Where’s _why? (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Where’s _why? (2012)

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61 pointsTomte65 comments

I get why people are interested in this, but the whole thing seems kind of gross to me. The guy wrote some good stuff, then decided he was happier being less Online. That doesn't seem newsworthy (it seems rather healthy, in fact), especially when the reporting seems so clearly to invade his privacy.

I think I partially agree, however, I can understand why the community itself would be worried. A big figure and a major contributor suddenly disappearing with no trace would probably worry me too.

Invading privacy is bad, but there's a big difference between "less", and being done publishing anything, versus deleting everything and completely disappearing.

Why? Because we say so? It was his content to delete.

> Why? Because we say so?

Because people were using it, and depending on it.

> It was his content to delete.

A major contributor in a large, active programming community just up and deleted all of his stuff, and you expect people to be just "huh, well, whatever, everything's probably fine."?

Yep. Consider your response in interaction with future major contributors to large, active programming communities. Because people can, and sometimes will, take their marbles and go home if you piss them off enough.

Yeah, exactly. If leftpad and bukkit taught us anything, it’s that contributor licensing agreements are really necessary. Otherwise you’re building your entire edifice on sand.

It would be different even if we didn't "say so".

I don't understand what you're asking, exactly. I didn't say he wasn't allowed, but you're going to get a lot of attention for purging popular things, attention that you don't get if you simply cut back to being "less Online" and shift from huge amounts of time to fifteen minutes a week making an occasional comment and replying to the occasional direct message.

It was his content. But it was also an inconsiderate move.

Lots of people decide to abandon their open-source projects and their personas. They will also arrange a transition if these happen to be popular projects other people depend on.

But hey, there's no mystique in an orderly shutdown. You don't make the news if you do that. Do we know if this was his intention? We don't.

But people usually leave farewell notes. Or a will.

This presupposes that content and ideas are "property". I more subscribe to the idea that once you put content out into the world, it is no longer yours.

(That said, all this chasing and doxing of this poor guy really is disgusting. If nothing else he absolutely has the right to leave and stop actively hosting things he doesn't want to host anymore.)

I don't think anyone is complaining about efforts to rescue and resuscitate the code.

> but there's a big difference between "less", and being done publishing anything, versus deleting everything and completely disappearing.

Isn't the difference at least in part the forcefulness of the desire to be left alone? I.e., since he deleted everything, he really wants to be left alone, as opposed to having a "meh" attitude towards notoriety. And wouldn't that therefore make the violation of his privacy more harmful as a result?

At the very least it is exactly the sort of discussion they wanted to happen in making such a forceful statement. If psuedonymous privacy could even still exist on the internet seemed a question they wanted people to ask.

Lots of people fade away, stop posting new stuff, stop answering emails. The internet moves on. If he wanted that, there was an easy path to follow. Instead, he staged an event that was singular, dramatic, that built up his legend and mystique even more. It's like he didn't want to be forgotten and was willing to snatch back everything he offered the world in order to accomplish that.

This is special pleading, and circular, too, in the sense that it says that the irrational response of his fans justifies their irrational response. Either way: leave the guy alone.

If leaving the guy alone means stopping wondering why he did what he did, I don't think you can expect that of people. If it means don't harass him, what am I saying that makes you think I need to be told?

I think it's quite rational to believe that someone making a flamboyant exit does so because they want people to notice and talk about it. That's just basic human behavior. You're asking people to believe that someone who successfully connected with a large audience for years, artistically, pedagogically, and as a persona, suddenly forgot the basics of human interaction in his grand finale and accidentally focused an entire community's attention on his absence. Maybe you're right, but on the face of it, can you see why people might find that unlikely?

It's fine to wonder, as long as you're not attempting to dox him.

> completely disappearing

He did not completely disappear. He removed some stuff that was online and stopped publishing. He is - one assumes - still a human being with a job, friends, family, and so on.

The story seems to be that deleting and disappearing was his response to his real-life identity being busted or soon-to-be, not something he just up and did one day.

Many people enjoyed his works (his gui gem, his executable poetry, his drawings) and felt a loss when he disappeared.

And some months after he disappeared, he teased everyone with his printer outputs. So it wasn't just some uneventful disappearance of someone unimportant.

