>>What a mean-spirited thing to do to someone who just wanted to stay anonymous. If this is the reason _why decided to pick up and leave, I understand it.
If that's why he quit though it's going to have the opposite effect. I doubt more than a handful of people cared to look into _why's identity before today. I've read the guide, watched his talks, and read probably 80% of his blog articles, and I never knew his identity was some kind of secret. But with the disappearance it's now on everyone's mind.
There's a name for this effect but I can't think of it. It often comes up when somebody sues somebody else to remove some bit of information. The suit becomes a news story, and suddenly where 10 people might have known the information, the info is on the daily news as they cover the suit.
The wikipedia page shows an image of him apparently giving a public speech. If his privacy was so precious to him I don't think he would do things like that. Hence I would say this was just a little game - and he lost.
privacy must be respected, and actually should be enforced by everybody, including you. meaning: even if you know him, you should pretend that he is anonymous person, disconnecting the _why persona from the real-life person.
for example, if you know him, and you hire him, you still should ignore the on-line _why persona, because for privacy purposes, it is separate, anonymous entity, and you should not connect it to real person. that's what privacy should be.
Uggh. If privacy must be protected by civic order it's already a lost cause. All these good people standing up for privacy--it only serves to increase the market value of violations.
Honestly, I think it's better to throw out the notion of digital privacy entirely and start pushing the notion of universal visibility, and accountability. Once everyone is naked, we'll stop obsessing over the naughty bits.
The anonymity and lack of personal accountability provided by the internet rarely have good effects. What's interesting is how fervently people fight to protect this anonymity, even though it doesn't really exist when we interact with strangers in the real world.
I'm not saying that online privacy is worthless of course, just noting that it is quite unique.
a public speech where? a programming language conference. No disrespect intended to anyone here, but making a presentation at the technical conference does not make one either a public figure.
By using a pseudonym, he implied he'd rather not be known by his given name. Telling the world his real then goes against his wishes. It is, at the very least, rude.
That someone outed him is inevitable. But that doesn't excuse the act.
Rude, I'd agree. No more, though - we're certainly not talking about exposing where Salman Rushdie's sleeping tonight. How rude, even, is an open question. This doesn't exactly rise to the level of pestering J. D. Salinger at his house.
Trying to be anonymous is one thing. Trying to remain anonymous while writing books and blogs and making public appearances, all under one common identity, is downright quixotic and just a bit presumptuous. Simply saying his preference was to be anonymous doesn't really create much of an obligation upon the rest of the world. You can't actively be a public figure and avoid being public.
Except that this enigma was something just about everyone treasured about him. He's a Ruby community treasure, our slightly twisted crown jewels. And the reason nobody tried harder before, or if they did they kept quiet, was out of respect for that cherishing.
He has always seemed a bit delicate, and that's why the rest of us always treated him gently. And he repaid us ten-fold with his quirky gifts.
This is like the rape of a beloved children's character. Not just learning that the Easter Bunny isn't real, but learning it when a drunken cop knocks out the kindly old man in the bunny costume, rips its furry head off, and pisses in it.
It's Just Not Done.
Just because the door is open, doesn't mean you have to walk through it. Adults consider the wider impact of their actions, rather than doing something just because "it's a challenge."
When there's a picture of you in your Wikipedia article from a public event you chose to speak at, you've made yourself just a "Hey, I know that guy!" away from being outed. At that point, I don't think you can claim it's a major affront when someone puts public information together to identify you.
I think the "who is why the lucky stiff" blog is odd and a bit dickish, but I'm not appalled.
I'm also skeptical of that purported outing as the cause of all this; this is one story I think that a bunch of people chatting and commenting are precisely the least well-suited way to work out the truth.
It's possible to be truly unidentified and uncelebrated. It's not possible to do so while maintaining a specific identity, especially after it becomes well-known. That he maintained this identity well after it gained celebrity wasn't exactly forced on him.
"Outing" is when you publish private information about someone. In this case the e-mail headers were both in public space. Highlighting something that's already public is not the same as breaking someone's confidentiality.
Respect for people's wishes is important too. It's quite clear that _why didn't want people to know who he is. Fair enough, if you wanted to work that out. I don't think you should, but I could understand it. Telling the world? That's trying to wave your E-penis at the cost of one of the ruby world's best contributors.
I'm sure someone in the know told me his real name a couple years back (he wrote the foreword to my book) and it certainly wasn't Jonathan Gillette. Of course, he might have changed him name again.. :)
To update, I've received a few anonymous e-mails with significant proof that the Jonathan Gillette theory is sound (though I won't go far as to say it's 100% certain).
This might also be the reason that _why just upped an ran. Staying anonymous is one thing, but letting someone else take the hit for you is quite another.
disclaimer: I don't know how long the blog has been trying to figure out who _why is.
Something doesn't seem right about that detective work - there's a Jonathan Gillette online who is a web developer in Harrisburg, PA who doesn't seem to be _why. Obviously it's likely that there's more than one Jonathan Gillette on the internet, but it seems odd to me that this other guy is also a web developer, with a decent online presence, in (somewhat) the same geographic area where _why is suspected to live, that isn't him.
But I don't know enough about e-mail headers to provide an alternate explanation if there is one.
