It’s literally a suicide kit, and it’s appalling that they would sell it to anyone let alone teens.

Just how much profit are they making from these kits? Must be negligible to them? I don’t understand why they think it is worth fighting this? Or is it their policy to always fight, never back down, never say sorry etc? I honestly don’t understand. Even ignoring ethics and looking at it from only economics, it doesn’t make sense to me. What am I missing?

If we can hold companies liable for what their employees recommend, I don't know why we wouldn't also hold them liable for what their recommendation engines recommend.

“People also bought” is very different from “It looks like you’re trying to suicide, let me help”.

If you ask the hardware store for a rope rated for an impact force of $X, they do not know your intentions, and they are not responsible for them. If you harm yourself, you’re culpable, not the store that simply sold you rope.

Chances are on HN you'll find people who are sufficiently detached from reality to advocate for this.

Btw: we should not encourage suicide. I think we need to help people that are in a position where they are considering and also there are things that are deeply f'ed with our society to begin with that slowly push people to this (ie helping suicidal people is a drop in the bucket if we don't fix fundamental issues)

If it's because of the reco: how do we ensure that we ban all other possible lethal combos? Disable recommendations? Ban certain things?

AFAIK, in the US, suicide is not a crime. Assisting in another person's suicide is a crime in most states.

As the post you're replying to said, we could allow physicians to offer painless and dignified deaths after the patient proves they are of sound mind or will never recover from a horrible condition. Much like the courts recognize there can be reasonable limits to purchasing and possessing guns. Admittedly, I don't know what fraction of those who commit suicide do so because of a temporary mental state they could recover from with help, but I'm guessing it's the majority. If so, it'd be inhumane to remove basic barriers that might save people, even if it'd make it easier for the smaller group of people who "rightly" believe they would rather die.

This is a complex topic that touches on so many sore spots in society. But that's when I most doubt all-or-nothing stances. They tend to come from strong emotions rather than reason.

We are hypothesing that people don't want to actually do it and that we are doing the a service from preventing it. This could be the case - but how many people decide to end their life on a whim?

Re: recovering with help. That was one of the main things i had in mind. If the factors that lead you to suicide and/or drive you insane are not removed do you actually believe that stopping you from the final act is going to be effective? As a society we don't give 2 shits about people that are struggling. Money is our religion everything else is secondary :(

Secondly, in many studies of attempted suicides, the vast majority of people of people who survived one suicide attempt did not try again (even though the risk of further attempts is much higher with an initial attempt than in the general population, it is still quite low - around 13% in one 35-year long follow-up study).

This doesn't even count the huge number of people that have suicidal thoughts and don't actually attempt suicide - at least sometimes because of barriers like those mentioned before, which prevent a suicidal thought from turning into a rash decision like jumping in from the of the train or off the building.

In fact, for many people, this type of "near-miss" offered by such barriers is exactly what allows them to realize they need urgent help: they don't want to die, but had been ignoring similar thoughts as meer fancies, until such a moment when they realize that they would have actually done and may try again if they don't seek immediate help.

My bigger point was that nobody decides to kill themselves for fun and what needs to happen is systematically helping people not knee jerk reactions like banning X or Y. I may be wrong

Seems like that would fall under basic bodily autonomy. Why should a doctor gatekeep something so important...

This is a case where rigidly basing reasoning about rights fails the common-sense test.

BTW, the chemistry set my parents gave me was the last year that they were sold.

This is how you end up with acetaminophen banned from gas station convenience stores and locked up behind the pharmacy counter. Or, for that matter, prohibition of alcohol, undoubtedly the most popular way to slowly kill yourself.

Try speaking to someone who has experienced suicidal ideation and how afraid they are they may actually do it in a moment of insanity.

That's certainly not a universal experience. There are rational and valid reasons a mentally ill person may want to die and other people should not deny them that right. It's inhumane torture and a complete disrespect of their personhood to disregard deny their capacity to so reason and force them to live in suffering.

If you actually want to help someone suffering from this, you must check that their desire to die persists for a long enough time, and is not simply a psychotic episode that they would regret later. This is often easily distinguishable, as people who start having thoughts of suicide are often terrified of actually following through just moments later.

It is also extremely well established fact that the vast majority of people whose suicide attempts are thwarted are thankful for it, and that cutting access to the easiest suicide methods drastically reduces the total rate of suicides: most people who commit suicide don't want to die, they are just having an irrational episode.

