Guys, unless he actually unveils something, just let this lie. _why did some great stuff, but he's just a man (and he wants to be left alone). If he plans on doing something, then let him, and let's discuss it if he does. But this is getting ridiculous and this sleuthing/snooping is uncomfortable. He renewed his domain name. We should be better than making this into news.
So the most favored Rubyist has returned from hiding with a fun new puzzle. Further down, folks are posting interesting stuff about it.
But the finger wagging – people just can't get enough of telling people what they should do and feel. And apparently that's what they want, for behold this top comment.
My point though, is that _why has made it clear that he wants to be left alone, and this HN endeavour seems to violate that. Maybe you're right and it is a new puzzle. And maybe he's back. (For what it's worth I posted that before most of the investigation.) Nevertheless though, given _why's wishes, this makes me uncomfortable, and I don't think it's unreasonable for me to acknowledge that.
You have it wrong. The man behind _why deleted his online presence because he grew tired of the persona and everything around it. At that point, people began searching for _why. This culminated in a Slate article that openly divulged his identity.
That, is of course, crossing the line. If someone wants to distance themselves from an online tag, they should be allowed to in peace.
Now, however, it seems that he's brought that persona back to life. He's posted a new puzzle, and brought his site back. Obviously, he wouldn't do that if he still "just wanted to be left alone." That's why people are excited.
First, many of us knew _why's identity long before that Slate article. In the Ruby community, _why was a little like Santa Claus for a while. Just because people were protective of him and didn't want to divulge his identity doesn't mean they didn't know.
Second, I think you're attributing motives to _why that none of us can possibly know. He's never discussed his rationale for leaving, so I try not to project motives onto him.
This timeline of events is inaccurate. _why's name was called out on a mailing list prior to the Slate article publication-- and prior to his vanishing. Please don't rewrite history in favor by pretending "he grew tired of the persona". He didn't quit because he wanted to move on with his life, he quit in a hissy fit because he was outed.
No. _why is not a man, it is a persona. Whoever it is that is behind the persona _why can continue to operate as a private citizen in whatever manner he wants. However, when _why does something, it is going to be noticed and talked about.
I agree. If something happens on http://whytheluckystiff.net/ it isn't like a celebrity doing something in his back yard and getting photographed by papparazzi; it's more like a celebrity releasing something via his publicist. Maybe he released something cryptic, maybe it's even premature, but he knows he's messing with something public. Listening to a person's publicist isn't an invasion of privacy.
> But this is getting ridiculous and this sleuthing/snooping is uncomfortable.
Maybe it is but it's pretty clear from the other posts in this thread (posted about the time you posted this) that this is the reaction he was expecting. This is him "doing something". If he didn't want people to snoop he wouldn't have given them something to snoop into.
> If he didn't want people to snoop he wouldn't have given them something to snoop into.
This remark is rather parallel to "she shouldn't dress that way...". If doing something makes some people behave like creeps, its generally the fault of the creeps. And if the would be mystery man is prepping something, I'd rather he unveiled it than a cabal of creepers.
No, this is him very intentionally posting to a public web site, wanting people to discover it, knowing that they would and now they have. Rather different from "she shouldn't dress that way..." for obvious reasons. Your claim (in another post) that he "made it clear that he wants to be left alone" isn't very convincing anymore.
Note that I share your unease with this whole situation but let's not pretend that this wasn't the expected outcome.
That's not correct. If a woman/man comes naked in class, people WILL stare. And it's not their fault, nor is it "creepy", it's only natural.
Weird, last time I checked I actually could avoid staring at people. Naked people too. Must be a superpower or something.
I do agree on the second paragraph, though — this is most definitely not this situation, it's more comparable to person entering a stage and starting to crack jokes.
>Weird, last time I checked I actually could avoid staring at people. Naked people too. Must be a superpower or something.
Yes, it must be. Surely it's not normal or representative of the general population. The normal thing to do in such situations is to stare (something that has been milked for comedic effect in hundreds of "hidden camera" pranks).
That said, I don't really believe what you claim. You are probably overestimating your powers of not staring in a kind of Dunning Kruger effect. I'm pretty sure if Megan Fox (or whatever rocks your boat) entered your classroom naked you WOULD stare. A lot.
Yes, it must be. Surely it's not normal or representative of the general population. The normal thing to do in such situations is to stare (something that has been milked for comedic effect in hundreds of "hidden camera" pranks).
