_why's site is back up
whytheluckystiff.net
whytheluckystiff.net
Edit: an article about _why, for those not in the know: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/...
So the most favored Rubyist has returned from hiding with a fun new puzzle. Further down, folks are posting interesting stuff about it.
But the finger wagging – people just can't get enough of telling people what they should do and feel. And apparently that's what they want, for behold this top comment.
My point though, is that _why has made it clear that he wants to be left alone, and this HN endeavour seems to violate that. Maybe you're right and it is a new puzzle. And maybe he's back. (For what it's worth I posted that before most of the investigation.) Nevertheless though, given _why's wishes, this makes me uncomfortable, and I don't think it's unreasonable for me to acknowledge that.
That, is of course, crossing the line. If someone wants to distance themselves from an online tag, they should be allowed to in peace.
Now, however, it seems that he's brought that persona back to life. He's posted a new puzzle, and brought his site back. Obviously, he wouldn't do that if he still "just wanted to be left alone." That's why people are excited.
Second, I think you're attributing motives to _why that none of us can possibly know. He's never discussed his rationale for leaving, so I try not to project motives onto him.
Maybe it is but it's pretty clear from the other posts in this thread (posted about the time you posted this) that this is the reaction he was expecting. This is him "doing something". If he didn't want people to snoop he wouldn't have given them something to snoop into.
This remark is rather parallel to "she shouldn't dress that way...". If doing something makes some people behave like creeps, its generally the fault of the creeps. And if the would be mystery man is prepping something, I'd rather he unveiled it than a cabal of creepers.
Note that I share your unease with this whole situation but let's not pretend that this wasn't the expected outcome.
That's not correct. If a woman/man comes naked in class, people WILL stare. And it's not their fault, nor is it "creepy", it's only natural.
In any case, this is not what we're dealing with here. Nothing creepy about noticing a website re-activated.
Weird, last time I checked I actually could avoid staring at people. Naked people too. Must be a superpower or something.
I do agree on the second paragraph, though — this is most definitely not this situation, it's more comparable to person entering a stage and starting to crack jokes.
Yes, it must be. Surely it's not normal or representative of the general population. The normal thing to do in such situations is to stare (something that has been milked for comedic effect in hundreds of "hidden camera" pranks).
That said, I don't really believe what you claim. You are probably overestimating your powers of not staring in a kind of Dunning Kruger effect. I'm pretty sure if Megan Fox (or whatever rocks your boat) entered your classroom naked you WOULD stare. A lot.
The general population did a lot of things it later stopped doing, or did less.
That said, I don't really believe what you claim. You are probably overestimating your powers of not staring in a kind of Dunning Kruger effect. I'm pretty sure if Megan Fox (or whatever rocks your boat) entered your classroom naked you WOULD stare. A lot.
That said, I don't really believe in your claim of estimating what is a part of uncontrollable behavior and what is not, in a kind of Dunning Kruger effect. For example, as a person who has seen a sauna, a mirror, and a public outdoor female-only bath in the middle of a city, I can assure you that I'd only stare if he/she specifically asked me to. I guess that's because I've been breast-feed in the Chernobyl era.
I doubt they've change a lot of thousands of years evolutionary traits like looking at something unexpected and/or sexual attraction.
(Plus it's not like the "hidden camera" pranks I mention happened in some long gone decades...)
>For example, as a person who has seen a sauna, a mirror, and a public outdoor female-only bath in the middle of a city, I can assure you that I'd only stare if he/she specifically asked me to.
We were talking about people doing things DIFFERENTLY (like one woman/man entering a room naked) driving attention, whereas the above example is about people all doing the same thing that is expected in that room (being naked).
I fail to see how this applies. And I'd love to do a "hidden camera" prank on you on this very matter.
Point taken, except that _why seems like just the kind of person who would have of fun making an ARG. Which this kinda sorta almost seems like.
Or “guy spotted at beach with kids and mystery woman”.
It's “guy publishes new content at his well-known internet domain”.
"Inquiring minds want to know!"
Which probably has the lowest correlation to entrepreneurial success as anything else. Curiosity about business or how the world works is different from curiosity about gossip. Gossip is unactionable to any positive outcome.
Ideas: a bizarre set of story ideas
http://www.scribd.com/doc/119138391/Ideas
Notes: life tips
http://www.scribd.com/doc/119138393/Notes
Test: A typed test document
On Pastebin:
Ideas: http://pastebin.com/WSfmLDA5
Life tips: http://pastebin.com/PTF4cfDJ
Test: http://pastebin.com/BExqVKpv
--------------
Full texts (same as Pastebin):
--------------
IDEAS FOR SALE
(All ideas are sold "as-is" with no warranty implied.
