In chapter 1, the narrator tells a story to "get you in the mood" for the Poignant Guide. "Here's something poignant to get you started." It's a story about a dog who he found and adopted, named Bigelow, only to lose him right away.
In chapter 5, the narrator reveals that he is a Preeventualist. Preeventualism seems like a fairly new philosophical doctrine, asserting that the nature of all predictive thought is optimistic -- even dystopian futures are "optimistically" predicted to come true. Therefore preeventualists just "focus... on the understanding that hope will always prevail in any sort of thought". I'd never heard of preeventualism before, but it made sense that someone on the cutting edge of Internet programming would also be on the cutting edge of philosophical discourse. And it was cutting edge -- no wikipedia articles, no podcasts, nothing. Just one page of actual information on the preeventualist homepage, and that shout-out in the Poignant Guide.
But it's a pretty compelling philosophy on the face of it, and they have a preeventualist youth group responsible for maintaining the web page (which is probably why it went down with such frequency). You can see other examples of preeventualist thought if you know what you're looking for: Anathem is pretty preeventualist, and if you start to think seriously about Long-Now style timescales I bet you'll become somewhat preeventualist yourself. (You'll start to mix up words like "molding" and "embroidery".) And of course there's always Ashley Raymond's blog, which sadly doesn't get updated at all. In fact, there's only the one entry, in which Ashley Raymond talks about his time with his dog, whom he called Biggles, whose "accusatory gaze often hinted at how wrong my pronounciation must have been".
Wait. Biggles? Bigelow?
So I did a whois on preeventualist.net, and sure enough, it was registered to _why the Lucky Stiff. Conclusion: the dude FABRICATED AN ENTIRE PHILOSOPHY FOR A THROWAWAY JOKE IN HIS STUPID BOOK. And it wouldn't be so stunning except that I BECAME a preeventualist in the time between discovering the philosophy and discovering that it was "fake" (if such a thing can be said of an idea).
A few people did some internet stalking back when he first disappeared and tracked down some of his real-life friends and family. Creepy, yes, but also enough to determine that the man behind the pseudonym is alive and well.
And, since one of the suspected reasons for why he chose to disappear as he did was "people prying into his real-life non-_why identity", it's probably best if we leave it at that.
I know I'm not alone in knowing the real _why, knowing that he was okay, passing that message on and I trying to stop the stalking/detective work. While I'm not sure he wanted people who know him to do so, I think it was the lesser of two evils to tracking down everyone who might know him and exposing them and bothering them.
As someone who's picking up one of _why's projects, I know I'm deathly afraid of someone thinking I was trying to replace such a legend. So I certainly wouldn't, as cool as I think the 'wandering professor' title was...
Actually, when a person has touched lives of so many people in a very good and profound way, he cannot escape a bit of attention back. The enquiry "are you ok?" is human and not evil.
Stalking _why online doesn't turn into Internet stalking. If I hunt a guy down in real life, but all I do with his family is talk to them and see if he was okay, I'm not stalking them. I'm just contacting them.
It was only painfully obvious after someone had done the detective work to verify that he hadn't suddenly died in real life. Obvious in retrospect is easy...
It's rather poetic to think that when you die in real life, all your digital work vanishes too. But were there people who really thought that's what happened?
I hadn't heard about this detective work until just now, but there was never a great mystery in my mind. Not to be a jerk, but I think it was obvious at the time that this was just a person who really valued his privacy.
At times, _why projected an image of the "troubled artist" archetype--either "real" or part of the _why persona, no one knew--and if memory serves me he'd had a couple disappointments recently and left some downbeat tweets.
So, while I can't speak for randallsquared, at least some of the people wanting to know if he'd "suddenly died" or some such were just being too tactful to say that they were afraid he might have committed suicide--in which case the deleting all his online stuff would have been completely plausible.
I don't know if direct contact was made, but they were definitely aware that the internet private eye squad had found their online presences. Names and locations were also found.
Like I said, it was kinda creepy. I wouldn't even have been reading about it but... well, I wanted to know if _why was okay. And yes, I realize that even if I didn't actively participate, watching others do it doesn't necessarily make me blameless.
Make of that what you will, but I do encourage everyone to not pursue the matter further. He's fine, don't worry about that, let's show him some respect.
There are better ways to get away from people contacting him. Like, you know, actually telling people that you want to get away from them before shutting everything down.
Zed's an idiot. He made up a fantasy about what he thought _why might be doing, and proceeded to insult _why and generally be a jackass without knowing what he was doing.
