Let’s see now. The article spends pages talking about _why and the author’s relationship with _why’s work. Great. It spends a page talking about _why’s desire for anonymity and reclusive nature. Good. It talks about _why’s “infosuicide” and notes that it happened shortly after he was “outed.” Fine.
And then we get paragraphs detailing how this journalist stalked him trying to get him to comment about the article. Send an email or two, fine, but after sending emails and leaving messages that were all unreturned, after leaving messages with people who know the man behind the pseudonym which were ignored, this journalist still had to track him down to where is is now working and try to get through to talk to him.
Being a journalist does not give you a right to stalk people. You have no special immunity to care and consideration for other people’s feelings. This man is not some sort of villain on the run from the law, he’s a private citizen who wishes to be be left alone, and this “journalist” admits to flirting with the idea of showing up at his house after being repeatedly refused contact.
I strongly disapprove of this conduct, it smacks of hubris to think that some fleeting bit of text, written for the business purpose of getting eyeballs to look at advertisements, is worth huntimg a man down and cornering him when he does not want to be interviewed.
p.s. And regardless of how well the name of the man behind _why is or isn’t known, I also disapprove of repeating it in the article, it was not necessary to the story at all.
Hi there, raganwald, Annie here. I think this is a completely valid criticism, and it's one I largely expected. But for what it is worth, here are my thoughts.
As a journalist, I think it would have been irresponsible not to inform _why of the article and not to try to interview him. (As a general point, you don't write articles about public figures, and he was absolutely a public figure, without giving them the chance to respond.) I didn't expect him to get back to me, and certainly did not stalk him. And my hope is that the article approaches the infosuicide in the most humane way possible.
As a journalist, I think it would have been irresponsible not to inform _why of the article and not to try to interview him.
Your repeated emails and messages left for him obviously informed him. We’ll have to agree to disagree about what constitutes responsible journalism with respect to “trying to interview him.”
Once he’s aware that you want to interview him and chooses not to respond, I’d say you tried. Your actions seem to suggest that “responsible journalism” consists of going further and pressing yourself on people who have already made their feelings about the matter clear.
I don’t wish to single you out, so I will say the next thing in a general way. I have trouble with flinging the words “public figure” around. There was a man. He constructed a persona. That persona was public. The man was private. The man worked very hard to separate the two. Compare and contrast to hollywood stars of both sexes who practically invite the world into their bedrooms.
I think reporting about _why is fair game, _why was a public figure. I think hunting down the man who created _why is intrusive and is at the level of a paparazzo, invading the privacy of a person who from the outset was clear about separating the two.
I have a public persona, “raganwald.” I don’t try to hide the man Reg Braithwaite behind the persona. But I don’t think that blogging or speaking at conferences or commenting here somehow invites the world to call me at work if I don’t answer emails, or to hunt down my cellphone records or to waylay me in the street or to take pictures of my children. I am not a public figure in the way that a politician is a public figure.
I likewise believe that the man behind _why is not a public figure. _why? Public. Pictures of _why in character? Public. The man who walked away from creating and maintaining _why? Entitled to privacy and to not worrying about people calling him when he chooses to ignore their emails and entitled to have his friends and associates left alone.
p.s. As I noted, however, I liked almost everything I read in the article.
A few phone calls do not a paparazzo make. _why, with virtually no effort, maintained his privacy.
The upvotes demonstrate that people are interested in the person, and it's a journalist's job to probe. Sometimes more so than other people would be comfortable with. While that can be awkward, I think it's a good thing, although in this case it doesn't matter so much.
It may be a journalist's job to probe, but it is a fellow human's job to have empathy. raganwald is perfectly correct in distinguishing between _why as a public figure, and the man behind _why as a private one. The man behind _why clearly wished to remain private; why are his wishes not being respected?
