Whytheluckystiff's original domain back as an archive
whytheluckystiff.net
whytheluckystiff.net
It was just the right kick at the right moment, and he will have a place in my heart forever.
"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.
All code rots, and it rots quickly. Its the a reality of modern software.
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.
Js (or specifically npm) and python were far slower to adopt this convention, to the point that I think it's fair to say that neither have fully adopted it yet.
Js at least has made almost no backwards incompatible syntax or core lib changes though, which is a point in its favor. Ruby 2 and python 3 were major breaking changes.
Ironically, this has made JS a very stable language (though APIs do occasionally drop out or change drastically for security reasons).
If you take any app built three years ago, you are going to have critical security vulns in libraries you depend on. With java think of the log4j fiasco. With Ruby there are nokogiri or rails things. With javascript there are probably at least a handful of downstream packages that have pretty big security issues. Now you have to update dependencies, and then the real fun begins.
If it a walled-off intranet app on a VPN, or a small CLI app, sure, maybe you can ignore that issue. But if its a public web or mobile app that is gonna see real use, you are going to have to head down the security audit + package update rabbit-hole.
I think the `npm` community is going in the right direction and learning from mistakes of the past on this topic.
Frontend post react is an absolute nightmare: My experience with a fleet of semi abandoned next.js static websites is pretty terrible: just in months something stops working in my pipeline on vercel and I need to spend time to debug it. Running things locally is even worse, I just change the code, push and hope for the best.
Python is a downright nightmare: between 2vs3 and pip, egg, venv, I usually just salvage the code I need and try to make it work or convert it to something saner (eg. I did that with an opencv algorithm I found - I just transposed it to rust + the same opencv api calls). My favourite story happened literally 2 days ago. I was trying to install a dependency (keras_ocr) and I kept failing on some dependency; I tried installing that dependency manually and it worked but no success on installing keras_ocr. Eventually I updated pip and it started working.
I had huge problems running old Go software, I think I succeeded once after a lot of pain and gave up the other times.
I had fairly good results with ancient C, C++, Java and Haskell. Probably because they started before we had cool and glamorous developers on twitter selling you a course and not maintaining his 200 leftpad libraries.
I'm curious to see where Rust will sit in a few years.
- On local: `npm i && next dev` is guaranteed to be stable.
- On remote: your pipeline is guaranteed to be stable.
If you have an example where this is not the case, please let me know.
C is a great example of this. Even if the ABI changes, in the worst case scenario a well-written C program only needs to be recompiled.
Run some 8 year old Clojure Github project, should be fine.
Try a Common 20 year old Common Lisp project, you shouldn't have an issue.
But I've had to work out weird command line incantations for various libraries that touch crypto or JavaFX namespaces. And things like Quil are still in a weird state on modern JVMs.
I wonder what intrinsic quality makes a language long lived, rather than blame communities and whatnot.
Another stalwart is Pure Data, the DSP language I am very fond of. It's based on atomic principles. Indeed the primitive processing elements are called Atoms, being irreducible ops like multiply, add, sin and cos. There really isn't much that can change. For C as for LISP, especially Scheme, it's hard to break them down any further, yet they are high enough level to be useful for programming. There's some sweet-spot to be found.
The Microsoft example is important. I've never been a fan, but I stand in grudging respect for what they've accomplished with their products as far as backwards compatibility goes, which has significant and enduring value.
Emulators are another example of how software can be long-lived with the right attention.
Personally, I think we have operating environment conceptions all wrong. We continually pay for or fête new versions and thus incentivize change for change's sake. We might do better to respect or even pay for continuing compatibility.
I was a PM for Visual Basic back in the day. A huge amount of work was done within dev and Office to work around problems with Adobe, Borland, etc. so that compat wasn't broken. It was frustrating and heartening.
This may be a bit of an extreme example, but generally the unix-y APIs have been relatively stable over the decades, including X11 as we see.
% ls -l
total 176
-rw-r--r-- 1 foo staff 547 Sep 9 1995 Imakefile
-rw-r--r-- 1 foo staff 15666 Sep 9 1995 Makefile
-rw-r--r-- 1 foo staff 7545 Sep 9 1995 README
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 foo staff 33472 Sep 9 1995 oneko.c
...
% xmkmf
mv -f Makefile Makefile.bak
imake -DUseInstalled -I/opt/homebrew/Cellar/imake/1.0.8_5/lib/X11/config
% touch DarwinMachineDefines; make CFLAGS="-I/usr/X11R6/include -I/usr/X11R6/lib --include=stdlib.h --include=string.h --include=unistd.h"
cc -I/usr/X11R6/include -I/usr/X11R6/lib --include=stdlib.h --include=string.h --include=unistd.h -c -o oneko.o oneko.c
...
