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Re:Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go by conistonwater on Monday August 11, 2014 @12:38PM (#8163950)
Have you thought at all about the ethics of meddling in people's lives? [1]

This "service" seems contrary to basic notions of privacy and freedom.

[1] http://www.davidhume.org/texts/suis.html

Re:Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go by jwise0 on Monday August 11, 2014 @12:46PM (#8163993)
The only thing the service does is alert the friends of someone who appears to be about to end their own life, but who, for some reason, is posting about it on a public forum.

I can assure you that the service does no meddling whatsoever.

Someone who is swept by the depths of depression, and takes a last moment to emerge long enough to ask their friends for help -- well, I think that it is only fair to counterbalance the feed algorithms that try to keep the rest of us blissfully ignorant, and let them have the support that they ask for.

Re:Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go by conistonwater on Monday August 11, 2014 @01:31PM (#8164223)
> alert the friends of someone who appears

That's meddling all right.

[deleted]
Re:Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go by rkirkendall on Monday August 11, 2014 @01:42PM (#8164283)
Thanks for looking at the repo. A couple of things to keep in mind. - This list is only a starting point I pulled from a white paper. I agree that it does need to expand, hence the ongoing and open source nature of the project.

- If you have a suggestion for how this could be done with machine learning, please feel free to submit a pull request. Just keep in mind that the project only aims to catch language that can be reasonably interpreted as self-threatening.

Lastly, if you have a problem with how the project is implemented PRs are more productive than comments. It is far from perfect, but I believe it is still better than nothing at all.