I think that you are being dismissive when you say, "a few phone calls". From the article, the author tried: asking RubyConf attendees, asking people he had been known to have a working relationship with, wrote him a letter, called his home phone, contacted a former employer, searched patent records to discover his current employer, and contacted his current employer, not to mention in the process naming his wife's Twitter account, publishing his real name, and publishing the name of his current employer.
That's pretty poor form, and I don't think that "journalism" is an appropriate excuse.
Like raganwald, I really liked every other aspect of the article. It's well written and I enjoyed taking the time to sit down and read it with a cup of hot chocolate. But -- and this is a big "but", one that eclipses everything in the article that I enjoyed -- I was tremendously disappointed at seeing the private man behind _why outed as he was in the article.
I'm completely receptive to the criticism of my treatment of the public persona / private person question -- as I wrote before, I expected it and appreciate everyone's insightful comments here.
But I'd just like to push back on the idea that my reporting somehow constituted harassment, rather than straightforward reporting on a public figure – and one who had unfortunately already been outed and whose offline identity was widely known.
We're talking about a phone message, an email forwarded from his office's receptionist, and a note, spaced over the course of a few months. I don’t think that constitutes harassment. My central objective was just making sure he had the opportunity to respond, if he wanted to, and would not be surprised when the piece came out.
I did extensive interviewing among Rubyists and other programmers for the piece, and would often ask them about _why's work, his guide's influence, his work's influence on them, etc. A bunch delightedly brought up old war stories about him, some of which made it into the piece. The back channeling about his offline identity came, unsolicited actually, from those conversations.
At any rate, I do appreciate all of the comments and criticisms of how I treat it in the piece. And am very appreciative of everyone’s compliments of the article as well.
He was at one point a very public figure - at least in this community. Just because the persona was his public face doesn't mean that the "person" was completely private. Attempting to reach out of a formerly public figure for a comment (or even a heads-up) is entirely acceptable. It is obviously something that he has taken steps to deal with.
What if _why had some comment about his info-suicide or the concept in general? What if he had replied back "good luck with your story - just don't use my real name"?
Serious question here: Where do you draw the line? What makes someone a “public figure?"
Does publishing open source make you a public figure?
How about speaking at a conference?
Playing in a band under a pseudonym?
Playing in a band under your real name?
Commenting under a pseudonym on Hacker News?
How about commenting under an identifiable handle like rbraithwaite?
I honestly don’t have a pat answer to this question.
My short (and overly legalistic) definition would be attractive public activity with a persistent identifier. By attractive, I mean designed to attract attention, however little. Nobody posts on HN in order to have a record of their private thoughts or avoid public engagement, for example; people post their thoughts specifically in order to share them. Insofar as one engages in acts designed to attract attention (not necessarily approval), and maintains a persistent identity such that one's acts are temporally/spatially connected, then one is a public figure in proportion to the attention those acts attract.
The persistence is important. Consider 4chan, where people can post anonymously. The downside of this, especially to the casual reader, is that people abuse the anonymity to say hateful things - although most of the time it's kids trying out the language of sexism or racism to see how the words feel in their mouths, so to speak, in order to reflect and understand the wider society they live in. (This might sound optimistic, but my view is that the bigotry there is only skin-deep and serves a function similar to that of hazing.) The upside is that one can engage in experimental social interactions without consequences - for example, making an embarrassing social admission in different fashions to gauge the variety of reactions. Now, someone might make brilliantly insightful contributions in an anonymous environment, but if they have the same discussion a week later they must rebuild any intellectual or social consensus from scratch. With a persistent identity, one can trade to some extent on one's social standing. Some online fora, such as HN, make this standing semi-explicit through karma scores and the like. If you say something that I find counter-intuitive, your high karma (expressing others' approval of your previous contributions) signals to me that your odd-seeming remark is probably not the product of mere foolishness, but rather has some rhetorical or specialist basis.
