I am beginning to believe that one of the unintended casualties of Aarons' passing is that HN is dying as well. I've never seen such a rift in the community as what is happening right now.
Can we please all stop this before there is no turning back? I understand the need to grieve, this is for sure not an easy time for any of us but the amount of hate-mongering that is happening right now is really beyond the pale. Please stop. Really.
edit: those flagging this: You really have to wonder what it is that you're trying to achieve here.
I think it's most unfair to conflate a person's legal and psychological problems as this headline does, and equally unfair to single out a contemporary critical comment from a HN participant as if that participant's skepticism about the merits of Aaronsw's hacktivism were made with an understanding of his psychological fragility. Both the original comment and this story make the mistake of assuming the worst about their subject, but there's a wide qualitative difference between peer-peer commentary on a message board and pseudo-objective commentary on a commercial news site.
As someone with a few suicidal episodes of my own, I can easily see how the stress of Aaronsw's socio-legal situation could have been a contributing factor to his suicide. However, the suicidal impulse is very often an irrational one and attempting to analyze it rationally often misses the mark completely and ends with projecting one's own views onto the dead person - doubly so where the stressors are political rather than personal and the person's death is widely viewed as an episode of martyrdom.
People are not machines, and policy issues (administrative, legislative and judicial) do not operate in mechanistic fashion. It would be a more tractable and perhaps even a better world if people were as clear and consistent as computers, but they're not. Often, we end up attacking each other as a poor proxy for attacking a problem.