God luck backing that one up.

> This is often easily distinguishable, as people who start having thoughts of suicide are often terrified of actually following through just moments later.

I this is a terrible criterion because even if you've made the right decision death is still incredibly scary and so is dying (which can go wrong, especially when efficient methods are witheld.)

Your overally point sounds good superficially but you don't see why you think its within your rights to be a gatekeeper for me though. It's none of your business, __at all__.

> Good luck backing that one up.

Here[0] is a study that followed 98 people for 35 years after an original attempt at suicide, and found that 13% of them eventually died by suicide, some up to 15 years later. I would say that clearly shows that the vast majority of people who attempted suicide (87%) did not intend to die.

> Your overall point sounds good superficially but I don't see why you think its within your rights to be a gatekeeper for me though. It's none of your business, __at all__. You can want to help all you want, but forcing your "help" on others isn't within your rights.

You're again missing a fundamental aspect of mental illness: that many people who have a mental witness need an advocate to help keep them safe from themselves. Not just for suicide, but also self harm, extreme risk-taking behavior, substance abuse and others. You don't just let late stage Alzheimer's patients wander outside: even though freedom of movement is a fundamental human right, they don't know where and why they are going and can easily harm themselves in the process.

[0] https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.1...

The vast majority of people who attempt suicide actually regret it afterwards, and have no deep desire to die. Making it hard to actually kill yourself is an extremely important safety net for these people, who outnumber the terminally ill who actually wish to die by a large margin.

Not to mention, people can be compelled to attempt suicide by social pressure, either in bullying or by family members who view them as a burden. Having to go through a neutral third party who can help make sure you actually deeply desire this step is critical to protect you from others.

The point here is that someone shouldn't be able to decide, in the course of 5 seconds, to engage in a permanent decision like this.

The reason being, that people make mistakes in the course of 5 seconds, that they regret.

So, instead of that, we should be pretty sure before allowing people to make such permanent decision.

Such as, for example, by having a doctor talk to the person.

This is why the OP mentioned the TV show Futurama.

Because in the comedy TV show, people could decide in 5 seconds to do that.

And the reason why it was in a comedy TV show, is because that is bad, and absurd, and that's why it is funny.

Is it a right or not?

> we should be pretty sure

In what sense is it a right if someone else has to agree to it?

As the other person said, stop being obtuse.

People should have a right to be as selfish as they want with their own bodies. You don't owe anyone else a responsibility to live.

Suicide is a serious decision with serious consequences. It should be treated as such, not as some flimsy debate topic about bodily autonomy.

Have some empathy and tact when discussing such serious topics.

I get that you don't agree with me. But having a different opinion doesn't make me obtuse. That's just slinging around an insult.

You choosing to ignore it all is, plain and simple, obtuse. Period. If you don't want to be called obtuse, don't be obtuse.

Good day, then. Talking to you is clearly useless.

Really?

Or are you just hyper focusing on an irrelevant dictionary definition of the single word "right", that nobody else was using?

That is why I said you were being obtuse.

You focusing on a single word is missing the point, and I don't know why you would focus on the word like that.

Yeah really. What right should I have to tell them to do something or not do something with their own body and life?

Because, if you had ever spoken to anyone who has felt suicidal, you will see that most of them admit that they have had couple second lapses in judgement and are extremely glad that they did not have a 5 second suicide button that they could press.

So, me, being someone who actually cares about these people, and who has spoken to them, know that most people who are suicidal do not want to be given this option.

You would know this if you had ever spoken to someone in your life, ever, who has had depressive or suicidal thoughts.

Actually I'm a trustee of a registered charity that provides support to people with a wide range of serious welfare and mental health issues and have dealt with them in practice multiple times, providing a great deal of support from my own personal time to people struggling.

I'm sorry that you made an incorrect assumption. I'm afraid that I find it's pretty typical among people who think they should have a right to control others.

You can just accept that you were wrong about my experience with the issue, if you want to.

That's actually the major issue in this area - people assuming things, and assuming that their experience translates to others.

Do you have any friends who have attempted suicide, failed, and now regret the attempt immensely?

Do you wish they had succeeded in their suicide attempt?

I am talking about a situation where they regret the decision, are alive now, and are glad that they are alive, and that the attempt failed.

For that situation, do you think they should have died, even though now they admit that it was a mistake and are glad that they didn't go through with it?

> I have been for the last 15 years

This wasn't about a situation where someone has made a decision, and been certain of it for years.