One of the tricky things about the world we live in, where video and text live on and on long after verbal conversations are forgotten, is that private individuals are increasingly creating public records. We wouldn't say that Joe Blow was a public figure just because he went to his neighborhood bar once a week and held forth on the state of the world to his neighbors. Sure, he is in public, but his 'public' consists of only a small group. Unless he starts speaking of controversial matters like having a plan to shoot the mayor, those conversations are ephemeral and weighed by society as such - unlike the situation faced by those who make foolish comments on Facebook, say.
There was a man. He constructed a persona. That persona was public. The man was private. The man worked very hard to separate the two.
Here's the problem: we have no way of knowing what someone's motivation for privacy is, and such motivations can be good or bad. Privacy is a basic right (implicit or explicit depending on your legal system), but to the extent that a person acts publicly that right is necessarily attenuated. Most public figures maintain a single identity and seek privacy for certain activities (family life, financial affairs and so on). Where someone maintains a private identity we tend to ask why, because the ability to recognize and distinguish between individuals is a basis of survival and social credit. A famous musician or artist may adopt a pseudonym to develop a personal brand: 'Picasso' or 'David Bowie' are such unusual names that we want to know more about the persons who adopted them. On the other hand, a famous villain may adopt a pseudonym to intimidate enemies or awe the public. Or an innocent person with enemies may adopt one to hide from them while still exercising the right to public speech...there are as many reasons to obscure one's identity as there are people in the world.
_why obviously fits within the former case - but that's only obvious if you're within the community of people to whom he largely addressed himself, and familiar with its norms. to an outsider, such as the Slate author), the sharp divide between public and private identities is mysterious, enigmatic; few people go to such lengths to separate their identities in this fashion, and enough of those who do are motivated by questionable reasons that it's worth asking why in this case, at least for a journalist. This would not have happened if, for example, _why had published a message saying 'Oh hi, my name is Jonathan Gillette aka _why, and although Ruby hacking is totally awesome I need to take a break from this sort of work to focus on family/ personal/ whatever matters. Thus, I won't be maintaining Hackety Hack (etc.) for the foreseeable future and you won't be seeing me at Rubyconf or other public events either. Thanks a lot and happy hacking.' If one disappears suddenly like Judge Crater [1], then it's inevitably going to attract a lot of attention and invite speculation - and indeed it did. Insofar as one chooses to pop a balloon rather than simply let the air out of it, one can hardly be surprised at the echoes that result. Even now, _why opts to maintain an air of mystery, as opposed to spending a few minutes on the phone explaining 'yeah, I was just tired of the whole thing and was drinking way too much coffee, so I chose to retire and now teach high school/ breed gophers/ live as a hermit.' This is a perfectly reasonable choice, but so is the choice of the journalist to follow up a mystery that piqued her curiosity, and that of a great many others.
This is one of the biggest problems of our time. Because omnipresent, eternally persistent tracking technologies threaten to make everyone and even every thing into a public figure.
Worse, while publicity has both costs and benefits, they're usually asymmetric: It's hard to derive much benefit from a wave of publicity unless you're carefully and consciously prepared to surf that wave, whereas destroying someone's happiness, career, or relationships via stalking or character assassination can be cheap and easy.
Neither do I... and I think people will disagree on this. Programmers like being able to make strict rules for stuff, but I think that this is one of those "you know it when you see it" moments.
And to make it more complicated - I don't necessarily think that it is up to the person to decide. Unfortunately, to some degree, the public gets a say.
>Your repeated emails and messages left for him obviously informed him. We’ll have to agree to disagree about what constitutes responsible journalism with respect to “trying to interview him.”
Journalists are used to having to do real legwork for fact checking and interviewing. Hell, I'm willing to bet that on a daily basis more hoops have to be jumped through to finally contact someone who is ready and willing to be interviewed.
As far as "obviously informed him", obvious to whom? Someone who doesn't know if their messages have gotten through to the guy or are waiting in an inbox somewhere only to be read after the writer's deadline? You know what would have made it obvious? Relaying back a simple "no comment" message to acknowledge that contact had been made. Otherwise the reporter doesn't really know.