% DISPLAY=:0 ./oneko
It's not even a particularly cherry-picked example. One day a few years ago, I suddenly remembered that cat, and went out to see if I can still find it. I tried to build it more just for kicks and remember being surprised when it not only "just built", but even "just ran", on my Mac, for which it wasn't even for.
Yeah, something bigger will most likely push back more, especially as soon as more dependencies than just the C library itself and X11 come into play. Though overall my track record in building ancient C stuff with an acceptable amount of changes is pretty good!
Just runs a lot faster. :-)
By comparison, the SPA is a nightmare of tooling and dependencies that will be unsupportable in a few years without constant maintenance and updating.
But JavaScript that worked in 1995 still works today. All of it.
We run twenty year old Perl scripts on new hosts at work all the time, with little to no change required in them. We have lots of microservices written in Perl over the last decade or more, and those generally have very little to no problem being ported to new systems as well. The problem now? Finding people that know Perl or want a job writing it.
Indeed. Although writing Perl is not so bad, reading not so much.
I think the total amount of effort required to write good legible code is about on par with it's contemporary languages if you take the time to write it well, but it's hard to resist being able to write it quickly and be done because it's easy to ignore the problem of tomorrow you're creating by being so quick and productive today.
I think people lost interest in Perl because Python was just a better language for a lot of people’s use cases (and arguably a lot less mysterious). And the focus on Perl 6 (now Raku) arguably distracted a lot of people from Perl 5 and then took too long to mature. (At least that’s how it looked from my outside perspective.)
> Python was just a better language for a lot of people’s use cases
I won't argue that about the short term, but long-term? Long-term the difference in policy in how it deals with changes ends up at exactly the problem we're discussing. The fact that (IMO) pyenv and virtualenv are needed to manage python deployments in any sane way is evidence of this.
Long-term a lot of projects that ended up using Python would likely have been better served by Perl because of the expected target and lifecycle of the programs in question. There are a lot of aspects of languages which aren't necessarily the thing people were thinking of at the time that they do think of now, because of very negative examples. Examples such as package distribution, which Javascript has had numerous problems with in the past with NPM, and Python occasionally still struggled with (I'm looking at you, pip, and your CLI search interface brokenness).
These days new languages take package management and deprecation policies and cycles and how to deal with long-term stability extremely carefully, because of the examples of Perl and Python and Javascript, etc. At least the ones that plan to have any real adoption do. Rust is a somewhat recent example of that. Look at all the effort they put into making sure they got those aspects as correct as they could and communicated them well to users. I don't think Rust would have nearly as many people using it or interested in it if they didn't give those the importance they did (I imagine C# and Java are similar, but I follow news about them somewhat less).
I recently wanted to play around with it again, and I was able to get the entire thing running in Kubernetes. You can find docker images for Ruby 1.8.7 still, and the Rails 2.1 gems still installed fine. It might not be up to date security wise, but it runs!
It didn’t teach me a whole lot about Ruby but I probably read it a dozen times or so lol
"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."
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.
Why the Luck Stiff Documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64anPPVUw5U
"It oughtta be illegal" is easy to say but not so easy to actually make happen.
(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.)
>> 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.
So this person should get a penalty which in some ways is more severe than what murderers get?
> No, blaming victim is obviously irrational.
Okay, but I mean, if I publish my own name and address in a public space, and then someone else who doesn't like me takes that information and republishes it in a manner I disapprove of, is that person still a doxer?
That's an extreme example but doxing almost never involves information which is not already publicly accessible to someone stubborn enough. It just involves following threads, correlating information, using public databases, etc.
Being deported is way more humane than imprisonments. Personally, to me, being controlled than governments, corporations, etc logging my identity and any other information as they want is from of control I neither agreed to, nor would and would happily deport myself to a country than did not.
>> if I publish my own name and address in a public space, and then someone else who doesn't like me takes that information and republishes it in a manner I disapprove of
That would not be possible, at least in a significant way; any directly or indirectly identifiable information digitally published would require approval and would be revocable.
___
Again, might point is two parts: (1) people would never agree to this; (2) but if they did, there is nothing I am aware of the would make it impossible.
In the middle are various levels of negligence and poor handling of PII which should attract severe punishment to provide economic incentive to protect PII or simply not collect it in the first place.
The whole goal of doxing is intimidation.
If so, I disagree.
He was a wonderful and quirky man. A true artist. And artists, unfortunately, seem to have a sort of tortured relationship with the world sometimes.
I hope he's found his peace wherever he is. I'm sure he understands how much he touched and inspired so many of us. Shine on, _why, wherever you are.
