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Whytheluckystiff's original domain back as an archive
- numbers 4y agothis is an important part of the internet, _why taught me to be kind on the internet.
- zeruch 4y agoThat may be one of the best lessons that can be taught, period.
- UncleOxidant 4y agoPoignant, but good to see. Yay! \o/
- roboben 4y agoGood old Ruby days!
- jmconfuzeus 4y agoPoignant guide was the only programming book that didn't put me to sleep.
- foxbarrington 4y agochunky bacon
- whitepoplar 4y agochunkybacon chunkybacon !!!!
- partomniscient 4y agocome on, seriously. chunky bacon.
- craz8 4y agoI work in Clojure now, after 15 years of Ruby Clojure is cool and all, but it has no Chunky Bacon
- fwip 4y agoIt seems almost disrespectful to republish all of the writings that _why had decided to delete.
- cecilpl2 4y agoFor better or worse, when you publish something on the internet it no longer belongs entirely to you.
- ben0x539 4y agoDoes that mean it's not disrespectful?
- shadowgovt 4y agoThis is a long-standing question. They teach stories in high school these days that came from manuscripts Franz Kafka explicitly demanded be burned upon his death. It is, perhaps, disrespectful. Perhaps we all disrespect him with every new generation of students. Perhaps that's a strangely fitting fate for the man who is the namesake of the term "Kafkaesque." I'd like to hope he'd laugh, but I know only the writings and not the man.
- googlryas 4y agoIronically enough, _why's last act "CLOSURE", he talks about how he read everything by Kafka, even the deleted stuff. So I have to hope he wouldn't have a problem with someone creating this archive to keep his deleted writings alive.
- drewcoo 4y agoKafka is dead. It's difficult to show he is harmed by anything we do today without resorting to the supernatural. _why is invisible, not known to be dead. It is possible to harm unseen people.
- jholman 4y agoAs a matter of legality, that's wrong, of course. This is copyright violation. For whatever that's worth. But I think the bigger point is, if you're a fan of WTLS, it seems very odd to be so disrespectful of WTLS's desires. I can only conclude the the party who put up the archive is someone who wants to hurt WTLS's feelings, or at least is quite willing to do so.
- shadowgovt 4y agoHis Wikipedia entry reminds me of this quote from him: "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" ... and I can't help but think that this experience is disproportionately part of the Ruby community he was embroiled in. I did some Ruby-on-Rails development back in the day, and yeah... It's all completely un-runnable now. But that mostly seems to be a Rails-specific issue, where the ecosystem was downright hostile to calcification of APIs, workflows, and core tools. A person could publish a whole book and have 50% of its recommendations obsoleted within two years. That has to be demoralizing for an educator and communicator. Contrast that massively with Windows binaries that still run that were built against operating system versions that existed before college graduates were born. Various other ecosystems lack the high-speed code churn problem. I think even the Ruby ecosystem has cooled from its white-hot molten state a decade ago.
- rsanheim 4y agoAre you being serious? Have you tried to get a "modern JS app" or Python web app running (safely, w/o massive security vulnerabilities) that is even a few years old? All code rots, and it rots quickly. Its the a reality of modern software.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shadowgovt 4y agoModern JS apps I encounter are packaged up with npm and I rarely have trouble running them. Python, I agree, is a challenge. I don't use it. I used to; I concluded it was too much hassle most of the time to maintain my Python working against other people's Python. Coupled with the lack of static type checking, I pulled it off my quick-grab list years ago (though with the growth of mypy, pip, and conda I may revisit it some day if I get bored with my current tools). Go code is pretty stable. Java seems downright calcified. And, of course, the whole C library space may as well be igneous stone. You can get FFTW version 3, for example, built from the relatively recent date of last year, but FFTW has a version 2 stable release dating back to 1999.
- lioeters 4y agoA related link posted here recently. Why the Luck Stiff Documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64anPPVUw5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64anPPVUw5U
- pram 4y agoWhy’s work had a lot of charm and heart. It was weird and funny and avant-garde but in a pretty accessible and (mostly) unpretentious way. It didn’t teach me a whole lot about Ruby but I probably read it a dozen times or so lol
- numeromancer 4y agoWhy, indeed.
- blonky 4y ago_Why’s work led me to where I am. At a crucial time in my life I found _Why. That put me on a path to learning Ruby and then a whole bunch of steps now I have an actual job as a web developer. I work in Python, but I’m sure _Why won’t mind. Before I found _Why I wasn’t sure what to do with my career-life. He showed me that programming can be art and science.
- mavu 4y agoExactly the same for me (except its still ruby). I really hope he knows how many lives he touched with his work/art.
- invalidator 4y ago_Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is what got me hooked. His quirky little foxes made it fun to just burn through the whole book and left me with enough knowledge to be useful, and able to ask the right questions to learn more. It was just the right kick at the right moment, and he will have a place in my heart forever.
- O__________O 4y agoWhile not a popular opinion, personally feel that people should have the legal right to remain anonymous, even if they have a public persona.
