How did the obituary know the date of death? Did she have a surgery that she did not survive?

I think this was a planned post she wrote while dealing with her disease, and likely a family member added in some relevant details and posted it. I've had a few terminally ill family friends that want to reclaim some control in death what life had taken from them, so they plan their funeral and some post death things out ahead of time.

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owlninja 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Am I wrong or does it just look like a funeral home posted this for her? Likely filled in a few data points as requested?

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bspammer 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Presumably she wrote it as "when I died on <insert day of death>"

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jsbg 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

edit: the funeral home published this

previous comment: could have been programmed as `Time.now - 1.day` to be published if no action was taken on the day of

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amelius 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch

It is very tricky though. You probably want to have a bunch of fail-safes in place.

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smallpipe 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah there's no way it's worth it for an obituary. You need it out in good time, so you can't have a delay longer than a few days. But it's definitely possible to be knocked out (or in a no-signal zone) for a few days and survive.

	▲	amelius 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This being HN, let me say it could work as a service where the service (a human) would check if you are still alive after a timeout.

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suid 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Uh. yeah. Can you imagine her dragging herself up and reaching for a keyboard - "I'm ... not ... dead ... yet". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfOW9QrLs0o