Stories unused within 70 years are forfeit for resale.)
A boy and a girl travel to the beach together, where
they pay a man to xxxxxx receive a bicycle ride from
his monkey. The ride is very uncomfortable, due to
a spoon tied to the seat which keeps whacking their
legs. Nevertheless, they fall in love and are maried.
At the end, the monkey is eating avocado with a spoon.
So that's what it was for. $3
A girl visits a boot store. In one of the racks, she
discovers a village of little people that has ssoraly
been living among the boots. A boy comes off the bus
outside, sees the girl in the store, falls in love and
goes and tells the girl he's in love with her. She
tries to show how the little village works, but he is
only marginally interested in that. They are wed, $1
A man eats corn on top of his house. It is his favorite
pasttime. He marries and dies happy. $3
Adam and Eve are riding bicycles (naked) in the Garden of
Eden. They decide to have a race to see who is the
fastest person in the world. Adam's wheel pops and he
uses the snake St Satan as a replacement tube. $4
A retired police offericer struggles to find acceptances
in the sububan life of Blouder Springs, Colorado. He
befriends a local fishmonger but still must fight his
personal demons. XXX 50
A guy with an enormous chin has the chin surgically
removed and is promptly married. $3
A man who collects prisms finds his house inundated
with refracted light, such that he is transformed into
a superpowerful albino who masquerades at as a wild
horse at night. A local fishmonger feeds the horse and
feeds him a green apple (not knowing the situation here)
which kills the albino half of the guy. So at night now
he's a live horse but is dead albino during the day.
The sheriff's office discovers the dead man and gives
him a proper funeral. During the funeral, the sun sets
and the whole horse body busts through the coffin. $12
A nerdy underappreciated kid wins a raffle and receives
his own Space Shuttle for a week. He installs a soft-serve
ice cream machine onboard and teaches a pet monkey to sit
in the cockpoit. One day, while going home from a birthday
party in space, the shuttle explodes (a la Challenger) $3 Deep Relationships. Notes on the article
Secrets to deep relationships:
-> asking deep questions
-> talking about deep relationships
with the person.
-> going camping with the person.
-> make the person a part of your
life (this may not work, though think about
it, we live with a mom and dad for many
many years, or we may not know anything deep
about them - might want to ask that person
a deep question to get things going)
-> make up something deep about the
person and then ask "is this true?"
("i heard you have a whole other
side to you that is very interesting
and i want to ask if this is true")
-> avoid using pseudonyms, use your
proper first and last name and avoid
other kinds of lying. (although you might
want to prepare a short
pseudonym that's just for deep relationships -
these special names are code for "i know you
deeper" and don't take pictures of yourself
with the person because pictures make the relation
ship not as deep - unless its a very old picture)
-> touch the person on the arm just once and
no more
-> promise to meet the person one hour from
now in the same spot (secret rendezvous technique,
good for when you're pressed
for time and need a deep relationship.)
-> joke and laugh - these seemingly light things
are surprisingly deep
On the side of "Life Tips":
deterioration of the
team "social" has made
this a lost art!!
perfect timing
Test:
TEST
TEST
RESTAURANT REVIEW
TEST
TEST Adam and Eve are riding bicycles (naked) in the Garden of
Eden. They decide to have a race to see who is the
fastest person in the world. Adam's wheel pops and he
uses the snake St Satan as a replacement tube. $4
Funnily enough this cyclicality is mentioned in the idea where a man ends up being a dead albino during the day and a wild horse at night. There's a cycle of the man going from dead albino to a wild horse and even a "Rising from the grave" (http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/rise+from+the+grave) in the idea's description.
Oh.. and here's some info about the symbolism of horses: http://www.whats-your-sign.com/horse-symbol-meanings.html
---
There's quite a few mentions of love and marriage across the texts. There's also a date on the last message (DESOLEE). Could they be related?
Oooh actually look at the second to last point of NOTES and then look at DESOLEE. Of course 18th of April not in "1 hour" but still ;)
One bit I found interesting in NOTES was "avoid using pseudonyms". Could this be something to do with _why detaching from his persona for the last few years?
---
deterioration of the
team "social" has made
this a lost art!!
perfect timing
---
/me takes tinfoil hat off
What this means is simple: _why switched to Perl 6.