Instead, if you read the conversation, it was about if someone should be able to make a quick, decision, within literally 5 seconds.

Do you understand how giving someone a decision, in this short a period of time, is extremely different than if someone has thought about the situation for a long time, and is very certain?

I have a young child who has voiced suicidal thoughts and and it’s so fucking hard. The pandemic has been really rough on a lot of kids.

Thank god we are we’re finally able to get professional help (after almost a year of waiting for an available therapist).

You don’t know shit about the circumstances of these families, and jumping to the conclusion that the parents are at fault and not at least considering that a $1T company could lift a finger is kinda messed up.

Sorry for the angry tone but I’m seeing a few folks make comments like yours and it’s infuriating. This isn’t some joke topic and the Silicon Valley contrarian attitude really is frustrating to see on this thread.

I feel for the parents’ grief. I also understand how difficult parenting a troubled teenager must be.

I also categorically reject the idea that Amazon is culpable, and I think that these particular parents, in their grief, are merely attempting to externalize their feelings of guilt.

They want to rage at something or someone other than themselves.

And I *AM* parenting my children when I insist on this. The only thing I’m thinking about is if my kid goes to a dark place again and starts searching the internet.

But please: why don’t you tell me how to be better parent to prevent this?

I’m not going to do that, just like you shouldn’t be trying to force the rest of us to pay the steep costs of assuaging your parenting fears.

Saying that Amazon is not culpable is like saying Amazon would not be culpable in an overdose death if they were selling heroin to children in withdrawal, because the parents should have been more careful. Sure, they should have, they can't discharge the blame. But the source of the substance is also culpable.

