Hacker News Reader

Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

A couple of years ago a server management application called HyperVM had a 0day due to some questionable programming, hundreds of thousands of websites were lost along with a lot of money... the next day the creator took his own life. A lot of people are going to be in a very bad position right now (both customers and people inside mtgox), let's hope it doesn't come to that.

View on HN

October 19, 1987 was "Black Monday" as US equity markets crashed. A number of Wall Street bankers defenestrated themselves because they lost so much money.

I hope that customers of MtGox don't do the same thing when they realize how much they've lost.

I also hope Karpeles doesn't harm himself, though we should have at least as much concern for the customers as we have for the proprietor.

There were no suicides associated with the 1987 Black Monday crash. You're thinking of Black Tuesday in 1929, a much bigger event. Even so, nobody jumped out any windows on Black Tuesday -- it was an urban legend. There were a handful of suicides but nothing statistically significant.

According to this[0] the HyperVM guy may have had a family history of suicide.

[0] http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/security/25559-hyperv...

I'm having trouble understanding what you think the relevance of that might be. Obviously, when someone commits suicide, that decision ultimately rests on their shoulders and is borne of their experience/history/state/what-have-you. GP was trying to make a broader point about the difference in levels of significance between a catastrophic business fuck-up and the wasting of human life, a conflation that people without family histories of suicide make all the time.

On the general point my original parent was trying to make, I totally agree. People throwing away their lives over a business fuck-up is a waste.

I just wanted to search on the story and saw that point was made in the article I linked, and thought it was an interesting point to that specific case.

oh, well, that's alright then.

> HyperVM guy may have had a family history of suicide.

Seems so. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/09/lxlabs_funder_death/

But more than that, in his own words, he was a "man of excesses." Here is his archived blog (http://echoreply.us/ligesh.com/ligesh.com/about/index.html)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com