The comment was clearly poorly phrased. When I made it, there were no negative comments on the story, and it was really just intended to question the "programmer prodigy" aspect, not to criticise the deceased or imply that she was not an impressive young person.

I hate (!) to discard any part of the english language; I think all expressions have their place, including "I hate to be that guy, but" - however, in hindsight, the net effect was to lump my relatively neutral comment in with all the haters on the thread, so, in practice, it was proven to be a poor choice.

That said, I do dislike the habit of idolising deceased people as perfect in every way. It reminds me of the "HN Salesmanship hero" story (where I commented that he wasn't my hero and I resented this attribution, for which I got badly downvoted). This person was clearly impressive without making stuff up about them. From all the comments and interviews, it in fact seems that her programming ability, far from being prodigy-like, was in fact the least impressive of her other personal traits.

To conclude: had I known that there would be a pile-up of hateful belittling following my comment, I wouldn't have made it, or if I felt the need to ask that question, I would have done so in a much more carefully phrased way. I fully take the blame for not realising that this type of thread could descend down to that level, but my intention was certainly not to belittle.

I agree with the post about thinking before you add something and not being mean for the sake of being mean. I think we also have to be careful here about a culture of groupthink and censoring alternative opinions via very negative feedback.

"I can never stop feeling, but sometimes I'm too tired to think" -- rallying around the asinine "prodigy" headline.

"I can never stop thinking, but sometimes I'm too tired to feel" -- rallying around the emotionally tone-deaf responses.

I think we all tend to identify with one side more than the other, but instead of rallying ourselves on either side of the issue, we should see each side as a vital aspect of being human that each of us has, with one side often gaining the upper hand and then getting out of hand. If we want to measure the supposed "decline" of Hacker News by the fact that one side gets out of hand and provokes a response the other, I think both sides need to be held to account. Glurge begets callousness. A pervasive environment of callousness makes glurge seem like a welcome relief. If we want to avoid either, we should avoid both, and that means ignoring offenses instead of responding in kind.

I dont think its a good idea to make statements like that on someone who is not here anymore to defend herself.

I dont want to make assumptions about everyone, but she was definitely a far far better programmer than me when I was 16.:(

They weren't bad comments at all. The circle-the-wagons "we're better than this" reaction is worse.

While a death is usually a tragedy, made magnitudes worse when it's a child, the title of that post was absurd, and it was a giant elephant in the room that simply had to be rationally diffused. Like others I went into that story primarily to read how she was a programming prodigy.

Tragic death. Not a programming prodigy. The misrepresentation was noticed by all, and it will be a sad day when social convention means we all have to carry forward the lie lest we offend someone's sensibility about death.

PG, given that you gray-out comments that get torrentially downvoted, perhaps you could bold-face (or render in green?) those comments that get a certain number of upvotes, or perhaps those comments that exceed X% of the aggregate number of upvotes for the thread.