Edit: they had pics of his wife and a screenshot of his home on Google Maps... That's doxxing
at ruby conferences he attended, folks would offer him a ride back home, so he'd have them like, drop him off at a park near his house or at a street corner. all of his talks and writing was written as "_why," and his event namebadges carried his screen name as well.
i remember thinking that one of the reasons why he "disappeared" in 2010 was because some folks were trying very hard to uncover his real-world identity
Is this okay? Should this person have a right to "be forgotten"? Even if we assume this person could somehow articulate a manner, method and value of negative impact this association has caused, is there a correct avenue to address this?
- The news outlets are not doing anything wrong, they largely have reported only facts. They're precluded from mentioning the perpetrator by name, and the good Samaritan is reported by name as having intervened in the crime and preventing it from escalating; these are indisputable facts.
- Is the person reviewing job applicants to blame for possibly not going past the title of an article when searching a prospect's name and city?
Unfortunately as reality here has shown, there is no correct way forward. Legislatively, the USA does not hold the rights of the good Samaritan above the Constitutional rights of the press and witnesses. Imagine the feelings that develop in the good Samaritan in realizing they're powerless against the public record while having done nothing wrong and being accused of no crime.
Clojure is cool and all, but it has no Chunky Bacon
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.
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.
_why is invisible, not known to be dead. It is possible to harm unseen people.
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.
The average HN user who posts blog content and deletes it is not going to be able to stop it from being distributed. Technically they own the copyright to its content but the end result would be identical to if he or she had announced it to be in public domain. Anybody anywhere could freely share and publish its content on platforms without any consequences unless you notify the platform with DMCA notice and it would be largely up to the discretion of the platform to comply or not as many hosting services explicitly advertise such "bulletproof" hosting.
Your own take on what's moral and not has no bearing here since we don't know how the author feels about his work being shared. Yeah I get it that he has copyright to it but its not exactly enforceable on the internet.
Of course, as per the laws of most countries it is also a copyright violation and the copyright holder can absolutely sue for such behavior, with penalties ranging from a legal obligation to cease to host the content to damages.
They have removed web sites before due to copyright claims and have a DMCA claim process.
Internet Archive operates the same way, if they receive DMCA notice, they need to comply in order to keep the safe harbour process.
As to whether WTL will file a DMCA to take down his material, it looks unlikely. For whatever reason he suddenly wanted to be out of limelight and I get the feeling that he doesn't care much whether his work is shared or not but who knows, maybe he will come out of the woodwork to raise his voice (which would be in contrast to his reclusive state).
He really is a mysterious figure and even more mysterious is the sheer amount of effort he put into his work and passion to share it suddenly relinquished overnight, out of whim? stress? depression? We can only guess.
However, the platforms and websites that publish that leak cannot be held accountable nor are they beholden to any agreement between you and your partner. Simply because there is no explicit /implicit agreement outside those two parties.
The same logic applies to whatever material you publish on the web. Once it enters public domain, you've relinquished the control over its distribution. The principle here is that once you publish to a public domain and while you can claim copyright and take down the material using DMCA, as long as the platform complies they are granted safe harbour and you are not going to be able to claim damages especially if you did not commercialize it. Even if a game you were selling were distributed online, it would be very tough to stop or go after platforms that hosted it.
Following the "partner leaked pictures" scenario, the opinion of courts with precedent ruling is that it demonstrates an explicit boundary between the parties involved in the original leak of the picture who are known to each other vs third parties that consume it who have no idea what agreements took place between them. Damages to the partner that leaked it can be held responsible but neither the platform or its audience. Even if they monetized the content, they would not be at fault because there is no implicit/explicit agreement once those leaks enter the public domain.
I don't know why we are getting side tracked with leaked nudes scenario but the gist of it is that only your partner that leaked your nudes are liable. If he/she uploads and it enters public domain and is shared amongst the entire cities spanning the globe the platform and its audience cannot be held responsible because of the lack of implicit/explicit agreement between the subject in the photo and the original distributor.
> it remains a violation of copyright for him or anyone else to post them without your permission, and damages can be claimed.
You can file DMCA to take down the photos and you can claim damages from the leaker, not the people who distributed it after the fact and the platforms that monetized and hosted the content.
Otherwise we would not be able to enjoy websites like xvideos or pornhub, who would take down the photos/videos if requested through DMCA but would not be liable for further dissemination nor will its audience.
Simply said and put: Once you put out content in the public domain or view, you lose control of it, and you cannot put the cat back in the bag. Copyright laws and right to privacy IS NOT going to change this principle.
More damages could be potentially claimed if the pictures your ex are posting are pictures you sell commercially, in fact, because you've demonstrated that those photos have value and that you depend on your copyrights to make a living.
You are also wrong on the scenario with leaked photos. The partner who leaked is liable not the rest of us who view it and share it.
Your last sentence also couldn't be further from the truth. Someone who is making ad revenues also isn't at fault and compliance with DMCA notice would be enough for them to continue operating.