EDIT 2: The infamous Zed Shaw posted a link to another page which I'm more inclined to believe is the real _why. I'm not going to post the link here, but you can find it in Zed's twitter stream if you really want to.
http://www.advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/ There are a few PHP apps there. Apparently he did PHP work before. There is also a Java project called javuh that he maintained. Archive.org for these projects reveals that the outing previously mentioned was in fact correct.
Please see the information posted by "burke", a couple of posts up from here. There was a Jonathan Gillette who graduated from Parkland High School in Allentown, PA, then went on to Kutztown University (also in PA). All of this around the time that _why was apparently posting from a company in Salt Lake City.
That Jonathan Gillette was also going to school in Pennsylvania (http://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathangillette) when _why wrote that message, supposedly from Salt Lake City, Utah.
He seems to have been working on the same file, in the same day, as Jonathan Gillette. Probably poking around this repository a little more could lead to an almost-definitive answer.
dolphins.ram has "Jonathan Gillette" as the author. Yet another reason to hate Real Player.
I would feel bad about posting this, but since everyone's apparently going to go around assuming it with almost-proof already, I guess it can't do much harm.
Kylie is a relative. He hosts a site by one Kylie Gillette using the alias Whytheluckystiff. If he is NOT Jonathan Gillette he has very, very close ties to him.
And here we are: Miss Trudy (who I definitively know being _why's wife, as I uncovered this some years ago, and _why asked me to not say anything), is definitively saying she belongs to "The Child Who was ..." :
This thread, combined with others combined with the javuh repository on sourceforge combined with all of the friend hosting create enough to bear it out. So there we have it.
Parents divorcing and family members committing suicide._why has written a lot about both topics and the band description matches up with his tastes and quirkiness quite well I think. So Kylie is in fact JGs wife.
Another hint, perhaps going in the same direction: this thread (http://listlibrary.net/ruby-talk/2002/06/00iG41gy) on ruby-talk, where Jonathan Gillette is both using the wgy@riza account and another one ...
The person that Zed is linking to is an art professor who was at Union University in Jackson, TN, now apparently a visiting professor at Lipscomb University in Nashville. You can see that Jonathan Gillette's photo in some faculty photos from a year or so ago (http://www.uu.edu/centers/faculty/faculty/new/0607newfaculty...). It's not _why.
He mentions his friend Dustin in: 12 Oct 2002 http://www.advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/diary.html?s...
This furthers the belief he is Jonathan Gillette as the band Jonathan Gillette was in contains a Dustin. With all the other evidence I am calling this a case closed. It is interesting to note how different he seems from _why. Maybe the Fight Club analogy (read above) is not too far from the truth.
I am posting this because I feel it is worthwhile information. It is within _why's rights to yank his sites off the Internet at a moments notice. I will not begrudge him that. However, I do think when people come to rely on your tools and software you should at least respect that people rely on you, if informally.
Also, I think that, since he was hosting a lot of other sites on hobix, not just his personal stuff something could actually be wrong. So I am sharing this information. Please be responsible.
I dug up a Kylie Gillette who is the owner of snapd.net, Snapdragon Jewelry. A quick whois on that domain:
Registrant: Layered Technologies TheLuckyStiff Why 1647 Witt Rd. Ste. # 20 Frisco, TX 75034 US +1.9723987998 86a756e735644786cd09875d0acb61365fb02f36@whois.gkg.net
What are the chances that a Jonathan Gillette hosting a website for Kylie Gillette who posted to a ruby mailing list as _why and Jonathan Gillette in 02 and 03 are different people? If something is wrong or something has happened to him IRL people would rest a little easier knowing what is going on.
I just tried calling that number, I got an automated response from "<something... beginning with a?> Solutions" with a pretty generic "press 1 for sales", "press 2 for customer care"-type set of options. That was a bit disappointing, I really hope he's okay...
It was presumably the hosting company (listed in the WHOIS records as "Layered Technologies"). I wouldn't expect them to provide you with any information about him.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't them, it definitely ended with "Solutions". The first word sounded something like "all-doors" but I couldn't really make it out (I'm not familiar with the accent).
As great as it is to have a community that cares about an individual, _why was very happy to stay anonymous, and a few comments here purport that his sudden disappearance resulted from someone penetrating that anonymity. If that's the case, calling him (assuming that number is accurate) could be counterproductive.
But the supposed outing happened over a month ago. I doubt he'd wait this long if that were the reason for his disappearance.
I don't know the guy, and am not involved in the Ruby community. Nonetheless, that someone would call to make sure he's OK speaks volumes to me of his presence on the Internet.
It's sad because (if the sites don't come back) it'll be harder for other people to find and enjoy his work that I enjoyed. And it's sad to think that maybe he won't come back and publish more awesome stuff. (But when I think about it, I doubt that someone with _why's drive to create will be able to keep from sharing for very long.)
I was already digging into Ruby when I found out about _why... but he's definitely a big chunk of the reason I stuck with it for so long, AND served as a good vehicle for evangelizing Ruby to new people...
Okay folks, let's not overreact. Odds are all of his sites are running on the same host, so someone screwing around could take them all down once inside. And if his twitter account used the same password...
racheltostring: RT: @_why: programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more.
about 21 hours ago from TwitterFox
This is exactly why such a complete self-deletion is worrying. I wasn't around in the neolithic days of the internet, but some people may remember that an early formative event in the WELL days was that a very well known and active contributor to the site deleted his entire posting history and then commited real life suicide. I dearly hope this has not happened and _why has simply moved on to other things...
