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Comment by okasaki | Hacker News Reader

page 10 of the slides says:

> kill yourself now

That's totally inappropriate no matter how funny you think you are.

Coming from a link titled "Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted" I expected some humor that may not be Politically Correct.

Strangely, your response bothers me more than the quote. Could you not find anything positive to say?

For an industry with a very high rate of depression, and disproportionately populated by demographics where suicide is the #2 leading cause of death, it's a very inappropriate joke.

Source: Men http://www.cdc.gov/men/lcod/2011/LCOD_menallages2011.pdf and women http://www.cdc.gov/women/lcod/2011/WomenAll_2011.pdf

I have suffered from chronic depression for almost 20 years now, so I am sympathetic to your perspective. Most humor is "inappropriate" in my experience. So, inappropriateness seems VERY appropriate when attempting to be humorous... Hehe, go watch some stand-up by Louis CK, Richard Pryor, or George Carlin for example.

This is just a subjective feeling blending personal and second-hand experience, but it seems extremely unlikely to me that a joke in presentation context would drive someone over the edge.

Being unable to joke about it, however, is stifling. The reaction to clamp down on the joke suggests that suicide is something normal people don't do.

I feel like it's making light of it, as if suicide weren't anything serious. When Louis CK jokes about, say, racism, he's not acting like racism isn't a big deal.

Couldn't you?

...you've really escaped the cycle of negative feedback, haven't you? ;)

I'm sorry not everyone subscribes to your own personal views. Some people think it's funny, others don't. That's just life.

Bill Hicks video about marketing was unbelievably funny, while pretty much say exactly that to marketing people for ten solid minutes.

I get there is probably some deeper reason behind your views. But I respectfully disagree.

Is this what you've got in mind?

http://fixyt.com/watch?v=3_VWXMFGsTo

Yeah. That's what I had in mind :D

Just the slides do. Maybe he later thought the same and then omitted or replaced that suggestion in his talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyL9EC0S0c&t=393

More than that, it's just the slide notes (things that people other than the presenter don't usually see, even when the slides are published) that say it. Those are ordinarily shorthand speaking notes; memory aids for an extemporaneous talk to make sure that you include all of the points that you had intended to include. It could as easily have been written as "you are beyond help" or some such, but the idea is to convey the maximum information to the speaker with the fewest number of words.

Probably a reference to this: 1,2

1) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/29/torvalds_tantrum_ope... 2) https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/1vyfmNCYpi5

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