Who cares if they felt a loss? That doesn't give them the right to invade anyone's privacy. People have a right to stop being Online.

Yes people shouldn't invade things. I was hoping to make an emotional connection. But this is highly illogical. Silly me.

I think the moral of this story is that people should be careful about their impulses to create emotional connections with strangers, which are not always welcome.

It's interesting how parasocial interactions form, often without us consciously doing so or meaning to. The drive to form these associations seem to be wired more deeply than the side of our brain that listens to reason.

There's a decent article called "Parasocial Interaction in the Digital Age"[0] that describes this phenomenon occuring through YouTube, and I would not be the least bit surprised to find that it's applicable to the situation of _why discussed here.

[0] [PDF] https://thejsms.org/tsmri/index.php/TSMRI/article/download/3...

It is, but people that had long-lasting direct social interaction with him were cut off too.

This type of problematic parasocial relationship is amplified by the internet, because the internet changed the mechanics of fame. In the past, becoming famous required infrastructure. Media access was scarce; you had to actively work with various gatekeepers if you wanted the opportunity to become famous. This often required putting on the mask the audience wanted to see. Removing the mask and retreating back to your "normal life" was easy: without regular upkeep, access to the media infrastructure moved to someone else.

On the internet, anybody can become famous at any time, because the internet is media access. People now become famous without the mask that differentiated their famous persona from their normal life. Giving up fame now requires giving up the part of your normal life that made you famous.

For a much better explanation, see this[1] short video essay.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w

Yeah, humans making inefficient decisions. Preposterous.

This sounds like the "community" felt entitled (which they are not)

It didn't really make it into the article, but at the end of our interview, the author asked me about trying to contact _why, and I told her that she shouldn't, I thought it was wrong, and refused to help.

I have lots of complicated feelings on the topic of _why, but this is one that I've always felt very clearly and strongly about: he wanted to go. Leave him alone.

I wouldn't really like to bother _why, but I'd certainly like to send them a thank-you card, or maybe donate to a charity of their choice.

_why was a big inspiration to me as a fledgling programmer, and I would love to be able to do something make their life just a little better, even if I don't get to know anything about the result.

(I also feel this same way about Bill Watterson.)

The one thing I certainly already try to do, is to follow in _why's footsteps of injecting as much joy and whimsy into programming—and programming education—as I can. I hope that's enough.

If they want to be left alone, the kindest thing you can do is to leave them alone. Maybe consider being an example to others in the spirit they were an example to you.

It was certainly interesting, and i think it maybe would have been fair game to report on his online persona and dissapearence, but the last bit of the article where they find his patent application and thus his employer, and then call his employer.... eww. Just no.

This is just doxing, again, someone who has made enormous effort in avoiding being doxed and just wants to be left alone.

Agreed. I always found Lowrey's doxxing to be appalling, especially given that she is a journalist. Tracking him down to his place of work. Extending his doxxing using the resources of her publication. As if listing his full name and place of work was in the public interest.

(Originally posted under wrong thread.)

Why The Lucky Stiff Documentary from 2019:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64anPPVUw5U

_why’s contributions to the Ruby world always had an art project element to them. His disappearance is just an extension of his art.

It was amusing to me that his real name wasn’t even exposed on conference badges.

Quil[1] project clearly references _why and seems like something _why would create. I’d be curious if he was involved.

[1]: https://github.com/quil/quil

Oh, that does indeed look very _Why-ish. Glad to see he's still creating stuff.

it's not him, look at the committers

Not him. It was whyified by Sam Aaron, the author of Sonic Pi, here: https://github.com/quil/quil/commit/32871e15056f684147063309... He called it "poetified"

He was a gem, so it is good to see he found some Clojure.

I remember a time when Reddit puns weren't rewarded on here

unlikely, unless one of the committers acts on his behalf. There are only five people with more than ten commits it's not hard to check they are real. Like, https://github.com/nbeloglazov this guy is the top committer, if you click on his LinkedIn (which he supplies) then you can see he went to a university and Belarus and trivial searching finds https://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2008a/080314TopCoder.html so he is extremely likely to be the real deal (and a damn good programmer, very likely, too).