I guess you're thinking of Tom Mandel. First, he deleted his posts after a tiff with his ex-fiance. Also, he died of lung cancer, not suicide. Full story here:
I don't remember the fellow's name, but the anecdote was related in a book about online communities written by Clifford Stoll, and definitely involved suicide, not cancer. But the anecdote he related could have been incorrect...
He was (understandably) a bit sensitive about new works displacing his. He almost seemed to suspect some sort of conspiracy against Hpricot:
"Clearly, the benchmarks you see on Ruby Inside are skewed to favor Nokogiri... Why not treat Hpricot fairly and use it properly in the benchmarks? It reeks of something."
As the editor of Ruby Inside, I can confirm we (or me, as author of the piece) were not involved in any conspiracy or malicious intent against Hpricot. Heck, Why even wrote the foreword for my book :)
Further, the benchmarks we republished were not by us, but just a screenshot of benchmarks shared by the creator of Nokogiri.
This bothers me honestly, why would you accept benchmark screenshots from someone that made claims against another persons code?
Was this an interview or something? Was _why alerted to this as a chance to refute the claim by providing his own benchmarks? Could the data even be validated and not easily doctored?
The benchmarks were from what was designed to be a fair test. It might not have worked out that way, but that was the intention of the creator nonetheless. I stuck a massive disclaimer on my link to those benchmarks and let people at it (since NO benchmarks are EVER undisputed - biggest lesson I've learned). The post is at http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-xml-performance-benchmarks-16... if you want to see how it was portrayed.
If everyone had to bother validating all the third party bits and pieces that get referenced on blogs, no-one would blog. Blogging is a "hey, check this out, I ain't saying it's true, but you might find it interesting" type of affair - it's not the New York Times (which is why regular journalism is foundering; it's expensive to fact check everything and, heck, it's a Ruby blog, not a trusted source of journalism).
Anyone who hasn't checked it out yet, do yourself a favour. And for the rest of us, who would like to remember this anonymous creator of cartoon foxes.
Let's hope it's just a quarter life crisis and that he's back soon. Or that he finds something else that makes him happier than programming.
That was pretty immature, to delete the repos as well. Sure, nuke your Twitter, who cares. But people might have been depending on the repos; it's a breach of trust IMO.
Name some circumstances which justify pulling down a broadly-used open source project like Hpricot. At a certain point it must be admitted that a project has a life beyond its author.
He could have had his computer, or email hacked.. have to wait to see if we hear from him before we assume he actually cleared all the accounts himself.
No, you're being down-voted because you're a selfish arse. Is the primary concern the slight inconvenience his disappearance will cause you?? ... to us, the answer is No.
An acquaintance of mine did. I had moved to a different state. We kept in occasional email contact. And one day I noticed he had deleted his LinkedIn account. Found him in the obituaries, he had passed on a couple of months before. RIP.
Isn't it more likely that a relative simply requested LinkedIn to delete the account? A LinkedIn account doesn't seem relevant to keep online at all after the person has passed away. Facebook, on the other hand, leaves pages up but with most features disabled except for the wall and photos - something I'm unfortunately familiar with.
How exactly do you implement a dead man's switch for your online accounts? Do you just leave your account info for your estate's executor, lawyer, friend, or whatever and he manually deletes them? Or do you have some script that will automatically run and delete your accounts if you don't tell it not to every week or so?
I've often what happens to people's free email addresses after they die. (I suppose nothing in most cases.)
These (dead mans switches) are online services which can terminate accounts for you and send emails on your behalf. Some of them work by sending you an email once a month or so to check up on you, if you don't reply, the switch is triggered.
The fact that Hpricot used a DVCS is a godsend in cases like this, but we still confront the fact that the software's canonical source, including its documentation, is gone. That Sucks, DVCS or not.
With all due respect, they were hosted with git, which is by nature distributed. If it's broadly-used, no single person can destroy a repository. Copies of the hpricot repo are all over the internets.
I don't disagree that it's inconvenient, but it's not like he nuked a SVN master repository or something.
Have a little respect. Unlike most of us here, _why never profited directly on his online celebrity status. If he chose to remove himself from the 'net, it seems only reasonable that he would want to shut down public repositories he managed, if only to avoid the inevitable deluge of complaints about them going stale, requests for commit rights from other people, etc.
The fact that you would care more about his shepherding of repositories which have been available to everyone else all along speaks volumes to me about the kind of attitudes that probably helped to drive him offline in the first place.
I would like to think I have utmost respect for _why. I have certainly never said or done anything against him in the past, nor ever felt anything besides quiet appreciation for his efforts.
If he wanted to quit, that's his right, of course. But at least give people a day's notice before he nukes everything, right?
"The fact that you would care more about his shepherding of repositories"
Care more about them than what? What else is there? I don't know what's going on. The repos were his work, they're all I know of him.
You seem to detect this entitled, callous attitude in my words but I assure you it's a false positive. I have, or had, nothing but positive feelings for the guy. Never met him, spoken to him, or anything else really. But I have relied on his code, and in my book, when you release open source code there's a kind of implied promise that you don't suddenly delete the master repo in a fit of internet pique.
if that's "the kind of attitudes that probably helped to drive him offline in the first place" then .. maybe he should be offline because I think it's pretty reasonable.