0. Since 2012-12-09, the following content was available at http://whytheluckystiff.net/
Public Print Queue
SPOOL/TEST 2012-12-09T14:12Z
SPOOL/IDEAS 2012-12-13T23:26Z
SPOOL/NOTES 2012-12-19T00:28Z
0.1. Prints are very regular. There are 4.4 days between the first two, and 5 between the last two.
1. Going to those addresses yields, in essence, the following data: http://d.pr/i/qwo8
2. Now the following content is available:
Public Print Queue
SPOOL/DESOLEE 2012-01-06T08:21Z
2.1. It happened within 12 hours of this very thread.
2.2. DESOLEE is the french for "sorry", from a woman.
2.3. It is 2012, not 2013 (may be a typo).
3. Going to this address yields: http://www.scribd.com/doc/119155590/DESOLEE
3.0. A date of April the 18th is stated as the return of the printer queue.
I've confirmed this by looking up the DNS records for the domain; they point to 204.232.175.78 which is the (or an) address of pages.github.com: http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/204.232.175.78
I can't immediately figure out what repo this is being hosted from; a code search for 'DESOLEE' doesn't show anything, so I'm assuming it's a private repo. But at least we know there are git commits happening.
Could describe the girl he has been talking about throughout the documents.
I take his writing style as just being playful, though.
While other programming language communities have their notable figures, there is never as much outright drama surrounding them as we find in the Ruby community. In fact, these Ruby figures are now better known for the drama surrounding them than they are for any software they might've written.
It's really quite strange.
The community is like a boiling pot. Sure, handle it the wrong way and you might get turned off, but there is a lot of energy there.
Drama happens when you have a bunch of opinionated people who care deeply about their craft expressing their opinions.
If you can ignore the drama, i think you'll find the creativity more than makes up for it.
Thirty years ago Ruby-style drama would have played out as drunken rant at a post-conference hotel bar, or a snide comment on Usenet, or on an obscure mailing list. Not quite the same.
The Ruby guys didn't have the benefit of age, experience, or a certain amount of professional obscurity.
1) Drama: fair point.
2) Personality cult: Not as sure. I've seen more than one newb told "don't waste your time" on the Poignant guide in Ruby forums. why's weakness as a coder is pretty widely recognized. In my opinion maybe over-estimated, esp. relative to people like DHH.
3) To me - I learned Ruby when Rails was in its infancy and the Agile salesmen had barely just hitched their wagon to it - why represents a more innocent period of the Ruby community.
Ruby was really a wonderful place - not-especially talented programmers could explore relatively sophisticated programming language features in a safe sandbox. Everything you'd been doing with Perl or whatever you could do with blocks and lambdas and even call/cc if you didn't mind a huge performance hit (naturally you didn't.)
Maybe it's nostalgia, but I think there was a time when MINSWAN actually meant something. Now, every doofus with a self-rolled YAML parser thinks he's the Steve Jobs Memorial Arbiter of Proper Design over Earth and All Satellites Thereof.
4) Yes, it is strange. But then, this is a Perl- and Smalltalk-based language from Japan.
E.g. take Camping (a micro-web-framework that fit in 4K of code) - it is fascinating as a demonstration of some of the things you can do in little space. It is beautiful as art. It has provided inspiration for a lot of us that finds Rails unnecessarily bloated.
It is also totally unreadable for ordinary developers, weird and quirky to the point that if someone had checked something like Camping into one of our work repos, it'd be a "ha-ha, now seriously where is your actualy code?" moment.
The Ruby community appreciates code as art, and is probably more than others inclined to blur the boundary between it and what we will accept or even embrace in production systems. But _why's stuff is mostly firmly on the art side.
There are exceptions, e.g. Hpricot was a nice first try that demonstrates some of _why's skill in terms of creating pleasing interfaces, and he deserves credit for that even though HPricot itself has been largely superseded by Nokogiri.
Once you ascribe cult-like groupthink and behavior to a diverse and disconnected group of people who happen to write code in the same language, "leaders" of the cult will emerge from the noise. If you think DHH is some worshipped leader of Ruby programmers, you should read the GitHub comment threads on some of his changes to Rails.
2. Become semi-famous in said community by publishing a few puzzles and an intro book about programming. Doesn't have to be particularly insightful, mind blowing or even good by common standards as long as it's "quirky" and light hearted.
3. Become a cult symbol by dropping off the internet.
4. Come back after a few years and receive a Second Coming treatment.
5. ???