So perhaps _why references are just a celebration of his legacy.

My first thought on reading the headline, was that this was about a construct/directive/command that should be in interpreters, like irb/ruby, that often save the last return value as _ (underscore) :

  > x=3 ; y=2
  => 2
  > x + y
  => 5
  > _
  => 5
  > _why?
  => x + y
  > _why? 
  => x=3 ; y=2

Oh well... Then I tmrealized it was probably about what it is about ;)

That seems like a nice feature, yes. Reminds me SHRDLU, where you could ask the computer "why did you do that?" recursively: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU#Excerpt

I've flagged this. Leave the man alone. Stop reposting what amounts to doxxing of someone who clearly indicated they do not want their internet fame or connection to real life ID to be made.

I wrote about this and Pilgrim’s exit in "410 Gone": Infocide in Open Content Communities https://reagle.org/joseph/2012/05/draft-infocide.html

Ethical considerations aside, this article had a huge impact on me and played a big part in getting me to finally learn to code. _why's style made the idea of coding very approachable for someone who didn't have a math/science background

So after he tried to delete himself from the internet, someone forked his code and then made it closed source...

I generally believe in the right to leave but not the right to vanish. However it seems hypocritical to use the right to fork basically to get around somebody's wishes but then close source the app to not give others the right to fork.

Did anything ever came out of potion? I thought it was a lookworthty language but apparently never caught on.

http://perl11.org/potion/

Still working on it from time to time, but there are several severe roadblocks. Mostly threads and GC. The re-entrant parser problem ("eval") should be solvable.

I always think of _why as a rubyist Rimbaud.

_why should be left alone. People keep bringing this up and starting the hunts again to locate and bother him, it's a form of harassment and bullying.

I was extremely interested in the _why situation when I first started my professional career (and started learning Ruby), which was shortly after he left. Maybe once a year I would search online if there was any news on him, and when there was that strange thing with his website having a brief printer feed, I looked into it more deeply than in retrospect seems reasonable.

And I think I finally get why this all was. I think we all liked _why and his whimsy and his disappearance for the same reason we liked Willie Wonka and Mary Poppins as children. Because they had an air of mystery about them, because they were serious yet whimsical, lighthearted yet deeply profound, creative and imaginative while still being practical.

My interest in his situation, and those movie characters, and similar real people or fictional characters, went down to zero after I finally learned that those things were guiding me to Jesus all along. He has all these qualities and more, and gives meaning to our everyday life. I know that religion is frowned upon here as being for the delusional and uneducated (ironically), and that what I'm saying will be taken as the cliche saying of a born-again Bible-thumper rather than as any kind of profound philosophical statement. But so many of you have such philosophical minds, and they go to such waste finding fancier ways to convert bytes into other bytes, because when it comes to daily lives, you think of yourselves as scientists and not philosophers. I understand the frustration St. Paul had as he stood on Mars Hill unable to reach the hearts of the learned and educated elite of his time. I understand why he went afterwards to Corinth resolving not to use words of eloquence or plausible earthly wisdom to proclaim what he had personally witnessed, but rather "to know nothing but Christ and Him Crucified."

Please don't take HN threads on religious tangents. It won't work, just as it hasn't worked in the past, and it became a significant problem at one point.

"Won't work" implies that I have some sort of goal of trying to convince anyone of religious truths, which I don't.

I also don't think it was a tangent to say that _why appeals to a religious desire within us. It's philosophical but on topic.

But maybe it was a tangent to lament the constant stream of missed opportunities for genuinely profound discussions on HN.

HN isn't capable of genuinely profound discussions about religion. Probably no large, public internet community is.

"Won't work" isn't saying anything about your goals, only about the subthreads such comments lead to.

I suppose you're right. Even the intellectual elite becomes irrational in the face of discussions over religion. Which explains why they replace it with discussions over politics, whereby they can at least exercise their agnosticism through amiable acceptance of their disagreements.

> what I'm saying will be taken as the cliche saying (...) rather than as any kind of profound philosophical statement

The two are not incompatible; in fact, those that combine both are the quintessential clichés.