He doesn't owe it to you, he doesn't owe it to me. That makes two of us. Let's imagine we're not unusual in that regard. Who does he owe a warning, then?
when you release open source code there's a kind of implied promise that you don't suddenly delete the master repo in a fit of internet pique.
You're making a lot of assumptions, not least among them _why's motivations (should they even exist) for dropping off your radar. Again, he doesn't owe you an explanation or a warning.
You were a user, not a co-owner of the projects, not an extensive financial donor (most likely), not an employer. The relationship is entirely one way. _why gives you things, you say "thank you", and move on. This is also the Internet we're talking about, if someone decides the content (repository or writing) should be made available again, it will happen.
Well, look, everything you say is technically correct. But my reaction remains the same. It's not about "rights" - I agree I have no "right" whatsoever to continue to benefit from _why's beneficence in perpetuity. No, _why hasn't breached any laws or contracts, but he has breached social norms.
For example, this site. I think all would agree that we have no "right" to its continued existence. None of us pay or contribute financially to this site in any way whatsoever. And yet if PG suddenly changed his mind and deleted it tomorrow, with no explanation or warning - I would consider that to be very poor form, and I'd wager most others here would, too.
Same deal. It's about basic respect for your audience, whether they were paying or not.
Did _why strike you as a guy who lived within the social norms? I mean, come on.
I would like to also point out that the people who "won't be happy with you if you exercise that right" don't actually care about you any way... so what's the loss?
why is awesome. he's one of the big reason I'm a ruby programmer. He's contributed so much to the community, and he doesn't owe anybody anything.
If he deleted all his repos, sites, etc with no notice, then that was a dick move. It doesn't mean he's an asshole, it means he did one asshole thing. That doesn't mark him as an asshole, but it wouldn't change the fact that it was an asshole thing to do.
If you're running for the elevator and I don't bother to hold it, that's an asshole thing to do. Maybe I saved your ass last week when you forgot to check in the fizbit and the client was pissed, whatever. That doesn't change the asshole-ness of my one action. And that's ok, we all do it. why's still awesome, even if possibly for an hour he was an asshole.
It's more along the lines of one person in the office bringing in bagels every week for a few years, then one Monday morning they aren't there.
The asshole isn't the one who stopped bringing in the bagels, it's the folks standing around the coffee machine empty handed, griping about not getting their weekly cinnamon crunch.
"I wish Mike would've told us he wasn't going to bring in bagels today. What a dick move." Nope, doesn't work.
But that's just the way I see what is happening here. I can understand the divide if you have a different perspective of what's going down.
I agree that failing to hold the elevator is inconsiderate, but I disagree that simply putting information on the web constitutes entry to a similar social contract.
Keeping software hosted is active. Let's say he waited until his domain name expired... then he could say "I'm not spending the $10" and let it go offline, and people would excoriate him then. He just chose to rip the Band-Aid off at once instead of in bits and pieces.
They were hosted free on github and/or rubyforge. He had to go in and actively delete them. If he had done nothing, they would still be there right now and there wouldn't be all this kerfuffle.
AFAIK there are forks/mirrors of his work on GitHub; so why are you having such a hard time dealing with his repos being deleted by him? It sounds like you're just whining.
I think, if he's posted up and said 'hey, I'm fed up with this internet thing. I'm taking everything down, can someone else host them', there'd have been a queue. Certainly, I'd have been very glad to host the Poignant Guide
I understand that you're referring to the web-based version which has a different feel to it, but the content does still exist. Nothing lasts forever--enjoy it while you can.
I'm going to agree with sho on this matter. If you provide something and give the impression that you will continue to provide it, you are partly responsible when people become dependent. You are certainly not required to continue to provide it, but you should at least give warning that those who were dependent have a chance to adapt.
When you quit a job or end a contract you ordinarily give notice. It's the same principle, and a matter of courtesy.
---
That said, I've no idea what's really going on here, so I'm loathe to pass judgement.
While I do agree that the author(s) of an open source project do not owe me or you anything, I'll have to disagree with you about what is an open source project. Once you've opened up your project it belongs to the community (and even if I'm not a lawyer I think that most of the OSS licenses speak in this direction).
Anyways, I'm pretty sure we will hear soon about what happened and it will be easier to understand things.
_why isn't required to maintain his copy of the source forever. Other people have forked/mirrored his projects; deletion of his repos is an inconvenience, but something that can be recovered from.
I'm with you Sho. _why's writings are in large part what initially attracted me to Ruby. I have nothing but admiration for his work. If one releases open source code, I don't expect them to support it for free or at all, everyone's time is their own. But at least leave the existing code up there or at the very least, give some notice that it will be removed.
This of course assumes that he did do this intentionally and that he was not the victim of some kind of foul play.
to be in a position where you are "dependent" on the code (i.e. have looked at it, ever) and do not have a full copy of the entire project extending to the mists of prehistory.
--depth does have some benefits... one of my friends tried to do a 'git svn clone' of his work's svn repo... he gave up after the process had been running for a full 3 or 4 weeks.
That said --depth doesn't have too much use when it comes to native git repos though. Unless you have a ton of binary files in the repo and don't want the full history of all of them...
If you want to git-svn clone such a massive repository (and either it was truly massive, or your friend's net connection sucked, or he was using an old version of git that had the bug where git-svn slowed down over time), you should copy it to your local computer. git-svn runs significantly faster when it doesn't have to deal with network latency.
