
_why's site is back up - aaronbrethorst
http://whytheluckystiff.net/
======
apawloski
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.

~~~
corwinstephen
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.

~~~
dasil003
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.

~~~
corwinstephen
What about curiosity about an unsolved riddle/puzzle?

------
mmastrac
Here is the data from IDEAS, NOTES and TEST, converted to PDF format. It's
somewhat readable (yes, the files are HP PCL format):

Ideas: a bizarre set of story ideas

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/119138391/Ideas>

Notes: life tips

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/119138393/Notes>

Test: A typed test document

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/119138394/Test-1>

~~~
w1ntermute
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).

On Pastebin:

Ideas: <http://pastebin.com/WSfmLDA5>

Life tips: <http://pastebin.com/PTF4cfDJ>

Test: <http://pastebin.com/BExqVKpv>

\--------------

Full texts (same as Pastebin):

\--------------

    
    
        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
    

\---------------

Test:

    
    
        TEST
        
        
        
        TEST
        RESTAURANT REVIEW
        
        
        
        
        
        
        TEST
        TEST

~~~
1qaz2wsx3edc
The numbers are interesting: 70 years $3 $1 $3 $4 XXX 50 $3 $12 $3

~~~
jayferd
Also the pattern of typos - there's probably some sort of message in here, but
I've never really been good at this sort of puzzle.

------
espadrine
Facts:

0\. Since 2012-12-09, the following content was available at
<http://whytheluckystiff.net/>

    
    
        Public Print Queue
    
        SPOOL/TEST	2012-12-09T14:12Z
        SPOOL/IDEAS	2012-12-13T23:26Z
        SPOOL/NOTES	2012-12-19T00:28Z
    

0.0. The style of writing and handwriting corresponds to that of Why.

0.1. Prints are very regular. There are 4.4 days between the first two, and 5
between the last two.

1\. Going to those addresses yields, in essence, the following data:
<http://d.pr/i/qwo8>

2\. Now the following content is available:

    
    
        Public Print Queue
    
        SPOOL/DESOLEE	2012-01-06T08:21Z
    

2.0. The headers that are sent back from the server changed. The difference is
shown in this picture: <http://i.imgur.com/6mMPQ.png>

2.1. It happened within 12 hours of this very thread.

2.2. DESOLEE is the french for "sorry", from a woman.

2.3. It is 2012, not 2013 (may be a typo).

3\. Going to this address yields:
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/119155590/DESOLEE>

3.0. A date of April the 18th is stated as the return of the printer queue.

~~~
PLejeck
Nice summary, but there's also QUEUE/YOU somewhere in there.

~~~
cdcarter
I can't get a QUEUE/YOU or SPOOL/YOU to send me any data. Does anybody have
the PCL for it?

~~~
marcbeaupre
Someone below posted it.

------
zacharyvoase
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.

~~~
lsb
Désolée = sorry, in French.

~~~
pygy_
As said by a woman. Males would say " _Désolé_ ".

~~~
_rs
I believe it is used to describe a woman rather than being always said by a
woman.

Could describe the girl he has been talking about throughout the documents.

~~~
abolibibelot
"désolée" also means..."desolated" or "forlorn" when refering to a place
instead of a person.

~~~
Lunatikzc
It's french for sorry, desolated would be more related to 'désolation'

~~~
abolibibelot
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).

~~~
Lunatikzc
Merci pour la précision ...

------
bulletmagnet
Am I the only one who finds this guy's affectations more than slightly
annoying?

~~~
PommeDeTerre
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.

It's really quite strange.

~~~
slurry
With regard to why:

1) Drama: fair point.

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.

~~~
jinfiesto
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.

~~~
vidarh
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.

------
jacquesm
This so reminds me of this monty python 'Life of Brian' scene:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krb2OdQksMc>

~~~
cloudclear
The perfect python reference for a _why thread. That's kind of funny.

import irony

------
PLejeck
I think _why is watching us as we watch him.

The first three files had spool dates

    
    
       SPOOL/TEST     2012-12-09T14:12Z
       SPOOL/IDEAS    2012-12-13T23:26Z
       SPOOL/NOTES    2012-12-19T00:28Z
    

The latest?

    
    
       SPOOL/DESOLEE  2012-01-06T08:21Z
    

I suspect this may have been around for a month, while he waited for somebody
to notice it. Then, when we noticed, he swapped in the new one.

Also, according to the converted DESOLEE
(<http://www.scribd.com/doc/119155590/DESOLEE>) file, something's happening on
April 18, "from like four o clock to lets say twelve"

Edit: Apparently there was also a SPOOL/YOU

No idea the timestamp on that one, but it seemed to be just before
SPOOL/DESOLEE

~~~
kngl
Note the wrong date also. We are in 2013 now...

