I also noticed that if you rearranged the letters in 'why' you get 'hwy', which, if pronounced a specific way, sounds very similar to the Pacific island of Hawaii, leading me to believe that he made his escape there on the 19th, which you get by fully curving the bottom right part of the 'h' around to make a '9', flipping it over both horizontally and vertically, and placing it to the right of the underscore when propped up to give us the '1'. It was under our noses the entire time.
It's a brief influx. We've had these before. Two days from now we'll all have forgotten about this.
How is this any different from, say, all the furor when Apple releases a new product, or Google unveils a future technology, or TechCrunch gets called out for doing something dumb? Social news is given shape by social waves.
The freaking out I think is ludicrous. The psychoanalysis, well... I liked the eulogy, and I like the postings of his quotes. I didn't mind this post, but I took it more to be a "look at how this guy made a programming manual moving" than a "look at how he let us know what was going to happen." I'll upvote anything featuring the (P)G.
I do find it silly that this has become so fevered in 24 hours' time. I'd find it hilarious if two days from know _why set up his Twitter and his web site again and was all, "Hey guys, I'm back, how you doing."
By psychoanalysis, I mean all the people talking about why he did this, what he was thinking, etc. Going on about his tweats and things he put in his books and treating them as "clues" is just one expression of that.
I agree. That's all dumb. I didn't think people were being serious about that.
Hell, if there's one thing we do know it's that we didn't get to see _why in his early developing years. When he joined the community, he was already a bright, talented guy with an assortment of interests. It's harder to look at somebody and figure out what they were thinking if you've only ever seen them when they were fairly mature.
EDIT: Oh, I could actually check your profile. Some people fill those out.
"Going on about <something>" is an idiom I've encountered in Texas and seems common throughout the Southeastern US as well. You can get the essential meaning by thinking of it as a shortening of "Going on at length about <something>" with strong implication of excessive length, though it can be (and often is) used to apply to whole discussions among multiple people.
Can we just truncate the thread at this point? The entire tree underneath here (as it stands now) is entirely inappropriate. Some of the posts even have > 1 upvotes.
Should they not be -1?
I think it's exactly the right place to discuss it. This is Hacker News, _why is a great hacker. This is the one place in the web where him disappearing is considered important. Those who prefer to read what Julia heard that Scoble said to Arrington about Twitter have the whole Hyposphere for that.
I can provide for you. As an Erlang developer for MS I've been asked to review Axum and give feedback. So they pointed me at the publicly available guide:
Please stop upvoting this rubbish. Please start thinking before posting. If you have a statment to make, please back it up with exactly what you feel should make it true and justified.
Tall Fox: -Have you noticed that this book is basically written by a _lunatic_?
Short Fox: -Yup
Tall Fox: -Seriously, he's way too hyperactive. If he keeps at this frantic pace he's gonna burn out quick.
Short Fox: -Burn out? He's gonna shoot himself in the head by the time he hits 30.
--
From that kind of comment and the pace of his work (bouts of rabid coding interspersed with AWOL periods), I'm afraid he's bipolar. His only output (code, writing, mailing list contributions) in june was a single tweet saying that he was trapped in a labyrinth of his own design.
"Ha! I was right! He flipped his lid! He's all burned out and he's going to shoot himself in the head!"
On the bright side, from the little psychology and the little about _why's author that I know, he doesn't seem to fit a psychological profile of someone who would kill himself. I'm sure he works a lot, and his work is curiously personal and I'd imagine exhausting, but his work is also well recognized and celebrated. Many artists don't have that luxury in their lifetimes.
I read his original blog on advogado today. There's a mention of his father undergoing a mental breakdown, and of his sister having drugs and alcohol problems. It ends like this:
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"and i go home and draw cats and doctors in space. without the medication. i'm a stiff. an upright. i'll never pass a joint. maybe mj works, maybe mj's death. i have too much mental illness in my blood to find out. narco+alco have turned kooky people i love into obliterated people i love. god, god, god, please keep her alive. (if i'm lucky maybe god will let a horse run by.)
families are a network of lost packets and bad routing.
cause you got spouses on the vpn. it's not all that bad,
but it's fun to moan, ya know."
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While there are some errements, these themes are far too recurrent to just be whimsical.