The general population did a lot of things it later stopped doing, or did less.
That said, I don't really believe what you claim. You are probably overestimating your powers of not staring in a kind of Dunning Kruger effect. I'm pretty sure if Megan Fox (or whatever rocks your boat) entered your classroom naked you WOULD stare. A lot.
That said, I don't really believe in your claim of estimating what is a part of uncontrollable behavior and what is not, in a kind of Dunning Kruger effect. For example, as a person who has seen a sauna, a mirror, and a public outdoor female-only bath in the middle of a city, I can assure you that I'd only stare if he/she specifically asked me to. I guess that's because I've been breast-feed in the Chernobyl era.
>The general population did a lot of things it later stopped doing, or did less.
I doubt they've change a lot of thousands of years evolutionary traits like looking at something unexpected and/or sexual attraction.
(Plus it's not like the "hidden camera" pranks I mention happened in some long gone decades...)
>For example, as a person who has seen a sauna, a mirror, and a public outdoor female-only bath in the middle of a city, I can assure you that I'd only stare if he/she specifically asked me to.
We were talking about people doing things DIFFERENTLY (like one woman/man entering a room naked) driving attention, whereas the above example is about people all doing the same thing that is expected in that room (being naked).
I fail to see how this applies. And I'd love to do a "hidden camera" prank on you on this very matter.
I agree with all the other comments here. You're trying to be that guy who eschews curiosity in an attempt to be mature, but that is not and never has been the type of mentality that leads to success, be it in software or any other field. Curiosity leads to creativity, and creativity leads to success. To swim against the current on this one is hardly admirable.
Also, does anyone else feel like people on Hackernews too often leave comments that deliberately go against the general consensus in a weak attempt to get up votes from fringe users?
When I ask myself what curiosity leads to, the first thing that pops into my head is the 80s commercial for The National Enquirer:
"Inquiring minds want to know!"
Which probably has the lowest correlation to entrepreneurial success as anything else. Curiosity about business or how the world works is different from curiosity about gossip. Gossip is unactionable to any positive outcome.
Here's transcriptions of the texts. There might be some errors, please post corrections (make sure they are transcription errors, and not errors from the original document - there are quite a few of those, perhaps intentional).
IDEAS FOR SALE
(All ideas are sold "as-is" with no warranty implied.
Stories unused within 70 years are forfeit for resale.)
A boy and a girl travel to the beach together, where
they pay a man to xxxxxx receive a bicycle ride from
his monkey. The ride is very uncomfortable, due to
a spoon tied to the seat which keeps whacking their
legs. Nevertheless, they fall in love and are maried.
At the end, the monkey is eating avocado with a spoon.
So that's what it was for. $3
A girl visits a boot store. In one of the racks, she
discovers a village of little people that has ssoraly
been living among the boots. A boy comes off the bus
outside, sees the girl in the store, falls in love and
goes and tells the girl he's in love with her. She
tries to show how the little village works, but he is
only marginally interested in that. They are wed, $1
A man eats corn on top of his house. It is his favorite
pasttime. He marries and dies happy. $3
Adam and Eve are riding bicycles (naked) in the Garden of
Eden. They decide to have a race to see who is the
fastest person in the world. Adam's wheel pops and he
uses the snake St Satan as a replacement tube. $4
A retired police offericer struggles to find acceptances
in the sububan life of Blouder Springs, Colorado. He
befriends a local fishmonger but still must fight his
personal demons. XXX 50
A guy with an enormous chin has the chin surgically
removed and is promptly married. $3
A man who collects prisms finds his house inundated
with refracted light, such that he is transformed into
a superpowerful albino who masquerades at as a wild
horse at night. A local fishmonger feeds the horse and
feeds him a green apple (not knowing the situation here)
which kills the albino half of the guy. So at night now
he's a live horse but is dead albino during the day.
The sheriff's office discovers the dead man and gives
him a proper funeral. During the funeral, the sun sets
and the whole horse body busts through the coffin. $12
A nerdy underappreciated kid wins a raffle and receives
his own Space Shuttle for a week. He installs a soft-serve
ice cream machine onboard and teaches a pet monkey to sit
in the cockpoit. One day, while going home from a birthday
party in space, the shuttle explodes (a la Challenger) $3
-------------
Deep Relationships. Notes on the article
Secrets to deep relationships:
-> asking deep questions
-> talking about deep relationships
with the person.
