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Comment by jboggan | Hacker News Reader

This has happened in my experience before, and it is one of the strongest reasons for good source control that is infrequently considered. It was a tragedy when a very wonderful and dear researcher in our group died suddenly, especially to his three children and wife that he left behind. It was also a great loss as well that we could never recover some key bits of source code from his computer, and that a very promising cancer drug trial was derailed because we couldn't articulate why the compounds were chosen for study in the first place.

He died of a heart attack at age 42 after pulling three 90+ hour weeks. It completely changed my attitude towards work. May he rest in peace.

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Just yesterday I was nearly run over by a taxi (in Seattle, what?) running a red light. As I realized he wasn't stopping I thought to myself, "at least all my code is checked in and pushed".

True story.

God, I hate taxis.. always beeping at you when you take 1 second to cross the street or make a turn (if you're riding in front of it)

We are all just 1 second away from a tragedy.

When I was learning how to drive a car my instructor told me: see the light turned green, hold on, wait for an idiot, then wait for a taxi cab, then go slowly.

Similarly, my mother always told me to drive as if the oncoming person who appears to be stopping is NOT, and that people with turn signals on are liars or forgetful, and will continue straight, when evaluating safety of turning right.

Sometimes it feels like I drive like the stereotypical granny, but this has saved my bacon several times in the past two decades.

Everyone drives like that in India :)

I saw an episode of Top Gear (UK) where they went to India and the driving situation looked terrifying. I still want to go sometime :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_driving

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadcraft

Just throw them the middle-finger if the honk... at least that's what I do.

In 2004 when I was working in Seattle, in the course of a year there were three accidents on 5th and Battery that were exact mirrors, IE: car going too fast, hits a pedestrian on the same corner. I don't remember the first, the second a German tourist was killed, and the third my co-worker and I were walking to lunch over at the Two Bells. She was hit. I'm not a superstitious or religious person, but something just didn't seem right and I lingered a few seconds on the curb and jumped back just in time - good or I'm sure we would have both been killed. Luckily she survived, and I'd even say it was a (positive) catalyst in major life changes for her - she made a job change, moved to a different city, took up new hobbies, got in shape, etc. After the event, I'll just say that: a) the city of Seattle is completely negligent in not fixing the traffic flow in that spot, b) the Seattle Police Department is truly evil (their handling of the "investigation" afterwards was appalling) and c) you will never erase the image of a car hitting a co-worker / friend/ other human being from your memory. Work is a good thing and should be fulfilling, but something like that is a good reminder that work is just one part of our life.

I know that intersection, as it's just on the edge of downtown, the traffic is thin enough to let people think they can go faster than they really should.

Your comment is hitting me pretty hard. I don't want my last thoughts to be related to what I was doing at work.

When I've worked at places that had poor source control and/or poor documentation, I've resorted to trying to push for it by walking around saying, "Suppose I (or fill-in-the-blank) get hit by a bus? You'll all be up a creek."

During University, my professors routinely called this "The bus scenario", are harped it on us every project.

Luckily, nobody got hit by a bus, but we all wound up very diligent at source control.

I always knew it as your "bus number": how many engineers could get hit by a bus before your project ground to a halt.

I call it our bus factor. It's currently one, but we're hiring ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Unfortunately relevant: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2525584/Copywriter-d...

Obviously not a common thing, but it is a scary thought to think it's quite possible to work yourself to death in an office based environment. I'm sure many of us (including myself) can think of similar times in our lives when we worked this hard, heavily intoxicated with the energy poison of your choice, working multiple all nighters in a row. Even when you're young you're not invincible.

In Japan it happens so often they have their own word for it: karoshi.

Sararimen fall over dead at their desks, and others simply avert their eyes and focus on their work while a manager urgently calls for white-gloved personnel to spirit the corpse away to the undertaker.

Nobody even misses a beat. The work must go on.

Karoushi incidents are national news and are rare (although overwork is common, for reasons that are too much to get into in this post). These also happen in Korea and other parts of Asia; more so than Japan now, possibly.

I'm breath taken by the casual disregard for life that you imply the Japanese have.

It reads like overdramatized amateur fiction.

Busy people, in general, avoid getting caught in other people's problems. Tokyo is filled with people who are busy. They may ignore beggars on the street and may not give up their seats. Taking it from there to an extreme (that they are immune to any fear of death) is an ugly reaction.

During the 3/11 earthquake, I was shocked and appalled by the stupidity of one of my co-workers who went on coding as normal while the building shook. (It was experienced as a Shindo 6 earthquake in Yokohama, so it was quite strong - I never ever experienced anything like it in my life). He probably saw it as macho, but it was dangerous - other people then were confused as what to do. He eventually left the company for not being very competent. (Good riddance.)

For every person like him, there were 50-100 people on the staff who were shocked, shaking, crying or scared. I find they reacted pretty much as I'd expect people in any school in Canada would have reacted. It certainly was more-or-less how we reacted when one of our class fellows put an end to his life.

I find it distasteful that people fetishise another group of people (especially people with the same capitalist democratic strain of lifestyle) to the extent that they basically superhuman or inhuman.

This makes no sense.

過労死 is just a compound word basically consisting of "too much work death."

Using your "they have a word for it so it's common and blithely ignored" logic, you could say that "infanticide" happens all the time and is ignored in English-speaking countries simply because there's a word for it.

Or the word "decimation". How often do we round up a group of people and kill every tenth?

I had 3 of those last week. Didn't you?

Do you work at Zynga?

> you could say that "infanticide" happens all the time and is ignored in English-speaking countries

It does, but most cases can be covered up as SIDS.

I'm seriously wondering, do you have a citation for that? I've never heard that mentioned before now.

You don't find it a little suspicious that there's a widespread medical euphemism for "this baby suddenly asphyxiated and we don't know how?" OK, not all SIDS cases are infanticide, most probably aren't, but it's nearly impossible to tell for sure.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/19/nyregion/investigating-a-r...

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration

What the hell are you talking about? People don't die from work exhaustion at their desks in Japan. I live in Japan and I've never even remotely heard of anything like that through my years here. And Karoshi is not even used the way you pretend it's used. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

There was a rash of news reports about fifteen years ago suggesting exactly that: that people regularly die at their desks in Japan from overwork. Since then, I've read that it was a vast exaggeration, but perhaps the person to whom you're responding missed those reports. They may not know what they're talking about, but it's probably not entirely their fault.

well with Internet nowadays it's really easy to check the information compared to 15 years ago. There's really no excuse to write something as if you are sure of what you are saying without double checking, especially on these kind of topics.

People generally don't double-check things that make for interesting stories and fit their view of how the world works. And for almost everyone, when it comes to foreign places they have not personally visited, that view is made up of stereotypes frequently bordering on racism.

Artistic license. I read the word karoshi years ago in some panicked news article in the USA.

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