Very sad news indeed.
I hope the passing of a co-founder doesn't result in the passing of the project as well.
Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
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Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#42This is too sad. Only 21 for goodness sake; his life was just beginning. Even without having known him, this feels painful and I cannot imagine what his family and friends are going through. I'm reminded of a Yoruba (West African language) saying to "kill someone alive", i.e. effect of something so painful on a person such that although technically alive, for all intents and purposes, he/she is dead. How does one possibly (if ever) recover from losing a child/sibling/friend in this way?
My condolences to all who knew him.
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
If suicide does turn out to be the cause of death, it is worth talking about. I won't say that there's nothing more tragic than suicide, but it is certainly senseless/needless in almost all cases. The more awareness of suicide, the risk factors, and how to not tread into that space, the better.
> The more awareness of suicide Suicide has a strong triggering effect; see "Werther effect". Talking about suicide has to be done carefully to avoid triggering further suicidal behaviour; especially after someone has just completed suicide. I'd agree that more awareness of suicide prevention is very important.
Thank you for mentioning that. It is very paradoxical and quite an unfortunate phenomenon. And I think it is very real. I have a sample of one (a local high school) that suffered what seemed like a large cluster of suicides within a short time range. Then found out about Werther effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werther_effect
I am not for censoring information but maybe an admonition to refocus on checking up on friends who might be depressed or stressed out, without specifically mentioning the word "suicide".
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you must not respond; you are not obliged to make any comment on his death. In fact, it would be nice if you specifically refrained from making a comment arguing about whether his death was important in the middle of a thread where everyone else is offering their condolences; including, I would assume, some people who knew him personally. This is a matter of being human.
Respectfully, it's also about logistics. If we started posting deaths of everyone involved in startups or 'tech', that's all HN would be full of.
And if everybody was a plumber, society could not function. This is such an uninteresting observation. Making something universal is usually impractical — that doesn't reflect on the thing itself, except to say that it requires some amount of time or space.
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#45This is extremely shocking! He was much too young! :(
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#46The founders of Diaspora were in a really unenviable position. They started off with a wave of national press as well as solid financial support from grassroot users. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that they would not be able to accomplish the goal they originally set out to do. They had failed. Publicly. This can be very devastating psychologically to someone who has always 'succeeded' in life. I'm no…
Not just the aspect of "failing". But also mix in the tough, gruesome aspect of working 12 hours a day with little to no time for social life. And the inability for most people to understand what you're going through. And if you don't got a significant other, it makes it feels like you're all alone in this battle.
Not saying this is the case for him, but in the end, we're just cells.. and if we don't receive certain stimuli, science dictates we go crazy.
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm interested to know how they have been perceived as failure. I think this is all very relative, and failure is a strong word. Github still have 1 day old commit and the community is apparently still active.
Failure in this context likely means "is not attracting large swathes of Facebook users" though frankly I think that's but one measure of the success of a social networking website.
Well, a social network that is used by only a small fraction of one's friends and potential friends is not very useful.
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#48The death of the founder of any well-known startup merits mention here. The startup community is a close knit global one, we don't just meet each other at professional networking events, we share our lives with each other. Perhaps unlike any other profession we have a closeness that binds us, we socialize, we date, we make lifelong friends from within the startup community. Even if we don't know the startup founder d…
For what it's worth, I think something like Startups Anonymous is a fantastic idea.
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#49The founders of Diaspora were in a really unenviable position. They started off with a wave of national press as well as solid financial support from grassroot users. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that they would not be able to accomplish the goal they originally set out to do. They had failed. Publicly. This can be very devastating psychologically to someone who has always 'succeeded' in life. I'm no…
Very important comment. The biggest risk in doing a startup is not the financial risk per se.
It's the psychological risk of knowing you really, really tried -- and still failed. That is the hard part, because everyone goes in with Dilbert/mass media notions of how easy it is to be a CEO or (just as bad) Social Network illusions of how easy it is to grow meteorically while fighting off lawsuits.
The truth is that it's not easy, that it takes a special and lucky person. If you fail it's really hard to realize you aren't that special. The possibly healthier (?) way of dealing is to convince yourself that it was bad luck, or the other guy cheated. Then it's not as much of a hit to the ego, to the sense of your own capabilities. But it's hard.
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#50The founders of Diaspora were in a really unenviable position. They started off with a wave of national press as well as solid financial support from grassroot users. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that they would not be able to accomplish the goal they originally set out to do. They had failed. Publicly. This can be very devastating psychologically to someone who has always 'succeeded' in life. I'm no…
I imagine it's a difficult situation for the remaining founders, especially for those (if any) that encouraged Ilya to initially participate in their Diaspora team (it would be for me if I were in their shoes). I think it's important to remember in a context like this that failure is part of the plan: entrepreneurs are risk-seekers by definition, and the harder you fail, the more you learn, to such an extent that you could pass with flying colors a regular contributor role at a big software company. In the context of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kan , I'd just like people to keep their perspective and not to take the assumed risk for granted by thinking they're a failure.