-> going camping with the person.
-> make the person a part of your
life (this may not work, though think about
it, we live with a mom and dad for many
many years, or we may not know anything deep
about them - might want to ask that person
a deep question to get things going)
-> make up something deep about the
person and then ask "is this true?"
("i heard you have a whole other
side to you that is very interesting
and i want to ask if this is true")
-> avoid using pseudonyms, use your
proper first and last name and avoid
other kinds of lying. (although you might
want to prepare a short
pseudonym that's just for deep relationships -
these special names are code for "i know you
deeper" and don't take pictures of yourself
with the person because pictures make the relation
ship not as deep - unless its a very old picture)
-> touch the person on the arm just once and
no more
-> promise to meet the person one hour from
now in the same spot (secret rendezvous technique,
good for when you're pressed
for time and need a deep relationship.)
-> joke and laugh - these seemingly light things
are surprisingly deep
---------------
On the side of "Life Tips":
deterioration of the
team "social" has made
this a lost art!!
perfect timing
Adam and Eve are riding bicycles (naked) in the Garden of
Eden. They decide to have a race to see who is the
fastest person in the world. Adam's wheel pops and he
uses the snake St Satan as a replacement tube. $4
Imagine turning a snake into a bike tube. You'd end up putting the tail in the mouth. The symbol for a snake eating its own tail is an Ouroboros (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros) representing cyclicality (hohoho bicycles!) especially in "eternal return".
Funnily enough this cyclicality is mentioned in the idea where a man ends up being a dead albino during the day and a wild horse at night. There's a cycle of the man going from dead albino to a wild horse and even a "Rising from the grave" (http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/rise+from+the+grave) in the idea's description.
There's quite a few mentions of love and marriage across the texts. There's also a date on the last message (DESOLEE). Could they be related?
Oooh actually look at the second to last point of NOTES and then look at DESOLEE. Of course 18th of April not in "1 hour" but still ;)
One bit I found interesting in NOTES was "avoid using pseudonyms". Could this be something to do with _why detaching from his persona for the last few years?
---
deterioration of the
team "social" has made
this a lost art!!
perfect timing
I think it's supposed to be "term" not "team". I think we all can guess where's he's getting at here though :) (/me looks up the last point in NOTES)
HTTP headers indicate it's being hosted from GitHub pages.
I've confirmed this by looking up the DNS records for the domain; they point to 204.232.175.78 which is the (or an) address of pages.github.com: http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/204.232.175.78
I can't immediately figure out what repo this is being hosted from; a code search for 'DESOLEE' doesn't show anything, so I'm assuming it's a private repo. But at least we know there are git commits happening.
Well, being French and all, I beg to differ: "une lande désolée" can be translated as "a desolated moor". But it's a bit quaint, and yes, désolée usually means sorry (feminine form).
When I use it (i'm french as a second language), I would usually use it to mean something closer to "sorry about that" or "Sorry, but ...". For example, "Sorry, but the road is closed.". I would not use it in the context "I'm sorry for what I did.". So, it's not a direct translation.
The Ruby community's attitude toward him is absurd, along with the personality cults they've formed around David Heinemeier Hansson and Zed Shaw.
While other programming language communities have their notable figures, there is never as much outright drama surrounding them as we find in the Ruby community. In fact, these Ruby figures are now better known for the drama surrounding them than they are for any software they might've written.
2) Personality cult: Not as sure. I've seen more than one newb told "don't waste your time" on the Poignant guide in Ruby forums. why's weakness as a coder is pretty widely recognized. In my opinion maybe over-estimated, esp. relative to people like DHH.
3) To me - I learned Ruby when Rails was in its infancy and the Agile salesmen had barely just hitched their wagon to it - why represents a more innocent period of the Ruby community.
Ruby was really a wonderful place - not-especially talented programmers could explore relatively sophisticated programming language features in a safe sandbox. Everything you'd been doing with Perl or whatever you could do with blocks and lambdas and even call/cc if you didn't mind a huge performance hit (naturally you didn't.)
Maybe it's nostalgia, but I think there was a time when MINSWAN actually meant something. Now, every doofus with a self-rolled YAML parser thinks he's the Steve Jobs Memorial Arbiter of Proper Design over Earth and All Satellites Thereof.
