A Costly Parade, by Why the Lucky Stiff, and that NodeBox pong game -- in Shoes

Supporting yourself and still coding a lot of cool stuff to give away isn't really that hard. There are plenty of service, light tech support, or even desk jobs which only require a few hours a day worth of real concentration, and leave you alone with your thoughts the rest of the time.

Covering rent + groceries in some sleepy midwest town with decent broadband is do-able on minimum wage, if you don't mint having a small apartment and older computers.

The challenge is in living the kind of lifestyle that most HN readers have or aspire to: living in S.F., going out to nice restaurants + clubs with your hip, hacker friends, owning multiple nice computers + tech toys, and flying to conferences and vacations all over the world several times a year.

That stuff gets expensive, fast.

I worked with him for about a year several years ago (before he got into Ruby). For the most part, his personality is just as you see him in his writing. He's very intelligent, which probably accounts to some degree for his prolific coding. I really doubt he's wealthy, though. He's too anti-establishment for much of that. Definitely a genuinely good guy, though.

He's so prolific that for a while I wondered if _why wasn't really a collection of people. But, he's just so consistently odd and unique (in a good way) that it's hard to imagine that there could be more than one _why.

(Although, I wonder how hard it would be to use markov chains to generate _why-like rambling rants)

I wonder these things, too, but don't really think I want to know: his enigmatic presence is part of the fun

Yes, it was. None of the things said or insinuated were without reason. It was primarily a shame on you all type of commentary.