I know we're not supposed to ask this on HN - but did you read the article? It's precisely examining the topic where most people's immediate response would be to want to punish the person who caused this - but in showing us the tragic human stories involved raises enough doubts to convince me it's an issue that needs a very careful weighing up.
The only reason I wanted to know if you're engaging with the article rather than the headline is that you haven't acknowledged the issues raised by the writer - which struck me as odd in this context.
Oh, I'm sorry if I came across that way. I do agree that our first impulse should be to help rather than harm, and that reality is almost always rather complex. I meant that as a comment upon people calling child protective services and the worry of such an occurrence influencing people's behavior. Sometimes, reasonable behavior can be misconstrued and lead to criminal consequences. I didn't mean to dismiss the issue out of hand.
Can be. But in the scenario described at the beginning of this article, what is the point of punishment here. Does this person need reformed? Can society dole out any more retribution/revenge/punishment than he's already experiencing?
Willful neglect is awful, a crime, and should be punished. In some cases it's probably necessary for a court to determine if the neglect was willful or not.
But I simply can't imagine the lifelong self-inflicted torment a parent would experience in a situation like the one described. Prison or death would be a respite I think.
We could think of it like that, but it seems like we're constantly surprised when humans can't run without crashing.
Crashing is often non-recoverable, and not really built into the runbook. Some support teams do triage pretty well, but most... not so much. The tickets build up, and often just get flushed.
Our monitoring infrastructure is built on the assumption of uptime. We ignore the technical debt.
If uptime is the goal, individual humans are impressive compared to almost all human technology.
The Centennial Light has now been running mostly continuously since 1901, while the oldest living human was born in 1904. The bulb hasn't burned out, but has been shut off briefly a few times, which seems comparable to one's heart stopping but being resuscitated.
I'm not aware of any single "technology," in the broadest sense, operating for a longer continuous period of time.
Neglect is an ongoing pattern of behavior, by someone who is otherwise mentally competent.
One-off screw-ups, no matter the outcome, are not "neglect". (Though very similar English words and phrases are often used to describe both a one-off screw-up and actual child neglect.)