In any case, I can't agree with your characterisation of the general opinion on religion by HN users. Yes, that contingent is certainly overrepresented compared to the overall population, but I feel like there's a majority that has at least respect for the cultural institution, even if we don't wish to participate. (Curiously, this might actually increase as the population becomes less religious, since the negative uses of religious teachings will also decrease proportionally.)

But frankly, what your post seems to indicate is that you lost the ability to share the joy of the mysteries of _why with the rest of us. I am sorry for your loss, even if you aren't.

> but I feel like there's a majority that has at least respect for the cultural institution, even if we don't wish to participate.

Most of the anti-religious sentiment is expressed by invisible downvotes and flags, so people don't generally see how great it is here.

> (Curiously, this might actually increase as the population becomes less religious, since the negative uses of religious teachings will also decrease proportionally.)

I'm not convinced. People will be even less educated on what our religion teaches, so there'll just be more general confusion. As Fulton Sheen once put it, there aren't 100 people in the whole USA who hate the Catholic Church, but a great many who hate what they believe the Catholic Church to be. Misconception and misrepresentation will only increase over time.

> But frankly, what your post seems to indicate is that you lost the ability to share the joy of the mysteries of _why with the rest of us. I am sorry for your loss, even if you aren't.

That's just the thing. The mysteries of _why were not actual mysteries, they're illusional, for lack of a better word. Whereas the mysteries of Jesus are very real and quite satisfying, intellectually and on every other level.

> Most of the anti-religious sentiment is expressed by invisible downvotes and flags, so people don't generally see how great it is here.

Downvotes and flags aren't invisible, they're shown by comments becoming grey and [dead], respectively (the latter can only be seen by people who have that option enabled, which I do). The points also influence the ordering in a thread, and I often see posts respectful of religion at the top.

What I also see are people seeing their own posts downvoted and deciding it must be due to a particular reason, which I often disagree with.

> I'm not convinced. People will be even less educated on what our religion teaches, so there'll just be more general confusion. As Fulton Sheen once put it, there aren't 100 people in the whole USA who hate the Catholic Church, but a great many who hate what they believe the Catholic Church to be. Misconception and misrepresentation will only increase over time.

People don't hate what they don't know; how many people today hate the Manicheans? People hate what they feel as threatening. The Catholic Church increasingly doesn't, in my opinion.

> The mysteries of _why were not actual mysteries, they're illusional, for lack of a better word.

Not everyone shares the fetish of the authentic. Of course they're an illusion.

I'm surprised you would call a genuine pursuit of authentic truth a fetish, and admit to enjoying an illusion. But I guess I shouldn't be. That's why people pass on the Santa Claus tradition, and those who enjoyed it when they were kids now enjoy MCU and Star Wars movies in their place, even reading and writing fan fiction about it. Every shred of evidence throughout my life has convinced me that anybody who loves truth will eventually hear it in Jesus's voice, and those who don't will scoff at the idea exactly as Pontius Pilate did.

> I'm surprised you would call a genuine pursuit of authentic truth a fetish

That's an overreaching interpretation of what I wrote. One can pursue the truth without declaring everything else as worthless. Plus, I dispute the idea that "non-authentic" mysteries can't convey truth.

> now enjoy MCU and Star Wars movies in their place, even reading and writing fan fiction about it.

Well, I don't. I do enjoy, for example, The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton. Is the mystery of Sunday illusory? I care not one whit.

> That's an overreaching interpretation of what I wrote.

That's a fair point. I'm extrapolating a bit from many other people I know, including nominal Christians and Catholics and my past self.

> One can pursue the truth without declaring everything else as worthless. Plus, I dispute the idea that "non-authentic" mysteries can't convey truth.

I agree, which is why I said that the allure of the character of _why (and Mary Poppins and Willie Wonka) is actually a shadow of Jesus, pointing to Him. But trivial pursuits for their own sake are too common, leading people to stop halfway through the journey to Truth because they're satisfied with an illusion. This is the tragedy I lament on HN in general and this thread in particular.

> GK Chesterton

If you enjoyed him, you'll enjoy Fulton Sheen too I suspect. The most thought provoking philosopher of the 20th century. Also, I have a friend who was convinced of becoming Christian by CK Chesterton but stopped short of Catholicism. Reminds me of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.

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