Most people clicked the story to find out the cause of death. If this young man indeed killed himself, we could have a reasonable discussion about the stresses of life and specifically related to tech, but we can't.

Instead, I strongly believe that most (if not all) condolences posted here come from people fulfilling a social expectation rather than a specific feeling towards this person.

I would hope those who knew this person and know his surviving friends and family have a more direct line of communication than comments on news.yc.

Why have a thread full of condolences from strangers directed at strangers and shun any actual discussion?

Because this is how people deal with the existence of death, and they appreciate having a place to pay their respects independent of having an "actual discussion." Why do you think that ceremonial burial is a near-universal element of human culture? A breaking-news thread announcing a person's early death is a terrible place to have a discussion about "the stresses of life...related to tech." You should have that discussion inside your head, and then engage other people with it at a time when they did not just hear about someone's suicide.

9oliYQjP did a pretty good job.

If suicide does turn out to be the cause of death, it is worth talking about. I won't say that there's nothing more tragic than suicide, but it is certainly senseless/needless in almost all cases.

The more awareness of suicide, the risk factors, and how to not tread into that space, the better.

> The more awareness of suicide

Suicide has a strong triggering effect; see "Werther effect".

Talking about suicide has to be done carefully to avoid triggering further suicidal behaviour; especially after someone has just completed suicide.

I'd agree that more awareness of suicide prevention is very important.

Thank you for mentioning that. It is very paradoxical and quite an unfortunate phenomenon. And I think it is very real. I have a sample of one (a local high school) that suffered what seemed like a large cluster of suicides within a short time range. Then found out about Werther effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werther_effect

I am not for censoring information but maybe an admonition to refocus on checking up on friends who might be depressed or stressed out, without specifically mentioning the word "suicide".

My condolences to his family and friends.

A good example of the Werther effect is the string of copycat suicides in South Korea after an actress, Lee Eun-Ju, took her own life in 2005. After her death, the suicide rate of the general population in Korea spiked with notable celebrities also taking their own lives. Here's a frightening statistic from the LA Times "In South Korea, 15,413 took their lives that year [2009], or 28.4 for every 100,000 residents."

As an individual who has overcome manic depression and dealt with suicide personally and amongst friends, it is a difficult issue to approach and conquer, especially because when caught in a downward spiral everything seems to perpetuate it and nothing seems to help. It is not enough to simply ask if a friend is doing alright or has harmful intentions but it takes a person (family or friend) who can weather the storm with them. I feel that it is almost equally difficult for the person helping because they have to be willing to listen to and be understanding of the irrational thoughts that plague a suicidal mind. From an outside perspective, the burden of the troubled is vastly greater than the burden upon a helping hand but I think the cumulative process of helping someone can be equally detrimental and taxing. I hate to make a movie reference but the movie What Dreams May Come paints a good metaphor of the risks involved with trying to pull someone out of their sorrow, although not quite as dramatic.

Without a baseline, how would I be able to tell if those statistics were frightening?

> The Werther effect not only predicts an increase in suicide, but the majority of the suicides will take place in the same or a similar way as the one publicized. The more similar the person in the publicized suicide is to the people exposed to the information about it, the more likely the age group or demographic is to commit suicide. The increase generally happens only in areas where the suicide story was highly publicized.

(From Wikipedia which turn quoted Meyers, David G. (2009). Social Psychology (10th Ed). New York: McGraw Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-337066-8).

During my sophomore year of high school, there was a string (about once every other week) of suicides. They were all linked in some way, a nasty chain of relationships. I think some of the early talk might have kept the chain going. The high school finally sent for proper grief counselors from the local university. It had been 3 or 4 months of gloom. I am not sure if they helped or it was just an ending, but they did stop (could have been the ending of winter thinking about it).

The truly sad part (beyond the ending of so many young lives) was the utter cynicism the rest of us got to. The grief counselor who was dealing with our class was utterly horrified by us wondering how anyone commits suicide by using a door knob and how we concluded that someone was using the suicides to hide a murder. Looking back, I suppose it was a coping mechanism.

Take care of your fellows and don't fool around non-professionals.

Excellent response. This is surely a worthy topic to discuss yet must done carefully as I'm sure many can relate to this tragedy in some aspect.

http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

I'm not affiliated.

Please use use this service if you are even remotely affected by this discussion in a negative way. I fear this will escalate and push a reader over the edge who doesn't think they have an alternative. They do. If you are one of these, please seek help.