- Cyberdog 4y agoSo then what happens if someone's anonymity is stripped away? Do they sue the de-anonymizer, or does the de-anonymizer face criminal penalties? Or both? How does one determine an appropriate penalty for this sort of thing? Does it matter if the victim made themselves stupidly easy to dox? "It oughtta be illegal" is easy to say but not so easy to actually make happen.
- O__________O 4y agoLike I said, it’s not a popular opinion, but assuming it was a popular opinion, what would stop it from being a reality? (To be clear, I have no reason to believe it will ever be a popular opinion, nor do I see the point in even trying to make it one; that said, not aware of any fundamental reasoning of why it’s impossible.)
- nickelpro 4y agoWhat stops it from being a reality is the lack of concrete answers to the questions raised by the comment you're replying to. Which you too have elected not to answer.
- O__________O 4y agoNothing in that comment was specific enough to respond to, but sure, my here are my responses which are unnecessarily verbose due to the generality of the questions, assuming it was popular and supported belief; again, all the responses you referred to were “generally speaking, how would xyz be done” — not specific statements saying “x is not possible because of y”, which would actually result in a narrow well defined exchange: >> So then what happens if someone's anonymity is stripped away? It would be impossible in any significant way, since it would be impossible to digitally identify any entity without having there prior consent; something that’s easily possible with existing technology. If person revoked that permission, retaining data would be illegal, even for the government. If government needed to identify someone, it would be done systematically and anonymously; for example, if a person needed to pay taxes, access a controlled area, etc - it would all be done anonymously with persons consent, if they decline to provide the required anonymous digital tokens, response would be predefined, and would include being deported to an exiled region. >> Do they sue the de-anonymizer, or does the de-anonymizer face criminal penalties? Or both? Both. >> How does one determine an appropriate penalty for this sort of thing? Person loses access to modern technology, is deported, would be unable to reach anyone once deported, and would never be allowed to return. >> Does it matter if the victim made themselves stupidly easy to dox? No, blaming victim is obviously irrational. _____ Again, if there specific issues other than it not being a popular opinion, please let me know. Otherwise, like I said, an individual being able to control their identity is limited only by popular opinion.
- vfclists 4y agoSome people don't like chunky bacon, but a lot of others do.
- clmay 4y agoI don't know _why, and never did, but the little cadre of characters he invented and the care and heart he put into his various works were literally what convinced me (at one of my lowest points) that my life was still worth living. And for that reason, I will always remain grateful to _why.
- balentio 4y agoYou can control your presentation of an identity and you can kill it. However, you cannot stop others from resurrecting it and remembering it. This is the lie of copyright.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gcr 4y agofor some folks, this sort of doxxing carries severe real-world consequences. think of someone who's trans for example: it isn't always possible to update names on government documents because of dumb state laws, so discovering and exposing (say) a coworker's "legal name" could out them as trans and cost them their job.
- balentio 4y agoUnless their job requirement is tied to their gender, I don't think being a trans person is listed as "legal fire-able offences" unless you can also be fired for being one gender or another.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- arthurcolle 4y agoWhere is this guy? Is he not programming anymore?
- keyle 4y agoIt hasn't been made public... He just vanished and asked to be left alone. His content was good, a natural technical teacher. Hopefully resurfaces one day. Might still be active under a different name, who knows.
- vlunkr 4y agohttps://youtu.be/mXZ_htL1rOI https://youtu.be/mXZ_htL1rOI This video is criminally under viewed.
- khy 4y agoI was doing something with hpricot at one of my first jobs when he disappeared. I went to the docs page (was it on Github at the time?), and then a couple minutes later I went back to check something else out, and everything was gone. I assumed it was something intermittent in the moment; I can't remember how or when I figured out what had actually happened.
- rurban 4y agoAh, those pesty domain grabbers
- aryehof 4y agoWhy to me contrasts a huge proportion of todays body of new programmers. Instead of the pursuit of programming as a means to a profession, career or livelihood, Why embodied programming as something to be pursued for the wonderment and satisfaction of being able to use a computer to make or model things real or imagined.
- zasdffaa 4y agoYou need a job to support yourself so you can do your programming as a hobby/pleasure.
- adrianh 4y agoThis argument can be applied to any hobby. :) "You need a job to support yourself so you can play piano as a hobby." "You need a job to support yourself so you can do rock climbing as a hobby."
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoThis is true; it's no wonder that a lot of people in the arts (or explorers like climbers) come from wealthy backgrounds. For most of us, music or climbing is a hobby that needs to be fit in somewhere in their normal schedules. And when it comes to IT, writing, learning, and things like open source are often also spare (sparse?) time activities. Which is a shame, I like to think I could write decent blog posts or even books but I never have (or take) the time. I have a passing hobby in music but that too never really takes off beyond noodling.
- bluehavana 4y agoHappy #whyday! http://wicswac.org/whyday.html http://wicswac.org/whyday.html
- reagle 4y agowhen I wrote about exit in open communities ("410 Gone - Infocide in Open Content Communities") 10 years ago, I included the _why case, and here his work is restored a decade later! https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/8215 https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/821...