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153 pointsjonathantneal54 comments

The moral of all this is that if you want to disappear silently, you should disappear silently. Silently on the internet does not mean deleting your content. It means leaving it there.

Amen to that. Specially if all your content was open source.

Indeed. If anything, I consider his move a little douchey. At least he should have put the tarballs for his open-source content somewhere and said "there guys, figure it out". Looks more like throwing a tantrum.

This was not unexpected. Several years ago there was an enigmatic post in his blog, a comparison with David Salinger author of The Catcher in the Rye, after publishing that book Salinger disappeared from public presence and hide from any form of popularity. The best friend of Mark died from drug consumption not long ago, and he was really disappointed about that. One time Mark said that all his activity in the web was of no use for getting a good friend. He think that you can have only one friend that survive you, and that friend is not here ...

No wonder people imagine strange things happening when someone decide to disappear in the web.

Did anyone manage to fork Dive Into HTML5's mercurial repository at hg.diveintohtml5.org recently? I had started translating the book to Spanish and now I'm left stranded!

Answering myself: https://github.com/diveintomark/diveintohtml5

I am sorry, but I was out of the loop. What exactly happened to the original site?

The author did a variant of the _Why: took down his online presence, deleted the online accounts he could and changed the configuration of his sites to return "410 Gone" on requests.

Why ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

But why?

No ... who is on second.

That's a real shame. I enjoyed reading his blog, especially during his transition to Linux.

google maps key error on http://diveintohtml5.info/detect.html

Fixed. Thanks.

no problem :)

There's this, too: http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/

I'm not very educated in all this legal stuff, so i have few questions regarded license of this book. First: does license CC-BY-3.0 allow me to download this book for free, make any changes to format or content of the book, including downloading to my Kindle? Amazon sells O'reilly version for kindle for 15.49$, and i can't find 'mobi' version at any legal sources, so is it ok if i make one myself? And if i will, is it ok to share it with everyone?

Secondly, as i understand, there is no problems with translating the book to any language and then sharing it for free with everyone?

why not? The license permits you to do what you want with it, as long as you attribute the original author.

I was expecting that, but wasn't completely sure about it. Thanks.

I just discovered that those resources were down. Is there any mirror of dive into python available? A good friend wants to learn python and that was a terrific resource.

I wish Mark all the best. I know what is to loose a good friend. Still what he created was beautiful and those resources are too good to vanish.

if you mean the one about python 2 I have it ( diveintopython-html-5.4.zip ), I'll gladly upload it somewhere. The python3 one is @ https://github.com/diveintomark/diveintopython3

feedparser.org is also down.

The Google code project is still there: https://code.google.com/p/feedparser/

And the software is still in PyPi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/feedparser/

This was a project Mark worked on his employer's time. Thats why it is different.

Different from what? What do you mean?

I'm super confused. A couple hours ago the two top stories were about mark pilgrim having done what looked like an info suicide. I came back here to check on that and the stories are nowhere to be seen on the first two pages of HN. What happened?

Looks like someone at HN stopped an attention whore from attention whoring too much. Censorship, yes, but nice censorship.

Is Pilgrim the attention whore ? Can you elaborate on why it was a good move to censor the stories ? I'm really confused by this story.

Also, jonathantneal, why is your name showing up green ?

Names of new users are green. 'jonathantneal' registered 3 hours ago (it's now 09:08 CEST).

I'm sorry, but no censorship is nice in a site that is supposed to be about content getting up-voted/down-voted by a community.

There's no downvoting, though. Hence, moderators sometimes remove articles that are popular but don't belong here. Just because something is popular among HN readers doesn't mean it needs to be on HN, and the mods balance out the natural Way Of The Universe in that case.

I'm not sure I necessarily agree with this, but am just stating how things work here. There is no reason to expect that you aren't being censored; ultimately this site is for advertising YC, not for being an impartial news filter.

You right of course, I was mistakenly thinking of comments getting down-voted, but articles cannot.

> There is no reason to expect that you aren't being censored; ultimately this site is for advertising YC, not for being an impartial news filter.

Yeah, it's important to keep sight of that, and frankly in that case it makes me wonder why I should continue to come back here?

Yeah, it's important to keep sight of that, and frankly in that case it makes me wonder why I should continue to come back here?

Same here. That's why I'm so interested in what happened backstage with these stories. I've contacted the mail link on the Guidelines section for some light but haven't received a reply yet.

Mark is fine.

See update on http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2011/10/04/searching-for-m...

