If you don't want people to read your post, perhaps write a private diary instead.

Having it on the Archive is fine; choosing to disregard how scary landing on the top of HN can be seems callous.

People in this thread should take into consideration that the author submitted the post to Hacker News themselves. This is a call for the general hacker public to read it, and ultimately it cannot be undone easily.

I do understand the basic level of curiosity from fellow HN readers -- I did look up the research team and the supervisors mentioned. They do claim a really large area of research interests:

* Verification and Validation

* Search-Based Software Engineering

* Autonomous Driving

* Cyber-Physical Systems

* Digital Twins

* Quantum Software Engineering

It all adds something to the picture. That being said, I would not form any conclusions from this besides "a PhD student faces a crisis" -- unfortunately, this happens often and diagnosing those is really, truly difficult. (I am an assistant professor for just a year now, and I have seen those crises second-hand.)

NotOscarWilde, I'd appreciate if you removed info regarding other people. The article was supposed about me, my feelings and the process of handling a personal crisis. My intention was that people read this post in a self-contained way, without relation to any other people (whose names I didn't mention on purpose), and I feel like most people here did. Maybe I could have expected folks spending time googling this type of unnecessary background information, it still got me by surprise. I'd really, really appreciate if you edited your comment insofar as a matter of respect to these other people.

I doubt they can edit their comment at this point. If you really want it removed, reach out to [email protected] for (accidental) doxxing.

Indeed there is no longer a possibility to edit or delete for me.

I was careful not to include names or places, and all this information is easily searchable starting from the author's username on HN or the website name.

So while I maintain that I made my comment in good faith, I hereby acknowledge that it is okay if it gets deleted, should HN moderators be requested to do so.

Update: I will contact the HN moderators myself, as I feel it is the right thing to do here.

Thanks a lot!

>landing on the top of HN can be seems callous.

call it callous, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for what is the direct result of their own actions. You make a post on HN, people have a right to be curious about it

Yet the author appears the person who submitted the post to HN.

I get that they are having second thoughts after it got so much attention, but it isn't like they had a diary entry accidentally blow up, they actively promoted its spread.

So while adding a disclaimer or some clarifying context would be a good response, yanking the content down after it has generated significant discussion is wonky and I think posting the archived link is entirely reasonable.

Or, you know, just don't submit it to HN yourself? If someone else had submitted it, I'd be fine with the author taking it down. Not everyone wants HN's attention.