>"I think reporting about _why is fair game, _why was a public figure. I think hunting down the man who created _why is intrusive and is at the level of a paparazzo, invading the privacy of a person who from the outset was clear about separating the two."
Sorry, but I find that rediculous. If Brian Warner kills someone, or James Osterburg overdoses that is not appropriate for public news because they did it under their private personas? Or can Brittney Spears claim that she has two different personas that both just happen to be named "Brittney Spears"?
Frankly, as I see it, once you develop a reputation based on name in a wider community you are now a public figure regardless under which persona you'd like to hide.
Killing someone is a very different issue - it's not a private matter, but a public crime. But for the rest, why not? Why should one be forced to have his life publicized just because he creates something that many people like?
You're essentially punishing people for doing good things. That feels very wrong to me.
You are not being punished even if you perceive as such. One could say that an obese women that loses weight and gets in shaped gets punished because men hit on her.
Next, it's not for you to decide if someone wants to have multiple personas. It's also going to vary over time.
Here's an example taken to the extreme: because you have posted publicly (at least several times on HN), is it okay for me to decide that that fits my personal definition of a public figure because you have now a reputation of being kind of a tool and then proceed to investigate and post personal details about you?
It's a perfectly sensible argument, as any person who has played both sides of the same chess game can tell you. People can and do have multiple conflicting personas, and attempting to identify [ed: coalesce] them is rarely useful. It can server to debase or solidify credentials or to explain fractures, but those are all exceptional purposes.
People have the right to put words in a different location from their money, and they have the right to invite a few friends in for a beer while the regent takes care of official matters. The press has special liberties to infringe on these rights, as they are expected to do so responsibly.
That's interesting that you consider your online persona distinct from yourself. I find addressing you as raganwald here on HN as awkward, so I have instead called you by your first name. Do you have a preference? Is that preference related to the distinction you wish to maintain?
Call me whatever you like, as long as you don’t call me late for whiskey’o’clock. In truth, my personality IRL is very different from my personality online.
I think it's every journalists’ duty to do their due diligence in contacting who they are writing about. That's all that was done here. To call it stalking or to compare it to paparazzo is preposterous.
I'm interested in your assertion that creating a very public persona doesn't make you a public figure. Could you say more about your theory behind that?
Mentioning that you tracked him down and that he wants to be left alone, fine.
Throwing in "HEY EVERYONE YES THIS IS HIS REAL NAME AND HERE'S WHERE HE WORKS" - valid reporting of facts, but unnecessary, and explicitly contrary to the wishes you state. He's not Steinbeck and doesn't have a millionaire Peter Norton to help him stay private, but you have the power to redact those bits from your article, and it would likely be a nice action on your part to talk to your editors at Slate and do so. You found him. Great. Take credit, report on that in your story. But you don't have to "drop docs" on him. If you enjoyed his work, please talk to your editor.
Thank you for responding. Now that I reflect on it, I guess it’s a little like sales. There are some salespeople whose persistence crosses deep into “intrusive” territory, and others who are polite to the point of deference, and every variation in between.
Unless you’re at one end or the other, there will always be many people who agree with your choice and some number of people who disagree with your choice. If we look, we can probably find people who wish you would have done an ‘ambush interview' with a video camera.
This time, I happen to be one of the people who didn’t agree. The next time I read an article of yours, I might be one of the ones who agrees or even wishes you were more forceful.
But I did like the article and thank you for writing it. Also, thanks again for your polite reply.
Hey Reg, I'm curious to what extent you believe that private citizens have a right not to be reported on. If Annie Lowrey had decided to interview Reg Braithwaite and couldn't get a hold of you, if she'd pursued a similar course of action, would it have been intrusive?
I get that having made something public once does not necessarily mean that one opens their life up to scrutiny forever and ever, but to what extent does closing down one's works and leaving the public eye entitle one to a lack of scrutiny/inquiry?