6. Profit!!!
(Of course I don't think this is an elaborate scheme by this guy and I see nothing wrong in his actions. I am only perplexed and turned off by the drama-seeking mentality of the (supposedly) rational, left-brained individuals that are expected to populate a programming community).
import irony
The first three files had spool dates
SPOOL/TEST 2012-12-09T14:12Z
SPOOL/IDEAS 2012-12-13T23:26Z
SPOOL/NOTES 2012-12-19T00:28Z
SPOOL/DESOLEE 2012-01-06T08:21Z
Also, according to the converted DESOLEE (http://www.scribd.com/doc/119155590/DESOLEE) file, something's happening on April 18, "from like four o clock to lets say twelve"
Edit: Apparently there was also a SPOOL/YOU
No idea the timestamp on that one, but it seemed to be just before SPOOL/DESOLEE
though, even I, am unable to buy into my own crazy theories. I might be insane! I tend to be terrible at these things too.
not quite related to this video, but something I found humorous was the picture he used in SPOOL/DESOLEE http://i.imgur.com/gJR6b.png not too sure but it looks like dogs racing.
I really liked the idea of scoped mixins, that would have allowed to extend any object locally (like, say, add unit conversion methods to numbers), without polluting the whole program. It was never implemented AFAIK.
With any language you have the freedom to write want you want to write, pick from the sources you feel are the best.
You can ignore the ruby community at large and still be productive. I don't see why (pun intended) if you don't use rails, you care about DHH, or Zed or whatever.
If you're unable to overlook _why as a fun programmer who happens to program ruby, I guess thats ok, but you really are missing out on an interesting language. I'd say the same thing about someone worrying about Guido and Python. Stretching that last analogy but I honestly don't know of any other programmer-artist that quite fits into the vein of _why. He is/was really unique.
And sometimes those curses come true. Like they say, "Fuck you!" and then you finally get laid.
"Public Print Queue SPOOL/TEST 2012-12-09T14:12Z SPOOL/IDEAS 2012-12-13T23:26Z SPOOL/NOTES 2012-12-19T00:28Z"
Confirming, the domain now has an A record to a github IP.
$ curl -I http://whytheluckystiff.net
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: GitHub.com
Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2013 04:37:51 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 109
Last-Modified: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:31:03 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Expires: Mon, 07 Jan 2013 04:37:51 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=86400
Accept-Ranges: bytesI wonder if there is a PCL viewer for OS X... It's really meant to be just for spooling data.
Edit: installing GhostPDL now.
I don't get any binary data from test, ideas or notes.
/SPOOL/DESOLEE gives me a binary file that seems to open in OpenPCLViewer on my Mac (gives a 2 page file) but it's completely unreadable, like a fragment of a corrupted binary image. I don't know if that's how the file is meant to look or if it's a bug in the reader.
I do note that "désolée" is the French word for sorry.
Here's the scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/119155590/DESOLEE
Transcriptified: This printer queue is going down for _MAINTENANCE_ but will shortly return for a day I believe it will be on the day of April the 18th from like four o clock to lets say twelve.
"th... ..... paper jam those ..... ....."
"Three rest of 6 paper jam these things copy machine"
The "rest of 6" and "copy machine" came from a friend who claimed to enhance the image. He said the first word was "three" though I thought "their" initially.
Do you think this content is erased or on the next page?
Found a fourth PCL: http://whytheluckystiff.net/SPOOL/YOU
Can somebody share more about some specific inspiring stuff _why did that makes him such an important figure in Ruby community:
Matz -> Ruby DHH -> Rails _why -> ?
Plus the Poignant guide helps.
Wrote some parsers/generators for various markup languages, at least one of which is now part of the Ruby standard library (after extensive rewrites).
Kind of like ESR in that he's more accomplished as an advocate than a coder, but unlike ESR doesn't pretend otherwise, and especially unlike ESR had the good sense not to overstay his welcome.
And hoodwink.d was really fun while it lasted (it was kind of a secret club that you had to explore and figure out some simple tech problems to get into).
Classic _why, if you ask me...
edit: posted link to best intro to R.E.
Domain Name: WHYTHELUCKYSTIFF.NET
Created on..............: 03-JAN-2002
Expires on..............: 03-JAN-2014
Record last updated on..: 13-DEC-2012
Status..................: ACTIVE
https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/287702245645107200
In under an hour, a status message is enough to garner many comments and speculation. Kudos to you, _why.
Worse to watch people go through it