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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

Is it callous of me to not really care about these things? Thousands of people commit suicide each day. While I'm not indifferent to that, and hope that the individual cases (including this one) turn out for the best, every time one involves the internet it seems to end up here.

Why? How is it news, or even interesting to people who don't know this person? Because the guy is a programmer? Are we going to also bump up every amber alert where the parent is a programmer? If we extrapolate this far enough, it some point in the future, we'd probably never see anything else here.

I'm really hoping its just the newness of the internet being used as the sucidial's cry for help that makes this get front page here, because I think I prefer stories about erlang.

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I don't think not caring is really all that callous.

Spending three paragraphs complaining about it is probably a little misguided, however.

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]

The parent's argument is that it isn't news because he doesn't know Tony and questions its suitability on HN because it's not interesting for people who don't know him. Well, welcome to the Internet. Not everyone is going to find every article posted relevant or interesting to them; suck-it-up my friend!

Besides which, it wasn't news per-say; HN was used as a medium to which might help locate Tony or gather information that could be used to contact him.

"The parent's argument is that it isn't news because he doesn't know Tony and questions its suitability on HN because it's not interesting for people who don't know him. Well, welcome to the Internet. Not everyone is going to find every article posted relevant or interesting to them; suck-it-up my friend!"

I think this about sums it up. If the OP is looking for a link aggregation site with only links pertinent to himself, he is in for a lot of disappointment; the current state of technology makes that a virtual impossibility. While I don't find the majority of links posted on HN that interesting, I feel that it does a better job of linking to stories that I want to read than just about every other link aggregation site out there.

HN is blah, HN is not blah blah. God, 90% of this discussion. Yall are like Norton. You waste so many cycles it's worse than having a virus.

I'm dead sorry, Matt, but the votes the responses to you have gotten, on the whole, demonstrate why this place has gone down the toilet (in terms of comments - the front page links are still pretty good!).

It seems that criticizing you and calling you names is worthy of karma and that a reasonably thought out point is not. I'd rethink about where you spend so much of your time in future - I certainly don't post as much as I used to. I tend to vote you up though, because even if I don't agree with you, you at least put your case properly, unlike some of the name calling, emotionally wrought folks on here lately.

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.

The previous submission was not news for your entertainment. It could have helped find him or cause him to change his mind.

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. ;)

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 doubt this will become a common occurrence.

I almost have to stop myself puking from doing this (sorry!) but.. it does not "beg the question": http://begthequestion.info/

Hey, I'm just a messenger :)

Ha, I actually thought of that as I said it, but I actually prefer the colloquial meaning of that phrase.

I wouldn't call not caring callous, but certainly expecting the rest of the community that does care to not use a very public forum as a resource to ask for help could be considered callous.

So, it's cool to read your thoughts about how services supported by ads are dead, but unnecessary to report about someone who was in need?

I prefer raising awareness of an important issue than reading your propaganda about web services. Yes, it was propaganda because you lacked data. Hard core data to support any of your suggestions.

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

Like with the Hans Reiser story, it's just more interesting because it happened to someone in our clan.

Hell, we've already got TMZ for nerds in the form of ValleyWag so even our educated consort likes drama & gossip.

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?

Everybody has their own monkeysphere, and they naturally care about people within that sphere and don't care about people outside of it.

What also happens is that through the power of media some people end up in your monkey circle, while you are not in theirs. If you see something really graphic on the screen or read something that makes you empathize it becomes more likely to happen.

http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

I agree with Matt. I don't think this is the correct forum for this kind of thing and I don't think his contribution as a programmer or a human being for that matter makes this post any more appropriate. I'm glad he is OK, but this person does not deserve special treatment from this community. A suicide note on the JOS off topic forums a couple years back promoted a similar discussion and ended with Joel shutting down that board.

[edit for structure]

Hi Matt.

Your comment makes you sound like an asshole. Sorry to have to put it that way, but there you go. I'm not saying you are an asshole -- heck, I don't even know you. But dang, that just doesn't sound right.

I understand your point, however. There are easily dozens if not hundreds of extreme distress situations that happen to programmers every day.

I think the proper thing is to wait until you see a pattern, then comment. And then only in measured language, for one day it may be you they are looking for. One instance does not a pattern make.

That's my opinion, fwiw. You don't have to care -- you just need to keep your piehole shut. A time for talking and a time for quiet, that kind of thing.

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.

Cynical quote from Joseph Stalin:

    A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

Maybe the news was posted here so that somebdy, who was not added on the scala mailing list could help find that guy. And a person's life is more important than following Hacker News etiquette any day ( according to me atleast ! )

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?

just flag it.

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

The line is where you and others draw it by upvoting or flagging.

I'd go as far as to say that it's insensitive, lacking in tact, and that you should apologize. Is this really the right forum to discuss this? A thread about a guy's almost-death?

Talk about kicking someone while they are down.

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.

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.

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