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Re: in-game advice and the idea of telling your players how not to die sounds like a good idea, but in reality, if your game is even moderately interesting, it will not be possible to accurately determine what a player did wrong to make him die (this is often a complex matter even for players of middling skill). [Edit: Sorry, didn't notice someone had made the same point upthread.] More importantly, it should not be obvious to the designer what the best thing a player could do is. It's good to have certain strategies in mind that serve as a guide to what the player might be able to do, but good players should be finding strategies you hadn't thought of.
To expand on the idea of helping the player learn what to do better, here's a radical concept: Allow the player to replay the last turns of his life, without offering the possibility of resurrection if he does better, but simply as a learning experience. Experienced players wouldn't bother, I think, but it offers an interesting puzzle to new players: How could I have played this differently?
Permadeath isn't that punishing if your game uses procedural generation in such a way that each game is new and exciting.
The punishment of permadeath is that you have to go through the same old slog every time you start the game, suffer through the same crap again.
If dying feels overly harsh that's because your game world lacks enough variety.
It's a lot harder for the game to identify what went wrong when you died to a tactical error. And if the game is any good, most player deaths should be due to tactical or strategic mistakes, not because they never found the right armor.