(As an entirely meta aside, I'd be curious to what extent the cultural divide over privacy ethos between Canadians and Americans is at play here. My impression, at least with my wife's Canadian family, and our collective friends, have different expectations from the Americans i grew up with.)
I realize that your comment was directed entirely to raganwald, but while people here are pondering to what extent private people should be reported on, nobody seems to be considering why someone might want to remain private, and how becoming public might affect them.
I write a monthly column for a local newspaper and occasionally give local talks and so on. Once in a while someone I've never met recognizes me, which at the moment is both neat and a little unsettling. Within about a 10 mile radius of my adopted home town, I'm no longer an entirely private person. One of my clients' more curious sons tracked down my contact information -- it wasn't very hard to do, but it was a personal first.
The problem is that, as a private individual, I have made decisions that are nuanced and not easily explained in three sentences. They are decisions that would be polarizing to others; if they became public, it could do a lot of damage.
I have family members and friends to consider. I am rarely entirely anonymous anymore, so I rarely get to talk about some subjects that I would dearly love to talk about. Part of my thought process behind every comment I leave on HN now is, "What if one of my clients read this?"
We have no idea what _why's personal life looks like. We have no idea what his motivations are behind wishing to remain private. It is entirely possible -- I would even say likely -- that he has very good reasons for wishing to remain private, which are known only to him and perhaps a couple of other people.
By attempting to treat him as a public figure, or as a private citizen which we have some "right" to report on, we are risking doing real, measurable, and possibly serious harm either to him or to his property or to his life, and all for the sake of nothing more than our own idle morbid curiosity.
I'm quite surprised there are so many people here that are defending that calculus.
I don’t have a track record of being reclusive, so I wouldn’t be offended by someone persisting a bit. But if it got around that I don’t want to talk to people about something I did, I guess I would be ill at ease if someone pursued me about it.
I’m not saying it’s wrong in some grand or absolute sense, there are going to be some things where a person disapproves without necessarily thinking there should be a law or an absolute, iron-clad, airtight legal definition.
Perhaps the word I should have used—and I apologize for being discourteous to Annie in my remarks—is “discourteous.” Having thought about it and considered the many thoughtful replies here, I think it was discourteous to persist, but not necessarily wrong.
This was probably unintended, but giving his real name in your article also marks a precedent.
Even though it was well known in Ruby circles, it had never been published in the press. Now that it has been, his Wikipedia page has been updated accordingly (now that they have a "reliable source" in Wikipedia parlance), which exposes his identity much more than it used to.
For that reason, I wouldn't mind if you redacted his name, the name of his employer and the way you found him out of the article. The same goes for the mirror of the infamous wordpress page.
He made it clear that he wants to be left alone. This doesn't help.
Edit: the mention of his sister was also completely out of place.
"As a journalist, I think it would have been irresponsible not to inform _why of the article and not to try to interview him. (As a general point, you don't write articles about public figures, and he was absolutely a public figure, without giving them the chance to respond.)"
There's a difference between "giving them the chance to respond" and what happened here. Being a journalist doesn't give someone an excuse to act outside the bounds of polite society.
I think there are 2 issues here: digging deep to try to get a response from _why, and publishing his real name and employer.
The first is debatable; exactly how much effort should a journalist put in to getting the story, particularly in a case where the subject didn't do anything wrong? Reading about the effort expended in this piece made me a little uncomfortable, but I don't know for sure whether I'd say it crossed the line.
The second issue, outing his identity, is more clear cut. The guy didn't want his identity revealed, hadn't done anything wrong, and is arguably not at this time a public figure; why not respect his wishes?
Publishing his name struck me as a vindictive way of punishing him for not responding to the requests for a statement.
I think the story would have been just as strong if the author hadn't mentioned his name or the exact city he lived in or the name of his employer. However, it would make the author's job harder next time she tries to get an interview if she doesn't have that punishment to hang over the next subject's head.
