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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

what a waste, at 21 and with Diaspora on his resume, he could have gone on to work at Google or Facebook, making $100K-$200K/yr. The skillset was there.

Sure it's not as much as owning the next Facebook...but it's plenty of money to live a comfortable life...and nothing was stopping him from trying again in a few years.

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I think you completely misunderstand Ilya. He emphatically did not want to work at Facebook for $100-$200K/year.

Not everyone gets to be a dotcom millionaire...plenty of people have to work for a living. And with his skillset, at least he didn't have to settle for a $20K/yr job flipping burgers.

I think you're still missing the point by focusing on how much he would be earning a year. He may have been perfectly happy with $20k a year making Diaspora- it certainly seems like money was of little concern in his career choices.

You're still missing the point. Making millions was obviously not his driving desire. You simply don't build Open Source software if your primary motivation is to make a lot of money.

He didn't mean he wouldn't want to work at Facebook for 200k because it wouldn't be enough money. He wouldn't want to work there because he was working on replacing Facebook with something more open and morally better.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs would consider it a failure to have to work for facebook or google for a living. It has very little to do with money.

indeed. as an employee, you have a price. you have expectations. as an entrepreneur you have a dream. some entrepreneurs sell out and relinquish their dream. maybe they find a new one. others will never sell out, as a matter of principle. they are uncompromising in that regard.

You're making the mistake of thinking that wealth is correlated with suicides. In fact, the countries with the highest per-capita suicide rates tend to in Northern and Eastern Europe.

I can't explain why. I think the people there are more melancholy by nature. They also have some of the highest IQs in the world, so maybe there is a correlation there.

Sorry for the tangent, RIP Ilya.

I can't say I ever had the impression that profit was a core aim of the Diaspora project; rather it seemed an attempt to create a Free Software social networking platform along the lines of GNU/ Linux.

As you mentioned above, there's really no way for a bunch of near-total strangers to know what led to his suicide, since most of us knew of him only through his internet activity rather than as personal friends or family members. Simplistic cause-and-effect analyses are usually inadequate or outright misleading where suicide is concerned.

the point is that at 21 and with his skillset, he had quite a comfortable life waiting ahead of him, one that would have been better than 99% of people out there.

I don't care what other things happened in his life, at 21, there is absolutely no valid reason to kill yourself.

Well of course, but who said suicide in these instances is ever a rational act? Mental illness is funny like that.

Having money and a 'comfortable life' from a purely material point of view doesn't exactly imply being happy.

Money can buy an awful lot of things, but not everything.

to quote David Foster Wallace, “The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

I agree that there is never a "valid" reason to kill yourself. But don't act like he was so greedy that being internet famous and intelligent wasn't enough for him. Depression hits all kinds of people, and it is simply not something that is affected in a reasonable way by success or failure.

As someone who's been there and back, this is an amazing analogy that captures depression extremely well. Thanks for sharing.

Appropriate given that the author also suffered depression and unfortunately took his own life.

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