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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

And how accurate are traditional methods? Seems to be behind a paywall.

Exciting, whatever the answer is. It's awful when someone commits suicide, and if there's some automated way to test it, that would help a lot. Also less intrusive. Who knows how many people need help but are too shy to reach out.

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This is also one of those perfect applications where it's quite okay to have a false positive.

"Hi this is an automated message from Facebook alerting you that the police have been called to your husband's/friends/boss's location to prevent him from killing himself"

"Actually just kidding, we had a little SNAFU. Thank you for being a loyal Facebook user, we assume this had a neutral effect on your life"

Actually Instagram does send a message to the user if enough people mark the user in danger of being harmed. Similar with Google where if someone searches for methods of committing suicide the user will get a number for helpline as first result in bold letter.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/19/instagram-tackles-self-har...

Holy , you can see why I wrote my top-level comment. Even here people are already jumping on the "who cares if it's accurate, take away their freedom and their dignity at the first sign of trouble!" bandwagon.

Is it really?

Everyone, sudhirj is suicidal! Please contact everyone who knows him and ask them to reach out. I'm sure this is not going to damage his or her interpersonal relationships or career prospects at all.

I don't know, the first application I can think of is raising life insurance fees for people who may be suicidal.

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