4) Yes, it is strange. But then, this is a Perl- and Smalltalk-based language from Japan.
I wouldn't say _why is a "weak" coder per say. His style is just as eccentric as his character. He's certainly not conventional, and much of his code is slow, but the ideas are often interesting and beautiful. He also abuses a lot of Ruby's metaprogramming facilities. He obviously coded because it amused him. I think that's probably what resulted in the "weaknesses" in his style.
His code is art. And so is his book. It is beautiful, and at times insightful and fascinating. It is not "engineering".
E.g. take Camping (a micro-web-framework that fit in 4K of code) - it is fascinating as a demonstration of some of the things you can do in little space. It is beautiful as art. It has provided inspiration for a lot of us that finds Rails unnecessarily bloated.
It is also totally unreadable for ordinary developers, weird and quirky to the point that if someone had checked something like Camping into one of our work repos, it'd be a "ha-ha, now seriously where is your actualy code?" moment.
The Ruby community appreciates code as art, and is probably more than others inclined to blur the boundary between it and what we will accept or even embrace in production systems. But _why's stuff is mostly firmly on the art side.
There are exceptions, e.g. Hpricot was a nice first try that demonstrates some of _why's skill in terms of creating pleasing interfaces, and he deserves credit for that even though HPricot itself has been largely superseded by Nokogiri.
well said. _why really did exemplify the "coders at play" aspect of the ruby community, doing a bunch of creative and fairly bizarre things for the sheer joy of it.
Figures in similar communities were older (Larry released Perl in his early thirties, Guido was pushing forty before Python gained traction). They also didn't come up in the era of YouTube, twitter, and archive.org.
Thirty years ago Ruby-style drama would have played out as drunken rant at a post-conference hotel bar, or a snide comment on Usenet, or on an obscure mailing list. Not quite the same.
The Ruby guys didn't have the benefit of age, experience, or a certain amount of professional obscurity.
I don't think that's quite fair. DHH and Zed Shaw are both famously outspoken and controversial, but the only thing why can be accused of is innocent whimsy. And, as far as I can tell, the Ruby community has no personality cult around any of the three men.
What is the "Ruby community", exactly? The set of programmers whose language of choice in certain cases (the web, scripting) is Ruby?
Once you ascribe cult-like groupthink and behavior to a diverse and disconnected group of people who happen to write code in the same language, "leaders" of the cult will emerge from the noise. If you think DHH is some worshipped leader of Ruby programmers, you should read the GitHub comment threads on some of his changes to Rails.
1. Get into a community not particularly known for its maturity.
2. Become semi-famous in said community by publishing a few puzzles and an intro book about programming. Doesn't have to be particularly insightful, mind blowing or even good by common standards as long as it's "quirky" and light hearted.
3. Become a cult symbol by dropping off the internet.
4. Come back after a few years and receive a Second Coming treatment.
5. ???
6. Profit!!!
(Of course I don't think this is an elaborate scheme by this guy and I see nothing wrong in his actions. I am only perplexed and turned off by the drama-seeking mentality of the (supposedly) rational, left-brained individuals that are expected to populate a programming community).
It's probably true that rubyists are still "left-brained", whatever that means, but I think they tend to be more on the right side of the left side than other language subcultures. The co-occurrence of terms like "beautiful", "happiness", and "art" in discussions of what ruby means are far higher than in other languages. This is self-reinforcing since a like-minded neophyte will be attracted to a community that talks and acts in ways that she or he finds common ground with. I had learned a bit of python from some well-written but dry books. But Why's poignant guide got me excited about ruby because it was obvious how excited he was by the language, and to some of us that was infectious in the same way chunky bacon is (it's not for everyone).
I find everyone that feels a need to dig further into the personal life of a guy who 'quit the internet' because people were digging too far into his personal life to be more annoying, personally.
I take his writing style as just being playful, though.
Mission accomplished: you brought all the wet blankets out. Have you created anything recently of note? Let me know when so I can go into the comments of your thread and pour water all over it.