Edit: Also, --depth does have a use with git repos, namely if the git repo is accessible only over http, as downloading packs over http is kind of slow.
I'll defer to my friend on this one. He's really heavily into the internals of git and keeping up with the mailinglist. This was about a year ago, and if there was any way to speed up the process I'm sure he tried it. I think that he said it had something to do with the number of branches that have existed over the years in the repo and trying to resolve all of them into git branches.
I think if he tried today he'd be much more successful. I remember using git-svn a year ago, and it had the problem where it would re-checkout every single file for every branch point, because SVN doesn't really keep track of branch points; a branch is just a "svn copy" of the root dir.
These days, git-svn is much smarter about recognizing a SVN branch, so it doesn't have to re-checkout the whole world.
The git-svn clone was not made from the canonical hudson repository, but rather from a svnsync clone hosted on localhost accessed through the svn:// protocol. Nevertheless, the conversion took about three weeks on a 2.6 GHz Core2.
There seems to be a memory leak in git-svn. The size of the git-svn process grew slowly and after about two weeks it was at 1.2 GB resident size, at which point the OS refused to let it fork. Thing is, this was a blessing in disguise. I was able to resume the interrupted clone with a simple "git svn fetch", and it ran much faster with the now radically smaller heap. This, worked so well, in fact, that I got into the habit of interrupting and restarting the process every evening and every morning. A few days later it was done.
The problem seems to be the structure of the Hudson repository. All modules are in a single huge maven-style multi-module build under /trunk, but the branches and tags are not complete copies of trunk, but rather of individual sub-trees of trunk. This does not mesh well with how git sees the world. For git tags and branches are always for the whole repository. This mean,s that git has to work extra hard to figure out what's going in in a repository like Hudson.
Because of the oddball structure of the Hudson repository, its history is not as browsable in git as I might have hoped. Still, it's proved to be an interesting experiment.
Size: the complete history works out to 203MiB (.git/objects) in git, though 754 MiB including all the cruft in .git/svn. In Subversion 1.6 FSFS format the repository is 795 MiB.
Even without git, everyone has a local copy of the source on their machines, at worst we can get Hpricot back up without the commit history... but that's not the issue.
The problem is GH was hosting all the Hpricot wiki HOWTO docs, which frankly, were invaluable resources to anybody using the library.
It's perfectly fair to leave the community. Destroying the ability for others to use your past work, however, is pretty lame. I'm hoping this was a hack for the benefit of my respect for him.
assuming that this is a tantrum, yes. not impressed, only really detrimental. at least have the courtesy to leave your stuff as it is for the people who have and will benefit from it, instead of scrubbing it all clean.
on the other hand, if this is a case of someone managing to crack/guess/etc his passwords and just wants to do some malicious damage, that would be too bad.
Yeah I think so too. My initial reaction was that this is his right, which technically I'm sure it is. It does call into question an unspoken rule of open source though, which is you can abandon your stuff if you want, but don't try to remove all traces, even if that is ultimately a futile act.
You know, I've been mulling over this "was it an immature/douchebaggy thing to do?" question, and my gut was with the "leave this guy alone, he doesn't owe you anything, it's open source" camp initially.
Then I thought - what if, e.g., Zed Shaw had done this? I have a feeling we'd all be calling for his head and claiming it was the biggest douchebag move he could make. So does _why get a free pass? Because he's so likable and has a special pedestal in the Ruby world?
I honestly don't know the answer to that, but it made me reconsider my gut knee-jerk reaction.
Assuming that was his account (it seems like he'd be more likely to register _why), this is consistent with him deleting his account, and someone pouncing on the now-free username -- note that this account was created today.
Definitely there are people that know _why. He has family and friends and such. He just is unique in his style and doesn't want to be famous for his art, he wants the art itself to be famous.
Maybe he's planning for a big star-spangled blowout and is getting us ready for it? Kind of like if MJ had jumped out of his coffin at the Staples Center to start singing Thriller?
Oh please! realtime discussions, revsions & more. Maybe you should be more attentive rather than wanting to make your point. I already said, idea of executing code is interesting. but then something should be found to execute also custom modules. that's all what I said and I would be happy to play with this idea.
Sorry. You assumed I was curious about PasteBins because I'm curious about sites that let you run code on them. Now, it turns out that I'm slightly curious about PasteBins. I think they're slightly more interesting than URL shorteners. They're not nearly as interesting to me as sites that let you run code on them, though.
FriendPaste is neat, but it's not as daring as letting people run a bunch of different languages on your server like CodePad does. I imagine one reason it's not open source is that they're relying partly on security through obscurity. I would be if I were running such a site.
BTW, I did check it out more in depth, and its python interpreter runs "import datetime" and "print datetime.datetime.now()" fine, but gives an error than an md5 library is missing when you try to run "import urllib2". So it supports some standard modules but not all.
I'd like to see a JVM version that could run server-side JavaScript and Clojure. From what I hear, it might be easier to sandbox.
I'd also like to see one that runs client-side JavaScript, but displays a warning and requires you to click to run it until it has been marked as not malicious.
take a look on friendpaste this isn't just a pastebin too. For code running. Yes I missed the point. Maybe because I don't see how it could works on most code if you can't import your own modules. I would be happy to participate to such project. Is sourcecode of codepad around ?
