Comment by anatoly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anatoly | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know a way of saying the following without looking like an asshole, considering the occasion.

If you find yourself admiring Naggum's acerbic wit and online presence, that's fine. But please please look for ways to live your life so that when you die, the fact will be discovered not because some irc channel regulars notice your longer-than-usual absence.

Please try very hard to arrange that there are people in your life who you love and who love you, and with whom you're in daily contact. People whose fondest memory of you will be as a spouse, a parent or an intimate friend, and not having been cursed by you to hell and back in flawless and elegant English.

Many of us here can easily rationalize ourselves into writing a five-page missive on a technical topic that will utterly demolish the sack of shit our opponent is, at the same time making the merits of our cause blindingly obvious to anyone with a three-octal-digits IQ. Please balance the time investment for writing that five-page missive against the possibility of spending that time on your family, or, if you're single, and then it's vastly more important yet, on looking for a person of appropriate gender you'd really like to spend time with.

Also, don't be the kind of person who's polite with others in face-to-face conversation, and then appallingly rude to the same person in email or online forums of any kind. You'll find it's easy to rationalize such behavior to yourself by appealing to lofty principles. Don't.

The world is cold, and we'll all be dead in the long run. Please have someone to hug and be stupidly sentimental with, and share some happiness with.

Thanks for listening, and sorry for being an asshole.

I am ambivalent about this. A friend of mine was found dead in his house last year, a week or three after he died. Many of his closest friends had moved away to other continents; others were trying to respect his desire for privacy by not dropping in unannounced. He had his problems, but he was very well loved. But it wasn't enough.

I agree with you that it's important that we live our lives in such a way as to create happiness; I think it's okay whether the happiness is for ourselves or for others.

But I think that the most effective way to do that is to carry forward the advancement of human knowledge, because ignorance is the source of unhappiness. It's worth depriving oneself of a bit of day-to-day pleasure if that's what it takes to develop your capacities to the point where you can make a real contribution. As usual, I want to point to Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research": http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

I'm sorry to hear about your friend.

I see, and appreciate, your link to Hamming's article and raise you Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape in counterbalance: https://www.msu.edu/~sullivan/BeckettKrapp.html

That's a pretty depressing story, but very powerful, too, and a very effective counterbalance.

I'm reminded of Paul Erdos. Never married, perhaps he died alone. But he never settled either.

Death in the middle of a lecture is hardly "alone."

We obviously went to different universities.

The fact that his internet "friens" found out about his death from twitter or IRC channel doesn't mean that his "real" friends didn't notice.

Why do some people assume that someone with large internet following doesn't have real life and real friends and real family?

Para 2 seems to imply Naggum didn't have family or friends. I don't see any indication that that's true. (Perhaps just that his family and friends are taciturn online.)

Otherwise, +1.

One comment in the first reddit discussion about this explained that irc regulars became suspicious and asked his family to check up on him. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8u5dp/erik_nagg...

This doesn't say outright that his death was discovered due to his absence on irc, but strongly suggests so. It also suggests that he had some family but wasn't in daily contact with them.

As I have understood it, the IRC friends noticed the absence, so one of them asked the family, who told him that erik was dead.

But please please look for ways to live your life so that when you die, the fact will be discovered not because some irc channel regulars notice your longer-than-usual absence.

Why? If I preferred to live my life alone, then it wouldn't really bother me if I died alone and noone knew about it because of the simple fact that I'd already be dead.

I wonder if there might be an entrepreneurial opportunity in this. It'll be basically a ping service, but an automated system will ping you - via SMS or email - to see if you're OK. If you're, you respond back saying yes. If you don't, your case gets escalated to human operators who will try real-world approaches to ensure you're OK.

The daily how-are-you emails can even be a bit Eliza-like, simulating a real human on the other end a little.

There are systems like this for elderly people leaving alone.

An interesting not exactly Freudian typo there.

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