Keep their number in your phone. Hopefully you'll never need it, but IMO it's the second most important number after 911. Even if you have had a little bit of training, helping a suicidal person can be very bewildering and difficult, so if you find yourself unable to act effectively, you can pull out your phone, dial this number, and get help from an expert. I know people who are alive because somebody else (in one case a complete stranger) had this number in their phone:

1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255)

If you find yourself dealing with a suicidal person and you don't have this number handy, dial 911.

I receive annual suicide awareness training at work. One of the things they train us to do is, if we suspect someone might be considering suicide, to ask point-blank: "Are you thinking about hurting yourself." Most people will answer honestly, and then you can get them help if they need it. So while discussing suicide in the abstract can trigger others to commit suicide, discussing it directly with a potentially suicidal person is a critical first step in preventing suicide. Also, most people don't know what to do when dealing with someone suicidal, and the only way to teach them is to talk about it, which creates a bit of a catch-22 when you combine that with the Werther effect.

I have also heard that if a person is all of the sudden talking about buying a gun or telling others how they would never commit suicide, out of the blue, one should be very worried about them.

The gun thing / statement thing is also an indicator that someone is being threatened. Bad either way.

Yes, this is important.

There's a big difference between talking directly to a person who may be suffering, when you should be direct and then be able to guide them towards help; and talking in a thread like this with a lot of speculation and abstract talk about suicidal behaviours.

tl:dr - you're right, and I missed the point you made in my post.

We don't talk about suicide in society very well let alone within the startup community. Founders find themselves in extremely stressful situations and living lifestyles that exacerbate the effects of this stress. Remember to eat well, try to get some routine exercise, seek both quality and quantity of sleep, and have a couple of confidants that you can rant to. Remember that the alpha males spouting off about toughness and pulling death march schedules while eating nothing but energy bars and coffee are often the ones hurting most (i.e., just like how a lot of the most vehement homosexual bashers turn out to be homosexual).

I know YC likes to promote flocking together as founders, but I think it's really healthy to have one or two close confidants that are completely outside the startup community. You need to be able to rant to these people and unwind emotionally. A lot of your rants might be non-sensical, might be hypocritical, and even a tad self-centred. The last thing you need is another opinion in that situation, especially one telling you you're wrong for feeling the way you do. You're least likely to find one from people that simply aren't interested in entrepreneurship.

Talking about must be done carefully. Suicide appears to be "contagious": http://www.mindframe-media.info/site/index.cfm?display=84352 so special care should be taken about reporting it. There are some guidelines for the media, e.g. http://www.samaritans.org/media_centre/media_guidelines.aspx

I met him at Burning Man this year, had a couple of good conversations with him, and have "email Ilya" as a current item on my to-do list. This is the first I've heard of his death. :-( His close friends may not be getting this news through HN, but surely a number of acquaintances are.

It's not a question of "importance" or "purpose", it's a question of interest or relevance.

This young man's death is just as "important" as the young woman you mention...they are both tragedies, they both will leave an indelible wound on many people's lives.

However, this is a social news site for the tech community. The young woman's death is not covered here because it's not relevant to the tech community.

This young man started (with others) a project which is followed, used, and worked on by many in the tech community...it's of interest to them that one of the initiators died just as any other major development would be. It's also safe to say that there are a few people here who either knew him personally or had had some interaction with him, so it's of interest to the community when one of it's own dies.

Any time you load Hacker News there will probably be some stories that don't interest you. However, as long as they follow the community guidelines, are relevant to hackers, etc...it's best to simply skip them.

As for your other point(s), I agree somewhat with what you seem to be saying. I don't think it's rude per se to respectfully ask if anyone happens to know the cause of death. I would find it more rude to speculate. I also agree that a bunch of strangers offering their condolences doesn't accomplish or mean much, but I can also appreciate that people are just trying to be nice to anyone who did know him who happens to be reading.

Most of us know about Diaspora, and some want it to succeed . That is reason enough to care about the lives of the project founders, regardless of whether or not we know who they are.

Also, who are you to say that nobody here knew him?

I knew Ilya from NoiseBridge. He was always a cool guy to hang with, and get advice from.

He will be missed.

He was actively engaged in trying to spur change in the tech community which makes it something that can become newsworthy, especially when you consider the lost potential.

Indeed. It's exactly because of the work that he was doing that his passing is a meaningful thing to find its way to HN. Honestly, even if he wasn't doing any of that work, I'm of the mind that most people have a story in their lives and most are worth hearing, even if painful.

In any case, I just donated to the project: https://www.diasporafoundation.org/donate – maybe something good can come from something so sad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com