At the time I commented here saying Zed and _why were foils in many ways. I still believe that. _why was all about encouraging creative expression and absolute artistic freedom, and about making people excited about things. For all that he had a vibrant personality, his work was never about himself. It was about the people he wanted to excite. Zed, meanwhile, is a similarly hard worker, but in Zed's world everything is about Zed and there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and Zed is the one who decides. _why was fine with the fact that not everybody wanted to do things his way. Zed's most famous for yelling and belittling other people, this article included.
While I respect Zed's intellect and like that he's working for one of my favorite companies, he's juvenile and embodies a lot of the parts of this scene that I despise.
It took a non-negligible amount of work to recreate _why's work in the wake of his disappearance. There's something very much against the engineering ethos in that. It's like burning books or destroying art because you're having a bad day.
Sure, Zed has worse marketing than _why's "happy fuzzy" persona, but I agree with him in this case. From the comments on the github page, it looks like tryruby was rewritten, the code was never recovered.
It is a bit ironic that the hardest artifacts of _why to recover were the projects aimed at teaching Ruby to children (tryruby and some of the books).
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I hope you know what this is from. You did not reply directly to the argument of Zed's blog post, but called him an idiot before you wrote more than 3 words.
I've seen a lot of your posts here and I've liked a lot of what you've said. However, this doesn't just go against the guidelines of Hacker News, this goes against the guidelines of civil discourse.
You took a nice thread about _why and turned it into an attack on Zed. This comment is in no way about _why, and that's just sad.
I'm not part of the Ruby community and I don't know Zed, nor did I know _why, all that being said, insulting Zed or saying inflammatory stuff about Zed doesn't change any of the facts. Just cause Zed has a opinion that differs from a lot of people about _why's retreat from the online world, it doesn't make him a dick or an Idiot.
Wait a minute, you're that dude I roasted a while back for your pathetic little rant about programmers. IIRC you ran your mouth in the HN comments until you actually advocated that a woman who'd been raped deserved it. Then when I called you on it you tried to say you never said that, even though it was easy to read that you did.
If anyone is an idiot here it's you Rory. You don't know me. You definitely don't know _why. And you sure as hell haven't earned enough street cred to have any kind of opinion on the matter.
I suggest next time you just shut your stupid mouth about me and other real hackers. You're a wannabe. When you got some real code under your belt, then you can come back and play with the big boys.
Until then, keep playing the flute or uh writing screen plays or founding companies or whatever other insignificant little events your life needs to define your personality to other people but not to yourself.
wow, I am actually amazed by the projects he has created, I actually knew him only for his 'Poignant Guide' and the 'Shoes'.
He has created tons of amazing projects, Now I really miss him :)
All of what _why has accomplished fills me with awe. He was so prolific, and everything he made was amazing, and along with it he was one of the coolest people I've seen online. He was humble, didn't take anything too seriously (up until his disappearance, I suppose), and encouraged me to rethink a lot of my attitudes.
His disappearance definitely wasn't a very considerate thing to do, but at least we still have most of his amazing work.
In chapter 1, the narrator tells a story to "get you in the mood" for the Poignant Guide. "Here's something poignant to get you started." It's a story about a dog who he found and adopted, named Bigelow, only to lose him right away.
In chapter 5, the narrator reveals that he is a Preeventualist. Preeventualism seems like a fairly new philosophical doctrine, asserting that the nature of all predictive thought is optimistic -- even dystopian futures are "optimistically" predicted to come true. Therefore preeventualists just "focus... on the understanding that hope will always prevail in any sort of thought". I'd never heard of preeventualism before, but it made sense that someone on the cutting edge of Internet programming would also be on the cutting edge of philosophical discourse. And it was cutting edge -- no wikipedia articles, no podcasts, nothing. Just one page of actual information on the preeventualist homepage, and that shout-out in the Poignant Guide.
But it's a pretty compelling philosophy on the face of it, and they have a preeventualist youth group responsible for maintaining the web page (which is probably why it went down with such frequency). You can see other examples of preeventualist thought if you know what you're looking for: Anathem is pretty preeventualist, and if you start to think seriously about Long-Now style timescales I bet you'll become somewhat preeventualist yourself. (You'll start to mix up words like "molding" and "embroidery".) And of course there's always Ashley Raymond's blog, which sadly doesn't get updated at all. In fact, there's only the one entry, in which Ashley Raymond talks about his time with his dog, whom he called Biggles, whose "accusatory gaze often hinted at how wrong my pronounciation must have been".
Wait. Biggles? Bigelow?
So I did a whois on preeventualist.net, and sure enough, it was registered to _why the Lucky Stiff. Conclusion: the dude FABRICATED AN ENTIRE PHILOSOPHY FOR A THROWAWAY JOKE IN HIS STUPID BOOK. And it wouldn't be so stunning except that I BECAME a preeventualist in the time between discovering the philosophy and discovering that it was "fake" (if such a thing can be said of an idea).