_why: "Goodbye until I can shake this."

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/chapter-6.html#section7

by luigi • 17 years ago

130 50 17 years ago

mislav.uniqpath.com

aditya• 17 years ago

gasp he was planning this all along! and he left clues!

drawkbox• 17 years ago

and his name is _why? What we are all asking right now!

marcusestes• 17 years ago

I'm confused. When did _why add this section? Recently? Did he even add it at all? It begins: August 19th shall be known as _why Fawkes day.

pygy4• 17 years ago

It was there when he wrote the chapter, with the comic section attached next to it.

There are other allusions to him leaving the scene/dying in other writings.

omouse2• 17 years ago

It's strange that no one mentions those sections when they mention the book.

judofyr• 17 years ago

It was there Feb 8th 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20080208063221/http://poignantgui...

wcarss• 17 years ago

I can't find that "August 19th shall be known as _why Fawkes day" bit - where'd you see that?

matthewcford• 17 years ago

surely you mean _why forks day.

TeHCrAzY3• 17 years ago

Please, go back to reddit.

chime• 17 years ago

I don't know how to say this politely but we really need a bunch of Erlang articles on HN right now. _this _is _getting _out _of _hand.

pygy4• 17 years ago

It may not be the right place to discuss these matters, but it's the only place I have (with the programming reddit, but the userbase is different).

kyro2• 17 years ago

What matters exactly?

nir• 17 years ago

I think it's exactly the right place to discuss it. This is Hacker News, _why is a great hacker. This is the one place in the web where him disappearing is considered important. Those who prefer to read what Julia heard that Scoble said to Arrington about Twitter have the whole Hyposphere for that.

unalone4• 17 years ago

It's a brief influx. We've had these before. Two days from now we'll all have forgotten about this.

How is this any different from, say, all the furor when Apple releases a new product, or Google unveils a future technology, or TechCrunch gets called out for doing something dumb? Social news is given shape by social waves.

Semiapies7• 17 years ago

None of those things involve scads of people freaking out and trying to psychoanalyze a man they don't know.

It's not the volume of stories, it's the tone of the comments.

KirinDave• 17 years ago

I can provide for you. As an Erlang developer for MS I've been asked to review Axum and give feedback. So they pointed me at the publicly available guide:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/D/5/BD51FFB2-C777-4...

I can only wince and wonder where I even start?

greyfade• 17 years ago

... What the hell?

It's like a C# developer trying to reinvent Erlang... Poorly. And using a needlessly verbose syntax.

Just tell them they're Doing It Wrong.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

I think what we really need is a new word for 'IT Drama'.

There's an awful lot of it these day, I'm expecting Oprah or someone like her to realize the potential of this real soon now.

Dvorak, Sethi, now this guy _why (_why not ? _who cares ?)

When Hans Reiser turned murderer I think it was newsworthy, most of the rest of this IT Drama stuff is just as interesting as Britneys latest tantrum.

rabble• 17 years ago

Damned fools who don't get why _why was awesome and worth reading about.

TeHCrAzY3• 17 years ago

Please stop upvoting this rubbish. Please start thinking before posting. If you have a statment to make, please back it up with exactly what you feel should make it true and justified.

apotheon• 17 years ago

Now look what you've done . . .

kyro2• 17 years ago

I also noticed that if you rearranged the letters in 'why' you get 'hwy', which, if pronounced a specific way, sounds very similar to the Pacific island of Hawaii, leading me to believe that he made his escape there on the 19th, which you get by fully curving the bottom right part of the 'h' around to make a '9', flipping it over both horizontally and vertically, and placing it to the right of the underscore when propped up to give us the '1'. It was under our noses the entire time.

derwiki• 17 years ago

Your comment has 19 points! That -has- to confirm it!

pyre• 17 years ago

And now for the unmasking! _why really is.... Bill Gates?!

"...and I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you crazy kids!"

flashingpumpkin• 17 years ago

i'm in no point a ruby guy or involved with the ruby community, but i couldn't have missed this guys legacy. kinda reminds me of RAW.

pygy4• 17 years ago

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/images/the.foxes-6... :-(

Tall Fox: -Have you noticed that this book is basically written by a _lunatic_?

Short Fox: -Yup

Tall Fox: -Seriously, he's way too hyperactive. If he keeps at this frantic pace he's gonna burn out quick.

Short Fox: -Burn out? He's gonna shoot himself in the head by the time he hits 30.

From that kind of comment and the pace of his work (bouts of rabid coding interspersed with AWOL periods), I'm afraid he's bipolar. His only output (code, writing, mailing list contributions) in june was a single tweet saying that he was trapped in a labyrinth of his own design.

I sincerely hope he's alright.

andreyf• 17 years ago

And here:

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/images/departure.p...

"Ha! I was right! He flipped his lid! He's all burned out and he's going to shoot himself in the head!"

On the bright side, from the little psychology and the little about _why's author that I know, he doesn't seem to fit a psychological profile of someone who would kill himself. I'm sure he works a lot, and his work is curiously personal and I'd imagine exhausting, but his work is also well recognized and celebrated. Many artists don't have that luxury in their lifetimes.

pygy4• 17 years ago

I read his original blog on advogado today. There's a mention of his father undergoing a mental breakdown, and of his sister having drugs and alcohol problems. It ends like this:

"and i go home and draw cats and doctors in space. without the medication. i'm a stiff. an upright. i'll never pass a joint. maybe mj works, maybe mj's death. i have too much mental illness in my blood to find out. narco+alco have turned kooky people i love into obliterated people i love. god, god, god, please keep her alive. (if i'm lucky maybe god will let a horse run by.)

families are a network of lost packets and bad routing. cause you got spouses on the vpn. it's not all that bad, but it's fun to moan, ya know."

While there are some errements, these themes are far too recurrent to just be whimsical.

larryfreeman• 17 years ago

I didn't know who _why is. Here's a link for non-ruby folks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

omouse2• 17 years ago

Can we stop discussing this? The more you say, the more it diminishes the effect and the aura of his leaving.

kakal• 17 years ago

this is effing lame.

rotw• 17 years ago

The Ian Curtis effect.

bitwize• 17 years ago

It's official. News.ycombinator is now news._whycombinator. And I can't stand it.

_why: "Goodbye until I can shake this."

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