I’m not going to say it’s the parent’s fault, but they’re a hell of a lot more culpable than Amazon, which isn’t any more culpable than a hardware store selling rope.

~~~

The circumstances surrounding Amazon’s sales to both Kristine and Ethan were highly irregular. Amazon has a policy that people under the age of 18 can only use the service with the involvement of a parent or guardian. However, Kristine, at just sixteen, had created her own account to purchase the poisonous chemical and was never asked her age when she set up the account. The package delivered to Kristine’s home was addressed without a last name. It read only “Kristine.”

Seventeen-year-old Ethan used the account that belonged to his mother, Nikki, to purchase Sodium Nitrite. When Nikki received the email receipt for the purchase, she immediately called Amazon’s customer service to tell them there must have been some mistake and that nobody at her home had ordered the item. Amazon told Nikki the order was cancelled. Instead, the Sodium Nitrite was delivered to her home four days later.

Everything is poisonous in excess. These are scare-words written by a lawyer looking for a big payout.

> … and was never asked her age when she set up the account.

She had to supply a credit card and agree to the terms of service.

Do you want Amazon to engage in privacy intrusive age verification? Maybe we should be forced to upload government ID?

Or maybe you should be responsible for parenting your own children, and not trying to parent the rest of us.

> The package delivered to Kristine’s home was addressed without a last name. It read only “Kristine.”

So?

> Instead, the Sodium Nitrite was delivered to her home four days later.

Yeah, that happens.

Guess what’s going to happen even more now?

All the irresponsible journalists driving social media panic are advertising sodium nitrate as an effective method of suicide to the world. People who never had heard of it or considered it are going to, now.

Parents are absolutely to blame here, our educational system is tito blame here. Our values and society in general have to be blamed here.

Stop defending actions because it's somewhat tangentially related to something else you think should be allowed.

"And yet you participate in society!"

Ah, la petit mort, c’est bon!

To me, its shows the limitations of 'AI' in 2022. We keep calling software 'intelligent' and saying things like 'we don't know exactly how it works', we tell people that it is going to take their jobs - that all seems like hubris to me. Situations like this prove that AI is not intelligent at all and has a long way to go before it is anything like intelligent.

This "kind" of harm seems to hide a huge amount of complexity. Let's assume the algorithm starts off on day 1 just looking for purchases that tend to appear in clusters. There's a potentially unbounded number of clusters that could be regarded as harmful. The options are surely:

1. Be vigilant and special case items one by one. I presume they are doing this. Maybe they aren't putting enough resources behind it or not reacting quickly enough but even if they were then things would always slip through.

2. Never use any kind of bundling algorithm ever.

(1) is a forever ongoing task so it doesn't sound like you're referring to that as that's not something where you can "iron out the kinks".

However it also doesn't sound like you mean (2) as you seem to be saying there's a way to fix this once and for all.

Is there a third option I haven't thought of?

EDIT - I guess maybe all "bundles" could require human curation before they are allowed to be displayed. It would be a gargantuan task but it's a valid third option.

They can still figure out how to buy the items separately, and Amazon isn’t inducing suicidal ideation.

Perhaps your kids shouldn’t have unrestricted and unmonitored access to order things from Amazon? Start there, instead of insisting that Amazon do the parenting for you.

Indeed. And we intend to exercise that responsibility to safeguard our children by stopping Amazon from mixing suicide kits in with shipments of innocuous household goods.

I think we disagree on the definition of “responsibility”.

So the people who have legitimate use for those chemicals can jump through a few hoops to get them.

And Amazon, a trillion dollar company, can do a better job with its algorithms and stop recommending them and selling them to teenagers.

I am super comfortable inflicting those costs on the world.

It sounds like we won’t agree on ethical fundamentals, much less this topic, so I wish you well, and hope you can source enough bubblewrap to feel safe existing in the world.

By the way your car is not a death-trap because of us nagging the industry to do better. You are welcome!

For evidence refer to the fact that your family hasn’t died of botulism or a falling building facade.

This is pretty basic stuff. It’s not a social media panic attack it’s an active lawsuit backed by sworn statements and evidence, and the fact pattern is genuinely apalling. I get skepticism at the headline but read through the details.

It's not about parents having oversight over kids. It's about mental illness: "kits" like this shouldn't exist at all for kids or otherwise. You use it once and you're dead because that's the whole point of the combination of goods. We as a society should be past the point where we need to discuss whether selling a literal suicide kit is okay or not. It's not, and we know from research that making suicide more accessible and convenient leads to more suicide. The only outcome of allowing Amazon to do what it's doing is additional deaths that could have been prevented.

Amazon is a $1T company. They have the resources. This is willful negligence.

This is the correct way to handle it. It being a "gargantuan task" doesn't matter. Everybody would freak out if the local supermarket advertised this kind of product but somehow "tech" (read: online retailers) can get away with this because they are big?

Amazon posts billions in profits, it can certainly afford to control their algorithms. If it's impossible, then stop using algorithms and use human curation like literally every brick and mortar business.

Amazon’s recommendations are mostly crap anyways, even for mundane, straightforward stuff. They shouldn’t be recommending anything dangerous

In fact in the UK I'm not seeing any results that could be described as a "suicide kit".

The US site does seem to stock chemicals but from a quick skim I don't seem to get any sodium nitrate in the results.

It seems to me that companies massively underestimate (or willingly don’t compensate for) the importance of this newly introduced work, only cashing in on the savings from the work removed. Other examples of similar behavior include automatic moderation, which also massively fails to remove actual dangerous content.

This kind of behavior looks like greed to me, but I guess it’s legal, and needs more regulation.

