10 ms·
_why: "Goodbye until I can shake this."
- omouse 17y agoCan we stop discussing this? The more you say, the more it diminishes the effect and the aura of his leaving.
- aditya 17y agogasp he was planning this all along! and he left clues!
- drawkbox 17y agoand his name is _why? What we are all asking right now!
- marcusestes 17y agoI'm confused. When did _why add this section? Recently? Did he even add it at all? It begins: August 19th shall be known as _why Fawkes day.
- pygy 17y agoIt was there when he wrote the chapter, with the comic section attached next to it. There are other allusions to him leaving the scene/dying in other writings.
- omouse 17y agoIt's strange that no one mentions those sections when they mention the book.
- judofyr 17y agoIt was there Feb 8th 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20080208063221/http://poignantguide.net/ruby/chapter-6.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080208063221/http://poignantgui...
- wcarss 17y agoI can't find that "August 19th shall be known as _why Fawkes day" bit - where'd you see that?
- matthewcford 17y agosurely you mean _why forks day.
- TeHCrAzY 17y agoPlease, go back to reddit.
- chime 17y agoI don't know how to say this politely but we really need a bunch of Erlang articles on HN right now. _this _is _getting _out _of _hand.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- pygy 17y agoIt may not be the right place to discuss these matters, but it's the only place I have (with the programming reddit, but the userbase is different).
- kyro 17y agoWhat matters exactly?
- unalone 17y agoThose of _why's disappearing, presumably, and of the work he left behind.
- nir 17y agoI 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.
- unalone 17y agoIt'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.
- Semiapies 17y ago
- kyro 17y agoI 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.
- flashingpumpkin 17y agoi'm in no point a ruby guy or involved with the ruby community, but i couldn't have missed this guys legacy. kinda reminds me of RAW.
- pygy 17y agohttp://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/images/the.foxes-6.png http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/images/the.foxes-6... :-( 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. I sincerely hope he's alright.
- andreyf 17y agoAnd here: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/images/departure.png http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/images/departure.p... "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.
- pygy 17y agoI 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: - "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." - While there are some errements, these themes are far too recurrent to just be whimsical.
- larryfreeman 17y agoI didn't know who _why is. Here's a link for non-ruby folks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- kakal 17y agothis is effing lame.
- rotw 17y agoThe Ian Curtis effect.
- bitwize 17y agoIt's official. News.ycombinator is now news._whycombinator. And I can't stand it.