Think about it... if the opposite were true then I could watch or download a TV show from Hulu for free and claim I own it and rebroadcast it to others while charging them money. That's not how it works though, just because I watched it for free doesn't mean it's public domain and I am free to do whatever I want with it.
putting it in public domain or publishing it on the internet results in the same outcome, you lose control over it's access and distribution. its even worse because if you try to censor it or known to litigate, it would cause streisand effect.
you are not hulu and you cannot afford the legal costs. even then it still doesn't stop torrent websites from hosting your content and distributing it.
Public domain is a legal term of art. It is not the internet, and it is not achieved by publishing something on the internet.
Common carrier status is orthogonal to all this.
True; instead it is explicit. This isn't controversial at all, in typical jurisdiction unless explicitly released into public domain the author retains all copyright - your consuming one of those copies gives you no further rights at all.
As a matter of practicality, it probably wont be acted on. Unless there is enough money involved to go after such copyright violations, it's unlikely anyone will bother...
The files and such may live forever, but your ability to publish them, reproduce them, etc. is only allowed if you were granted a license to do so.. i.e. if _why published them under a permissive or open source license.
We all know what copyright is. We all know nobody cares online, too. Those of us who remember the work when published originally also know that you’re making an argument that _why would hate you making, and that they consciously chose to avoid through how they published. I can tell how you’re arguing here that you don’t remember or didn’t know _why’s preferences, which is itself somewhat disrespectful.
Stick to the respect, which is an interesting thought to consider, and spare the copyright litigation. It’s honestly tedious.
The exact same argument you're making is what someone who would steal _why's work and charge money to republish it would make. Imagine if someone ganked the poignant guide to ruby and it became a NYT bestseller... can they just say "oh this is what _why would have wanted, for more people to read this" and walk away with all the profits?
Copyright is there for a reason, to protect the owner of a work. If _why chooses to do so they can go after anyone republishing their work for money or not.
Given that they haven’t. And haven’t for years, I imagine they’re done with the whole thing.
Or whether things put on the internet are any more publicly owned than books, television shows, or movies, which can all easily be put on the internet (and which everybody agrees is extremely problematic irt the law.)
edit: also, this really reeks of weird parasocial hero worship unless you know the man and have asked him about it.
I’ve not written a single line of Ruby in my life and even I know his thoughts on copyright and public domain and intellectual property, is the point. I actually hate how many people worship him like he’s Jesus because the content is more interesting than the person, which is the case for pretty much anyone creative and has nothing to do with him. (Something tells me he’d vibe on that take, too, given how he left.)
And back to the parent's comment and others regurgitating the same circular logic: We know its not public domain on legal term but we are saying it might as well be because of the irreversible nature of making any content publicly available on the internet which more or less is identical to putting your content in public domain.
I suspect a lot of this rigid thinking and hyper sensitivity to word is spectrum behavior and I am already seeing several people.
This is like people arguing people who pirate should be put in prison. I wonder what type of world they live in to be this rigid and black & white thinking. Must be quite isolating
So it must feel really weird to him that people go to so much trouble to keep his old texts alife. It's like the whole _why thing is now completely separate to him and it's now about the idea of him and people care more about the idea of _why. It kinda feels like making a tribute site/song/whatever to your first love years a decade later.
I thought it was more like a book going out of publication—there’s no desire from the author that people should stop reading it, just that it’s out of the author’s hands.
I don’t know if _why ever expressed a desire that people shouldn’t go back and read his writing.
There's a lot of different takeaways from that and other contemporary writings of _why. Some of them are that _why wished to pursue the Right to Be Forgotten, not just in the GDPR terminology sense, but in a "Last Chance to See" existential way. Those impressions yield that _why watched the internet transition from "pseudonyms are fine and ephemeral" to "everyone knows your real name and pseudonyms are permanent fixtures in the modern internet" and tried as hard as possible to kill everything about that pseudonym as Performance Art. As a reminder of an internet long gone. As a reminder of a Right to be Forgotten.
From that perspective, this archive is maybe a bit of putting a Banksy into the Louvre. It's out of context, it's maybe against the artist's wishes, it's kind of weird and over-pedestalizing a legendary figure.
(Arguably _why's last stand failed to account for that little last bit, that human tendency even older than the internet of myth making and legend building. As this shows, as the history of mentions of _why on HN alone every few months shows, legends loom large in culture and _why was already a part of the programming legendarium before he tried to murder that pseudonym.)
[1] https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/raw/master/CLOSURE.p...
If it were just his own servers that lapsed, sure. But he actively deleted his GitHub repos.
https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/821...
His content was good, a natural technical teacher. Hopefully resurfaces one day. Might still be active under a different name, who knows.