Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by deadbabe 265 days ago
How did the obituary know the date of death? Did she have a surgery that she did not survive?
5 comments

I think this was a planned post she wrote while dealing with her disease, and likely a family member added in some relevant details and posted it. I've had a few terminally ill family friends that want to reclaim some control in death what life had taken from them, so they plan their funeral and some post death things out ahead of time.
Presumably she wrote it as "when I died on <insert day of death>"
This question is so absurd. The obit was written prior to her passing. It was obviously filled in by a family member. 100 truth
Am I wrong or does it just look like a funeral home posted this for her? Likely filled in a few data points as requested?
NOPE. Linda’s personal words.
edit: the funeral home published this

previous comment: could have been programmed as `Time.now - 1.day` to be published if no action was taken on the day of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch

It is very tricky though. You probably want to have a bunch of fail-safes in place.

Yeah there's no way it's worth it for an obituary. You need it out in good time, so you can't have a delay longer than a few days. But it's definitely possible to be knocked out (or in a no-signal zone) for a few days and survive.
This being HN, let me say it could work as a service where the service (a human) would check if you are still alive after a timeout.
Uh. yeah. Can you imagine her dragging herself up and reaching for a keyboard - "I'm ... not ... dead ... yet". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfOW9QrLs0o