------
tomasien
Could someone explain the significance of this for us who don't know? I'd
really appreciate it!

~~~
mcpherrinm
_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.

~~~
tomasien
Much appreciated!

~~~
naturalethic
I appreciate you.

------
fogus
Here's hoping he wants Potion back. <http://www.github.com/fogus/potion>

~~~
pm
Agreed, I really liked where it was going.

~~~
espadrine
It did heavily influence CoffeeScript, so there's that.

~~~
fogus
Syntax only thought right?

~~~
espadrine
Right. Jeremy Ashkenas also dropped some of the more controversial syntax
along the way, like the use of dots to end a block.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014080>

------
munchingmonster
I keep wanting to look into ruby, but every time I hear about these
personalities involved, It turns me off.

~~~
petercooper
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.

~~~
saraid216
> Some of the people say curses

And sometimes those curses come true. Like they say, "Fuck you!" and then you
finally get laid.

------
danso
Getting this:

"Public Print Queue SPOOL/TEST 2012-12-09T14:12Z SPOOL/IDEAS 2012-12-13T23:26Z
SPOOL/NOTES 2012-12-19T00:28Z"

~~~
jacobian
If you hit `/SPOOL/{TEST,IDEAS,NOTES}` you get some binary data; `file` tells
me it's "HP PCL printer data". Not sure what to do next with that...

~~~
cdcarter
Got an HP LaserJet around? Two lines of PJL and you can send it to the
printer...

I wonder if there is a PCL viewer for OS X... It's really meant to be just for
spooling data.

Edit: installing GhostPDL now.

~~~
unimpressive
I do. Looking up PJL now.

------
haven
Hooray for _why! :D

Found a fourth PCL: <http://whytheluckystiff.net/SPOOL/YOU>

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/119153889/You>

~~~
_rs
Do you know what timestamp was on this file?

------
lazydon
Oh my, did't know what was this all about. Just checked
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff> This _why guy is like
Elvis/Garbo of the Ruby world.

Can somebody share more about some specific inspiring stuff _why did that
makes him such an important figure in Ruby community:

Matz -> Ruby DHH -> Rails _why -> ?

~~~
phillmv
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.

~~~
jarin
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).

------
wyclif
"A guy with an an enormous chin has the chin surgically removed and is
promptly married."

Classic _why, if you ask me...

~~~
tmcw
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.

~~~
zenocon
I don't know anything about this paparazzi crusade or this _why fellow, but I
do like me some absurdist poetry. Kharms is pretty good...highly recommend
Russel Edson [http://www.amazon.com/Tunnel-Selected-Poems-Russell-
Edson/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Tunnel-Selected-Poems-Russell-
Edson/dp/0932440657), and for prose Donald Barthelme (e.g. Don B's last _fake_
tweet <https://twitter.com/donb/status/273048668519690240>)

edit: posted link to best intro to R.E.

------
cmer
I was curious, I checked WHOIS:

    
    
        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.

~~~
cdcarter
It means it wasn't just someone sniping the domain after an expire.

~~~
cmer
Exactly my thought. He probably actually renewed it. Makes you wonder why (no
pun intended).

------
cdcarter
I've converted the three PCL files mentioned into PDFs. Warning: they are
barely readable...

<https://www.dropbox.com/sh/au20fgk5ko84300/ENSDticHe->

------
gfodor
Here are the contents as images fyi

<http://imgur.com/QBHNR>

~~~
cormacrelf
I've upped the contrast and made the handwriting a little more legible.

<http://d.pr/i/qwo8>

------
mwill
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?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I saw a tweet from Andy Matuschak and posted a link here as a result. I have
no idea how he found out originally, unfortunately.

<https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/287702245645107200>

~~~
andymatuschak
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.

------
Posibyte
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.

------
kaonashi
Way to chase the guy away again.

------
dblock
This is not very useful, but since it's a github page there's
<http://whytheluckystiff.net/CNAME> with "whytheluckystiff.net" in it.

------
chanux
I wish he is back with some big project :)

~~~
damm
Burnout that makes you drop from the web is hard to come back from for many
reasons.

Worse to watch people go through it

------
jbrooksuk
I'm still getting 'Public Print Queue SPOOL/DESOLEE 2012-01-06T08:21Z'

------
vanhalt
whytheluckystiff.net/SPOOL/DESOLEE

------
artellectual
He's soon going to unveil a new ruby VM, to replace MRI.

~~~
freddigbjk
He's gonna find the cure for Rabies!

~~~
amorphid
He's going change his name to _Because!

------
protome
wow!

------
pit
That's odd -- I had a dream about _why last night.

