Tony has been found ok by the police

Disagree. HN is a community very much shaped by conscious decisions and discussion of what is and is not appropriate.

I care about this guy I've never known, and that he gets help.

I also care about HN, and that discussion here continues to remain on topic. I do think this case is important enough to maybe make an exception, but still worth raising the point afterward that it is a bit off topic.

If these three paragraphs can help shape this community, and what people do and do not choose to up vote, I think the comment is spot on and very well directed. I think that was the point, not trying to emphasize callousness or whine.

[Edit: some poor punctuation]

I'm not willing to go quite that far. I think at the base it's because most of the people here are decent and want to see a suicide prevented. I just don't think they understood my argument, which is that there are so many tragedies out there that if we let that sort of thing go on here, it would eventually monopolize the site. I think it's really an all or nothing (or maybe nothing except for a few rare exceptions) decision in the long run.

My bet is 0. If anyone other than maybe PG went missing, I could think of at least 50 better ways to find him.

But again it begs the question, do we do this sort of thing for every programmer in one sort of trouble or another? If so, this site could easily be overwhelmed.

I do wonder how many people responded via HN with relevant info? (purely out of interest).

That said I guess one can hardly blame his IRC friends for posting to the list just in cae :)

EDIT: removed Off Topic comments. ;)

By your logic, just about everything here is propaganda of one form or another.

I agree. For the IRC folks, I think contacting the police and his family was appropriate. I don't think anything further then that is appropriate or helpful. Everything after that is just gossip. I'd be interested to hear how the OP feels in retrospect, and if spreading this around helped even slightly. I would doubt it, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. I think it's important to remember that the Internet is not real life. It is fantasy. How else do you explain lulz?

I'm willing to accept sounding like an asshole, but I certainly don't think I need to say nothing, and in fact you telling me so makes me think that of you. And not that you sound like one.

I find it's best to discuss problems before they become a pattern. Not to mention, this is a pattern. There was a whole similar (though far less urgent and interesting) thread from Zed Shaw that had a few top posts here before. There was the dude from Justin.tv, which at least you could argue was relevant due to that startup's affiliation with YC. I'd bet there were others I've missed or can't remember.

The problem is, of course, that these sorts of stories could overrun every social news site with ease, especially given that each one will lead to multiple posts. Every time someone says "I'm going to commit suicide" dozens of people on each site will think "Hey, I can help find this guy by posting to HN/Digg/Reddit or upvoting." And since saying you're going to commit suicide is clearly a cry for help (those serious about it just do it) and it clearly gets attention, there will be a torrent of these. Each one will be followed by at least one or two updates too.

I feel like there's some game theory there. You can decide to allow them all, in which case you're encouraging them, which will in turn make the web suicide threats (and other urgent stories) increase, until they're a huge problem. Or you can just delete them all and decide that while we all want to help those people, this just isn't the proper venue, and that having those things here probably hurts the mentally ill people they're meant to help in the first place.

If you disagree with his statement, criticize his point. Calling him names and giving him piehole-related advice might get votes, but it isn't very cool.

Then why isn't every single emergency in the entire world posted here? Every time a child goes missing, one of the tens of thousands of people here might know them. Why doesn't this site automatically post Amber Alerts? Is it noble to limit our help in finding missing persons only to those who've contributed to a programming language?

Good point. I wasn't meaning to play HN-police though. I was just curious where the line is.

Perhaps it wasn't the most tactful thing to say, but this is most certainly the right forum to discuss this. His post was about this very situation. It's 100% relevant. While I don't agree with his viewpoint myself, discussing what we want HN to be helps avoid confusion and unmet expectations.

2 points (I downvoted this - here is a rationalisation of that).

Firstly we have no info about what happened. In all liklehood (as in the majority of cases) this was a cry for help to which his friends responded well. Calling it an almost-death is, at the moment, an overstatement :)

Secondly I think you missed the commentors point. I feel nothing but a passing interest in this - yes I hope the guy is ok but there is nothing I can personally do. It's not something I will remember tomorrow (unless it hits here again). If the posting here bore fruit then that's great.. but otherwise lets move on. EDIT: of course if it was someone I happened to know I would have been notified by the posting and would have done something (just ot be clear :D).

And finally one has to wonder equally whether messages of support from random people he has never seen (on a thread he will never see) would have a positive effect. I doubt it. The same is true for semi-negative posts.