_why was a notable member of the Ruby community who disappeared without trace one day. He wrote Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby, which was how many people started learning the language.
while watching this I noticed that the kid in the "tech today live" video mentions his live stream being "usually at saturdays at four pm-." I was unable to make out the rest of what he says, it's around 12:35-12:45 if you would like to hear it yourself. I feel like _why referenced this in SPOOL/DESOLEE with "April the 18th from like four o clock to let's say twelve." April 18th of 2009 (the year this video was made) was a saturday and I'm assuming what I couldn't make out from "tech today live" was some variation of "to twelve." so, "saturday from like four o clock to twelve."
though, even I, am unable to buy into my own crazy theories. I might be insane! I tend to be terrible at these things too.
not quite related to this video, but something I found humorous was the picture he used in SPOOL/DESOLEE http://i.imgur.com/gJR6b.png not too sure but it looks like dogs racing.
I really liked the idea of scoped mixins, that would have allowed to extend any object locally (like, say, add unit conversion methods to numbers), without polluting the whole program. It was never implemented AFAIK.
That's why my mom doesn't like rap music. Some of the people say curses and they talk about sex. It's also probably not worth visiting Texas because Bush lives there.
I don't think that's the issue. The issue is that if a community is represented by a few key figures that share traits that you do not enjoy or seek in a community (in this particular case; generating a lot of drama), it's very hard to overlook. It's like getting a bad first impression, only a bit more continuous.
I've been using ruby for about or over now not sure any longer 10 years. I ignore the general ruby community most of the time, you can too it isn't hard.
You can ignore the ruby community at large and still be productive. I don't see why (pun intended) if you don't use rails, you care about DHH, or Zed or whatever.
If you're unable to overlook _why as a fun programmer who happens to program ruby, I guess thats ok, but you really are missing out on an interesting language. I'd say the same thing about someone worrying about Guido and Python. Stretching that last analogy but I honestly don't know of any other programmer-artist that quite fits into the vein of _why. He is/was really unique.
I'm getting this instead:
"Public Print Queue SPOOL/DESOLEE 2012-01-06T08:21Z"
I don't get any binary data from test, ideas or notes.
/SPOOL/DESOLEE gives me a binary file that seems to open in OpenPCLViewer on my Mac (gives a 2 page file) but it's completely unreadable, like a fragment of a corrupted binary image. I don't know if that's how the file is meant to look or if it's a bug in the reader.
I do note that "désolée" is the French word for sorry.
Transcriptified:
This printer
queue is going
down for
_MAINTENANCE_
but will shortly
return for a
day I believe it
will be on the
day of April
the 18th from like
four o clock to lets
say twelve.
"Three rest of 6 paper jam these things copy machine"
The "rest of 6" and "copy machine" came from a friend who claimed to enhance the image. He said the first word was "three" though I thought "their" initially.
Do you think this content is erased or on the next page?
He single handedly made everyone in the Ruby community feel a little more special and fun and light hearted and quirky. Kind of the opposite of a brogrammer.
I loved when he would post up interesting code snippets, but he would make them animated gifs so you actually had to type them in.
And hoodwink.d was really fun while it lasted (it was kind of a secret club that you had to explore and figure out some simple tech problems to get into).
Wrote and illustrated a free online book, later published, which is accessible and somewhat fun/helpful if you don't know much about programming.
Wrote some parsers/generators for various markup languages, at least one of which is now part of the Ruby standard library (after extensive rewrites).
Kind of like ESR in that he's more accomplished as an advocate than a coder, but unlike ESR doesn't pretend otherwise, and especially unlike ESR had the good sense not to overstay his welcome.
fwiw, if you're interested in the style of poetry, his main inspiration was Daniil Kharms, who has some great collections - Today I Wrote Nothing is excellent.
Domain Name: WHYTHELUCKYSTIFF.NET
Created on..............: 03-JAN-2002
Expires on..............: 03-JAN-2014
Record last updated on..: 13-DEC-2012
Status..................: ACTIVE
Record was last updated 3 weeks ago. Not sure if that means anything but interesting nonetheless.
I'm curious how this was noticed. I wonder if there just are people periodically checking his site, or if he pointed it out to someone/a few people and watched it spread?
Honestly... I just had a habit of checking up on him every once in a while. Came upon this today when someone brought him up and I thought to check in. It's been there for weeks and somehow no one else noticed.
I'm actually a little surprised it wasn't noticed earlier. I'd have thought someone out there would have set up a program to check his site periodically.
He never left in the shadows; he simply hid away for a while to build interest in his future endeavors. Even if it is marketing a persona, this is a great example of priming your audience to notice even the inconspicuous.
In under an hour, a status message is enough to garner many comments and speculation. Kudos to you, _why.