Previous HN threads:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3073798

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3073842

Both stories have more than 200 votes and are only a few hours old. Mark Pilgrim doing an info suicide is newsworthy and obviously a lot of people care about it, so can someone explain how and why those stories have been kicked out of the first HN pages?

I imagine they got flagged to death by reasonable people, or a moderator star-chambered them.

Either way, good riddance. Mark didn't want them there, obviously, and neither did anyone except rubbernecking thrill-chasers.

It was ridiculous to think the guy was in trouble or to send the freaking police to his house. The man has friends, family, and co-workers, and the people who surfaced this story didn't so much care if he was alright (because they weren't his friends) so much as they wanted a few seconds of internet fame for being the first to notice the data wipe.

The story should have been posted as "Lookie, lookie - Mark Pilgrim disappeared from the internet!" That would have been fine.

Instead, it was the morbid internet at its worst.

Mark didn't want them there, obviously, and neither did anyone except rubbernecking thrill-chasers.

Or people interested on the subject of mark pirlgrim's work going 401, or the subject of info suicide. There seems to be some kind of censorship goin on, and whether or not there's a legitimate reason for it, HN readers deserve an explanation.

Not defending anyone's actions here one way or another, but, being a sort-of-internet-celebrity and suddenly removing everything associated with yourself without a comment or explanation is bound to attract some attention.

Normal people in good mental and physical health don't generally "disappear from the Internet" in that way. Such a drastic measure warrants some concern. If he didn't want people to be concerned, he could have done it in a less drastic way.

Mark pulled down his twitter account, his blog, diveintopython and diveintopython3.

All of these is his own content developed in his own time, and he has every right to pull it down, if he so deems fit, whatever reasons for that. And he has.

Yet, diveintohtml5 lives on. The reason for it is that, it was something he wrote in his employers time who are at least part owners of it.

I hold high respect for Mark and for his wishes to pull down anything his. I am just recognizing the qualitative difference between diveintohtml5 and other projects that he pulled.

So ... why exactly were the HN stories buried?

Although, I didn't do it, I can reason why. If Mark pulled all his content (and even nominated his own Wikipedia article for deletion citing he is not notable) because he wanted some privacy, letting all those articles on the HN frontpage would do the exact opposite to provide him more attention that he is avoiding.

letting all those articles on the HN frontpage would do the exact opposite to provide him more attention that he is avoiding.

So you're saying those stories were removed because Mark Pilgrim wished they were? Is that how things actually work in HN?

benevolent censorship?

So Mark deletes this from the Internet, and a bunch of other people put it back up? For people that were concerned enough about him to send the police to his house a few hours ago, it seems weird that they are now saying "fuck the author's wishes" and putting it back online.

I guess if there isn't enough Internet Drama, we have to make our own? Can we go back to whining about node.js? At least I found that mildly funny...

I have mixed feelings about this.

I agree it is good that someone had the good taste to bury the HN stories.

But DiveInto* is good content, and the internet needs more content like it.

Being concerned about the author's well-being doesn't imply that one ought to 'respect his wishes' with regard to a CC-licensed work that many other people rely upon as a productive resource.

Mark has produced some exceptional reference works and released them under an open license. They certainly ought not be removed from existence on anyone's personal whim, original author or not, no matter how much we sympathize with his situation, whatever that might be.

Put another way, republishing an otherwise unavailable CC-licensed/open-source-licensed work is explicitly respecting the author's wishes, the author that published it under that license.

I doubt (but obviously don't know) Mark wanted to excise his work from human memory, he just didn't want the personal responsibility of maintaining those resources/participating in their development as a leader. That's the wish worth respecting.

Not to be a dick but pretty sure it's well-recognized as an infallible truth that once you put something on the Internet, it's in the world forever. It is never gone, no matter what you want.

I'm sure Mr. Pilgrim is well aware of this fact.

Shows one downside of digital publishing, where the author can just throw a fit and delete all their good content. If it was on books, they couldn't do a thing.

It also shows an upside of digital publishing, where others can restore the useful content the same day if it was published under a CC license.

Actually, by releasing the content under a CC license, the author clearly chose to have this exact phenomenon happen. He may no longer wish to host the books himself, which is reasonable and acceptable -- but since the CC license allows republishing, this behavior by others is also reasonable and acceptable. The only drama being made by this action is by wonks like you who ignore the basic facts of sharing based licensing to cop some sort of bs superior attitude.

I like the idea that 'the people' who called the police and 'the people' who got diveintohtml5.info up and running are obviously the same people, cause they like, use the internet and stuff.

Dude, it was CC licensed.

Just because he took down his copy doesn't mean he wanted it to disappear completely. Where did he explicitly state that? Nowhere! You're making a big leap there.

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