_why got me back into programming and into ruby, first with "Try Ruby!" in the browser and later Hackety Hack. When I asked if I could use hackety to build a web app, he steered me toward rails. I've used tons of his library, especially hpricot.
You're an important part of this community, _why. I hope you're not saying goodbye.
Maybe the title of one of his RailsConf sessions gives us some clue: "A Starry Afternoon, a Sinking Symphony, and the Polo Champ Who Gave It All Up for No Reason Whatsoever."
_why has always been an unusual guy. He has always prized his pseudonymity online, so I'm honestly not entirely shocked to see that he has decided to simply pack it up and move on.
It's a sad day for all of us, but I hope and trust that he has good reasons for this decision. His contributions to the world of Ruby and programming-as-art will not be soon forgotten.
FWIW, I noticed that all of his sites were down for a period sunday night, too. I figured he was just doing something on the server and everything was back up the next day. I didn't check his github or twitter, though.
_why got me back into programming and into ruby, first with "Try Ruby!" in the browser and later Hackety Hack. When I asked if I could use hackety to build a web app, he steered me toward rails. I've used tons of his library, especially hpricot.
You're an important part of this community, _why. I hope you're not saying goodbye.
Registrar..: gkg.net (http://register.gkg.net/)
Domain Name: WHYTHELUCKYSTIFF.NET
Created on..............: 03-JAN-2002
Expires on..............: 03-JAN-2014
Record last updated on..: 24-DEC-2008
Status..................: ACTIVE
Registrar..: gkg.net (http://register.gkg.net/)
Domain Name: HACKETYHACK.NET
Created on..............: 25-FEB-2007
Expires on..............: 25-FEB-2010
Record last updated on..: 24-DEC-2008
Status..................: ACTIVE
Registrar..: gkg.net (http://register.gkg.net/)
Domain Name: POIGNANTGUIDE.NET
Created on..............: 20-NOV-2003
Expires on..............: 20-NOV-2010
Record last updated on..: 24-DEC-2008
Status..................: ACTIVE
Being actively anonymous is an open invitation for having your identity discovered and released. He knew it was coming. Deleting any trace of himself was planned, it was not done in heat of passion after being outed.
first up _why was active in more than the RoR community (look at potion, shoes, unholy, etc). Secondly, the majority of comments have been directed towards the dramatic way in which he left and the fact he will be sorely missed.
_why was to the ruby community what willy wonka was to chocolate. Maybe, just as the fictional Willy Wonka secluded himself in his chocolate factory for so many years due to competition, _why is simply secluding himself in his programming factory.
Deliciously sweet chocolates (or libraries/books/hacketyhack/etc.) will hopefully magically still appear.
Maybe _why is simply going to oompa loompa land to get little helpers.
I suspect some sort of burn out. Honestly the guy was a machine. I remember looking at his commit logs for all of his public Github projects and wondering how he managed it. And mind you, that only accounts for code publicly released and doesn't address any private projects he might have been working on.
I'm on the shoes mailing list and he recently made this announcement:
Aug 3rd:
<quote>
Okay, wow, hello, I'm very behind on this list, I hope you will
pardon me. I've been away for the summer, taking a break from
everything.
Well, enough of that, time's up: I hope to concentrate strictly on
getting Shoes 3 done. While it's disappointing to see what a poor
job I've done with Shoes, I am going to try to do what I can to
aright the situation by at least getting us some more speed and
stability. (As with all of my projects, it's just a toy experiment
which is full of an unpredictable amount of both the sweet and
bitter.)
My hope is to release the final version by September 7th. Please,
if you want something fixed for Shoes 3, it will need to be filed
on github, in the issues section. Yes, I think that will work just
great.
_why
</quote>
Perhaps this is a publicity stunt to popularize the new and improved Hackety Hack?!
Is it just me, or does Ruby tend have these "personalities" more than other communities? Seems like the Ruby community focuses a lot on the "rockstar" mentality. I don't spend any time in it to know for sure, though.
By "rock star" I just meant the lone, dedicated, popular, and generally charismatic developer that has a lot of people talking about how great he/she is. A personality.
Again, I don't travel in Ruby circles, so I don't know of _why and can't speak about him personally. I just seem to hear about specific developers from the Ruby circle more than, say, C#.
Followed by: "Oh boo hoo, people know who you are. Fucking take Karate lessons and STFU."
Sometimes people ask why it is that a lot of us dislike Zed Shaw, despite his being bright and talented and sharp. Stuff like this is why: For all that's good about him, he remains a douche who likes making assumptions about people, sticking to said assumptions, and then acting like the mandate of heaven shines down on him.
I got into a flamewar with him once. Used to be I thought he was a great guy, albeit a blowhard, who exposed people who did dumb things. Sometimes he is. The problem with him is he still hasn't learned to calm the fuck down, look at other people's perspectives, and understand that knowing how to write an insult doesn't make you a wise badass no matter how many people online respond positively to such viciousness.
Yes. People like this are like double-edged swords. They cut both ways (for and against you). It's only a matter of time before the blade is coming in your direction. Zed reminds me of Erik Naggum.
People liked him because of the quality of the stuff he produced. I personally haven't seen rockstar qualities from him. Most of his work (code/blog) are to the point and of high quality.
Yeah it does. It's a bit like Linux-land has more interesting personalities than Microsoft-land or how skateboarders tend to be more exciting than WalMart workers.