According to the article, they're not doing this, and not for lack of awareness or resources. Not only have other companies like Etsy and eBay stopped selling these products years ago, but Amazon has already banned them in the UK where it's legally required. So the 'it's too complicated' excuse doesn't hold up at all.

This story is so much worse than the headline suggests, despite that seeming impossible.

If they artificially limit their "AI" from outside pressure, then they will have admitted that they can do it, and they'll get pressured to do it more and more. They don't want to deal with that, and would rather wait until a law is passed "forcing" them to do so - coincidentally Amazon will be best positioned to comply with that law and for some reason it'll only ever be used to go after smaller competitors.

They are obviously afraid of a precedent of having to answer for what they sell on their site and what happens next.

It’s understandable but no less sociopathic once understood.

> They had decades to iron out these kinks.

Aren’t the developments in algorithms that lead to these kinds of unexpected outcomes a bit more recent?

This seems similar to the content moderation problems the social media giants are having.

The sheer volume of products in Amazon’s marketplace is such that these kinds of things seem bound to happen when applying recommendation engines.

This is not to imply that such recommendations are acceptable, but my primarily contention is that this doesn’t seem like a problem that has been well solved anywhere yet.

No. Unexpected outcomes are pretty normal for search engines (and really, any complex computer system) since... forever, and really, the solution, regardless of input is is really easy: on input if (keyword in prohibited_phrases) disable recommendations, and on output if (keyword in recommendation_results) disable recommendations to user. I do believe this was solved sometime prior to E. F. Codd's 1970 "Relational Completeness of Data Base Sublanguages".

Cutting off a search early is easy. Deciding that “even though these are commonly purchased together, this pairing shouldn’t be shown” seems like a fundamentally different problem.

The thing I was replying to was the sentiment that this should have been solved decades ago.

Curation/moderation is never solved, only managed.

I think it’s because the other is mixed with salt (Prague Powder #1). You aren’t buying sodium nitrite though - you are buying prague powder.

It’s packaged that way specifically.

Maybe, but as long ago as at age 12 I was buying it from the local pharmacy to make awesome smoke bombs.

>> In 2022 there is just no excuse for this, nobody should be deploying software in production that is capable of this kind of harm

You realize the #1 founding reason of the internet outside of sharing academic research was to distribute an entire "book" capable of this type of harm?

Purity here doesn't mean the rest is impurities, it means the percent of what you're buying is that compound. The rest is usually common salt, in this case.

The reason it's done like this is so mixing up a teaspoon and a tablespoon isn't a lethal difference.

The LD_lo of sodium nitrite is a bit over 5g for a 75kg person. You use an ounce of 6% sodium nitrite to cure about 25kg of meat. That's about 28g, or 1.7g of pure sodium nitrite. The equivalent lethal dose of what Amazon is selling is equal to ~three ounces of the stuff you use for food (enough for 75kg of meat), which ends up looking like a teaspoon.

While I buy 100% sucrose in 10lb quantities, the cupcakes I make with it are a small fraction sugar. It would be very difficult to guage my recipes if the concentration of sugar I bought varied per bag. Sucrose is explosive if atomized and ignited or mixed with oxidizing agents.

The same is true of salt (deadly at 3g/kg body mass and sold in 5-10lb quantities, by the way), which is important when I mix up a dry rub or table seasoning.

Why did you speak universally for something you have copious evidence to dispute?

The US government sets the purity for sodium nitrite for use in food. You can't buy food-grade sodium nitrite at other concentrations. And using too much sucrose or salt in your recipe doesn't make your cupcakes lethal.

Comparing salt to the toxicity of sodium nitrite is an absolutely bonkers argument. You'd need about 225g of salt (about 3/4 cup) to be lethal for a 75kg person. Good luck eating that much salt. By comparison, you need 5g of sodium nitrite.

Did you actually think about this for more than a second. Despite all this moral panic bullshit I would wager the majority of minors purchasing sodium nitrite are doing so for its legitimate uses. Teenagers with cooking or aquarium hobbies are not that rare - sodium nitrite suicides seem to have been in the single to low double digits for most countries - which when they report 150 to 200 percent increases over the year sounds all the more sensational.

This is stupid. Might as well ban ropes.

Some of you might want to look up the stats on intentional and unintentional Tylenol toxicity and number of deaths - it is 1000s and 100s more respectively.

Maybe their recommendation system was aggregating. Or maybe it was just suggesting specific things the user had viewed or purchased recently.

I’ll withhold judgement until less charged “facts” are out in the open.

It will recommend them. This is not new and there are plenty examples.

Since these suicides are planned, it doesn't seem like needing to buy the products individually presents much of a safeguard.

The category of things that "might be harmful to minors" is impossibly broad. I suspect Amazon will be removing this chemical from their listings, just as Amazon and eBay constantly add new items to their banned items list. There are several chemicals that I ordered from Amazon in the past that now can't be found online, and I expect it's only a matter of time until pure sodium nitrite also disappears.

The bigger question is: Should we be forcing every online marketplace to perform strict age verification of every customer? From the article:

> Kristine was able to create an Amazon account even though she was under 18, skirting Amazon rules against underage account holders—the lawsuit notes that Amazon does not verify age.

If a minor can get ahold of a credit card, it's not hard to imagine that they can also get ahold of their parent's drivers license to go through an arbitrary age verification too.

Even if they did perform age verification on accounts, how would you expect Amazon to verify that the person pressing the Checkout button is actually the parent, and not a minor who sat down at their parents' computer and went to Amazon.com?

It's really easy to make blanket dismissals of difficult situations in comments ("Amazon shouldn't be selling X to minors...") but the reality is that the only way to prevent these things is to remove them entirely from the marketplace. Amazon does remove a lot of potentially misused medications and chemicals from their marketplace, but the list is never going to perfectly capture every single combination of items that might trend as being harmful.

What would you propose as a practical solution? A blanket ban on anything that might be harmful?