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Comment by carbon8 | Hacker News Reader

Apparently he tweeted this yesterday (quoted from a retweet): "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."

But _why's contributions are largely irreplaceable. Yeah, software evolves and individual projects might be supplanted by others, but his contributions go way beyond simply writing functioning code.

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But _why's contributions are largely irreplaceable.

Sadly this is not true for anyone.

Not in the programming world, which is sad.... but hopefully that isn't the only place we live in.

I'm not in the ruby world, so perhaps that's why his contributions have largely been outside my sphere and there may be a great deal I'm unaware of. That said, when someone goes and removes their repositories and whatever other traces of their workproduct they have access to (as is their right), it might make people reluctant to use their products in the future (assuming they return).

_why has never really made "products" -- in fact, as far as I know, he's never made money from any of the stuff he shared online. (Sales of physical copies of the Poignant Guide may be the one exception to this, but IIRC, he priced it exactly at his cost in order to insure the widest possible distribution.)

There has been some negativity about hpricot lately:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=Nokogiri%20hpricot

And hpricot is the only living remnant of _why.

Well thanks to github, there's branches of a bunch of his work. I have a fairly recent copy of Potion: http://github.com/adamsanderson/potion/tree/master

Apparently he tweeted this yesterday: "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."

ironically he wrote "you" on twitter, and you wrote "u" on hn.

It's from a retweet I believe, where the retweeter replaced "you" with "u", perhaps to fit it into 140 chars.

burn out?

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