Smalltalk had it's share of personalities. I am witness to drama at OOPSLA that would have made for some damn good movie scenes. But all of this predates YouTube, Blogs, Twitter, etc...
Apparently he tweeted this yesterday (quoted from a retweet): "programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more."
But _why's contributions are largely irreplaceable. Yeah, software evolves and individual projects might be supplanted by others, but his contributions go way beyond simply writing functioning code.
I'm not in the ruby world, so perhaps that's why his contributions have largely been outside my sphere and there may be a great deal I'm unaware of. That said, when someone goes and removes their repositories and whatever other traces of their workproduct they have access to (as is their right), it might make people reluctant to use their products in the future (assuming they return).
_why has never really made "products" -- in fact, as far as I know, he's never made money from any of the stuff he shared online. (Sales of physical copies of the Poignant Guide may be the one exception to this, but IIRC, he priced it exactly at his cost in order to insure the widest possible distribution.)
Apparently he tweeted this yesterday: "programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more."
ironically he wrote "you" on twitter, and you wrote "u" on hn.
Man - what a bum out. The talk he gave at art + code was awesome and seriously inspired me to focus more on educational material for teaching kids to program. I hope he at least gives a more valid reason for removing everything. I can understand letting something become dormant - but others can take what you have done and be inspired and or build upon it. That is not a slight to you it's just the way a system grows. Like layers of sediment upon rock upon sediment. If I ever discovered that a piece of my code/idea had made its way into something someone else had done I would be stoked not bummed out.
Please remember the incredible amount of pressure he felt to continue support for older projects. That is why he initially set timelimits on certain projects. If he had stopped committing, people would have been beating down his door for an explanation.
Technically _why is his online persona and I can now understand/analyze your argument. But my first thought after reading the title was "OMG!!". Not fair.
Perhaps that has to do with the day that I woke up to NPR on the radio, and the announcer said "Douglas Adams... bestselling science-fiction writer..." and I immediately knew, before even hearing the next word, that my favorite author was dead.
I have flashbacks to that day. And I just had one now.
I have a feeling that this disappearing act is part of a ritualized collecting of energies that he needs to release Hackety Hack. He originally meant it to be ready for Art and Code and I have a feeling that many side-projects since then (including Potion) have been produced out of nervous energy misapplied to tasks other than his One True Project.
One of my favorite local (Seattle) musicians is Jason Webley. Every year or two he stages a big concert where he "dies" at the end in some staged way, then remains "dead" for the next 6 to 12 months, with no public appearances while he works on a major project. Then, usually on his birthday, he has another big event where he is "born" and then reveals the fruits of his labor.
That's just weird enough to be plausible -- there's pictures of the Shoes shoes, kitties, rainbows, needlepoint, and Tom Cruise giving a piggy back ride.
Though I'm not entirely certain the authors didn't just make up a name to fit the citation style. I don't see any reason why they would have any information the internet at large doens't.
Do you think maybe his mom or someone might know his real name? There are people in the community that know his real name, but out of respect for his desired privacy, to let the art itself be famous instead of the artist simply refer to him as _why.
If you're referring to moot's supposed identity "Christopher Poole," you're wrong. There's no verification that that is his real name, and I think it's just a joke. Just look at the initials: CP. For those of you who are uninitiated, "CP" is a 4chan meme for child pornography, and is closely associated with Pedobear.
No verification? He's been interviewed, at his home, by multiple magazines. I recall his parents were interviewed. And I've seen him at panels: He's not like most 4channers. I doubt he'd pull an elaborate prank. On the other hand, 4channers are retarded enough to assume he would.
One of the most thoroughly documented libraries that I have used.
It's interesting that he gave a talk in 2005 called "A Starry Afternoon, a Sinking Symphony, and the Polo Champ Who Gave It All Up for No Reason Whatsoever" (from his Wikipedia article)
Anyone know anything about what he said about the Polo Champ in the talk?
Apparently there's no holding period for deleted names on GitHub.
If he wanted his twitter account to be taken by somebody else, he could have renamed it before deleting it. If you rename a twitter account, the old name is freed up instantly, but if you delete an account, it is held for an unknown period of time.
I hope he didn't take my extremely down voted, (apparently) not funny, pun ridden comment on this article too seriously. My puns were harmless, I swear. Any comic drawn in programming text immediately makes me think of _why: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=771013
But seriously, reading _why's poignant guide to ruby back in the day was a breath of fresh air coming from Java, and wanting to try something new. His intermingled illustrations and humorous text made a programming book that I actually found enjoyable to read. Also, his contributions in terms of libraries and interesting apps has been awesome.
_why: My hats off to you fine sir! May you find goodness on your latest adventures!
i've taken the python path instead of the ruby one, but _why's poignant guide is simply amazing. the only programming book i know of that's both psychedelic and actually useful. well not as a reference, but great for expanding your mind. _why, if you're reading, blessings to you. i thank you for enriching my programming life, and i hope we hear from you again.
I remember checking the Guide just for a joke, and on the FIRST PAGE I learned something - that you can delimit ruby numbers with _ for commas - 3_600 is a legal 3600 to ruby.
His job could have a stipulation in the contract that they own everything he creates. Wouldn't that make him potentially civilly liable for his open source contributions, as well as these books and other things he has made.
_why got me back into programming and into ruby, first with Try Ruby! in the browser and later Hackety Hack. When I asked if I could use hackety to build a web app, he steered me toward rails. I've used tons of his library, especially hpricot.
