Ian was well capable of reaching out to his friends all by himself, he also was capable of using twitter (which he did) and his cell phone. HN is not the place to alert your friends if you have suicide on the brain, in fact it is probably the last thing you should count on since there is absolutely no guarantee it will be posted or that some friend of yours would see it in time.
I'm not myopic for seeing that Ian had many more ways of reaching out to others than asking people aready reading this twitter feed to post it to HN which could then possibly result in someone close to him reaching him in time to make a difference. That's patently absurd reasoning.
> Ad absurdum argument. Ian's posts weren't the attention seeking behavior of some high-school drama hound, this was clearly a legitimate meltdown by the founder of Debian, someone who was a part of this community, not someone random as you suggest.
Yes, but that does not make the community responsible, as much as you would apparently like.
> That's why the post about his tweets was being upvoted -- people recognized there was a legitimate issue that needed attention.
Well, an 'upvote' is not giving attention to an issue, it is just a way to express support. Attention to an issue is to figure out who is close enough to Ian to go and do something about it. And I notice that nobody did, not you nor anybody else for that matter. Given how connected the world is do you really believe that HN is now so important that in matters of life-or-death the right thing to do is to ask for a post on HN rather than to contact someone close? Do you actually believe that none of Ians twitter followers would be better placed to make the link? Do you know Ians HN handle?
> Then the Dang intentionally removed the post, blinding everyone to what was happening simply because they didn't want people to "gawk."
No, he didn't blind anybody. If you were a friend of Ians then you should not rely on HN to make the difference in situations like these. It is an absolutely horrible thing to attempt to make that link. Of course it nicely fits in with your inner narrative that someone needs to be blamed here and you've figured that should be Dan because he killed that thread. But having been in Dans shoes in the past makes me a bit more knowledgeable about how these things go and the fact of the matter is that in the past those threads stayed up and people still killed themselves, and some threads may have contributed to the person killing themselves (see the thread where Aaron Swartz asked for help). Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
> That's pretty reprehensible, in my opinion, and though I'm sure it wasn't intended that way, actions have consequences.
That action did not have the consequence you tie to it. If you read Ians words carefully he explicitly asked all his friends NOT TO STOP HIM. So how come you are so clever about this that you feel that it is right to blame a complete outsider just because a forum thread was deleted. Ians life or death did not hinge on that in a way linked strongly enough that you can make these outrageous claims.