If you're listening _why; don't stop being generous - don't disappear without a trace.
A guy I know used to work at Inetz. Here's a small chat exerpt from a few minutes ago...
Confirmation that the guy that worked at Inetz is _why. Perhaps take it with a grain of salt.
emullet
you worked at Inetz right?
friend
4:20
yeah
emullet
4:20
You work with a guy named Jonathan Gillette
?
friend
4:21
not allowed to answer that
emullet
4:21
lol
why do you say that?
friend
4:21
but I've heard that a lot of his stuff "disappeared" today
emullet
4:21
ya
you know whats up?
friend
4:21
nope
emullet
4:21
its very odd
kinda cool he worked with you
I had a copy of Potion cloned on my machine, so I stuck it on Github. If someone has a newer one, please post it, or let me pull from you or something: http://github.com/randrews/potion
_why had a lot of projects, we can probably preserve most of them just with people pushing stuff they had cloned.
I was playing with hackityhack last night, trying to find a way to contribute to it. It's very important to me that young people have an easy way to learn programming and I think he was really on the right track.
I learned ruby via his blog, via his poignant guide, and via the older edition copy of the pitchaxe which he had hosted on his site. I really hope he's not going into seclusion for good. :-(
internet/_why
#=> SystemStackError: stack level too deep
I remember reading on his twitter something like, "a caller asks: should I use hpricot or nokogiri? If you're not me, use nokogiri. If you're me, then stop being me"
I'm sure this comment will get lost in all the clutter, but:
I, up until today, didn't give two shits about ruby. I know that I had heard of this craaazzzyyyy "Ruby on Rails" jazz from about a year ago, and I know that people talked about it all the time, but I grabbed onto my python, looked the other way, and called it good.
Now, I want to learn ruby...
This guy seemed like he was all about teaching people Ruby, perhaps this was an attention grab?
it's the mystique, the razzle dazzle, the enigma. his fabulous body of work will live on, restored, uploaded and duplicated by hundreds of devotees and admirers. he'll be reincarnated. a _why by any other name would still smell as sweet. it's better to burn out than to fade away. ladies and gentlemen, elvis has left the building.
If anyone's about to mirror the stuff on his web sites, it might be wise to act quickly. Wayback Machine always checks the current robots.txt for a given domain, so it's possible to block files that have already been archived.
"This is the true joy in life ... being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one ... being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy ... I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing on to future generations."
I'm afraid my impression of _why from what I've read lately is that he wasn't exactly happy. Adding to that.. has anyone read the last few pages of chapter 6 of his guide recently?
Apparently his sister was drinking and got alcohol poisoning or might have been on drugs. All in all it seems he was deeply troubled by this and by his deteriorating relationship to his sister.
When did he write this and is this stuff about his sister true? I really, really hope it isn't and that he or his sister didn't do something tragic.
Well thats the problem with people who tell lots of stories isn't it? You can never tell if a story is actually true or not.. At least it does seem to me to be a remarkably depressing section in an otherwise fun and quirky book.
I have an opinion I would like to share, from what am reading online, it seems that his last tweet was a bit angry at the programming world, us in a more specific term. Us developers whom have learned so much from him...
What I feel is that it's like an anger wave inside him, that like "alright, people are not thankful for what I do, let's see what happens when everything goes down... now what will they do without me" dunno, but I cannot find an explanation of why even his source codes are down.. really hope he's blessed by god somewhere feeling better and if that's the case, being angry at us, hope he feels better soon.
guys I think maybe we should do him a website, you know like a call for his return, who's with me?
I feel compelled to dispatch an anonymous postcard to _why, just to say thanks. And to wish the best farewell. Maybe I'll find one with a furry animal on the front, like a lumberjack or something. Tomorrow.
You see, phoning seems rather creepy. And besides, I really don't have anything to ask him, or of him. He's taught us all so much already.
Yeah, a postcard seems best. Just a message in a bottle, a ping into the void. Naturally, the letter shall read in a language known well among those he has enlightened.
Jeff Yates' disappearance is the similar case. He is JavaScript developer, books author and creator of PBWizard, one of the very first WYSIWYG editors. He had site pbwizard.com with many articles. However only one of these article can be found in web today (http://www.dotvoid.com/2001/03/using-the-range-object-in-moz...).
'stiff' is 30s slang for a working class person (as in 'working stiff'). This would be like saying 'he really lucked out!' today - a mixture of admiration and mild jealousy for someone's (possibly unearned) good fortune.
I'm pretty sure stiff is slang for dead person, but it gets used more generally than that, for example: 'working stiff', a working person nothing going for him.
Also, the only current repo in this account (now called "because" and not "lol" anymore) has been CLONED by two other people! They made some commits, even. wtf?
The new /why account is a placeholder. The because repo is a thing that says some things about _why, stuff like theories on why he might have done it. Not a hack. (although I'm still not sure about the 'lol' thing...)
_why's actions remind me of a quote from Hagakure:
"In the Kamigata area, they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. The end is important in all things." (emphasis added)
Rest in peace, _why! You were but a hero, but now you are a legend.
I'm betting they're downvoting you because your comment was kind of douchey. It's okay not to be concerned about Why's abrupt disappearance from online-ness, but slamming other people for being concerned about it? And "good riddance?" Really?