My thoughts exactly. I think the digging was okay though, for the simple reason that she backed off as soon as he said he wanted to be left alone. And I don't believe a journalist doing research has to interpret silence or no-response as such, but when he communicated this, she let him be.
The second issue was absolutely over the line. It's not so much the name (which is sort-of public knowledge, although the Wikipedia citing issue makes it problematic), but publishing the other personal information really crossed the line, and the article would have been much better without it.
I don't think it's vindictive though, rather a very stupid oversight.
I also think it's too bad that the top comment conflates these two issues, because I think it's very useful to draw the distinction. Spending effort to reach a subject for comment strikes me as proper journalistic research--publishing the PI gathered in the process however, absolutely is not. Even tabloid journalists would simply just publish the comment, but not the addresses or names of employers used in acquiring said comment (be it for different, more competitive reasons, but still).
OK, maybe not intentionally vindictive (only the reporter really knows her motivations for publishing the personal information), but it still bothers me that there's an incentive for the reporter to punish a non-cooperative subject as a way to motivate future subjects to be more cooperative, even if the she wasn't aware of it.
"Being a journalist doesn't give someone an excuse to act outside the bounds of polite society."
I thought we expected journalists to dig a bit deeper and not just take things at face value? Sometimes that means poking around when people might prefer you not to be.
I think that's valid when there's a suspicion of a crime, or of an hypocrisy by a politician, because that's a damage to society and it's fair to have the person punished by it.
Doing the same to a person because she did someone good is essentially punishing good deeds.
"Doing the same to a person because she did someone good is essentially punishing good deeds."
I'm not sure a journalist trying to get in touch with you amounts to a punishment. The hypocritical politician probably doesn't find it much fun, but they're being given a chance to present their side of the story.
Note that, for example, in Australia the very first point of the Code of Ethics that Journalists sign up to says:
"1. Report and interpret honestly, striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts. Do not suppress relevant available facts, or give distorting emphasis. Do your utmost to give a fair opportunity for reply."
Doing your utmost means not leaving one voicemail and hoping for the best. What if _why did have something to say, but his phone number had changed? I imagine that a reputable publication like Salon would have stopped trying to get in touch if he'd given a simple 'no comment' to any of their approaches.
(Also, define 'good'. Did a protestor who stopped the logging company from cutting down some trees do good for saving the environment, or was it bad he cost some jobs?)
If someone I didn't want to talk (and who knew it) to called me, emailed me, reached out through my friends, and called two of my employers I would consider that stalking.
How can you have the gall to say you were 'humane' after publishing his real name and current employer?
It is very clear he wanted to be left alone. It is hugely egotistical to think that your article would be the one he'd need to know about. The one he'd be happy to comment on.
I think that's what this is really about - getting some kind of quote from _why would have been killer for this article. Getting "word back-channeled" to you at all is pretty exciting in itself, if it's even true.
Like I say, is it very clear he wanted to be left alone but there were eyeballs to show adverts to, so you persisted. Let's not pretend it's anything different.
This is a relatively easy litmus test. Let's say someone you decided to do an investigative piece on you Annie Lowrey (arbitrarily deciding because you write publicly that it fits his definition of a "public figure) and publicly states considering visiting you at home in order to learn more about you.
Would you feel creeped out or "hey, come on in?" To me, _why by his actions has demonstrated that he wants his privacy and to be left alone. It is not for you to decide that he is a public figure. Prioritize the human aspect and respect his wishes before the advancement of your own career.
Sorry, you do not get a pass on this. You can try to sweep everything under the rug of interacting with a "public person" (as if such a distinction had meaning in the modern age) but it doesn't work. _why made it abundantly clear that he wanted to retreat from public life, and you went out of your way to violate his privacy.
In microcosm this is an example of just the sort of behavior with respect to "public persons" that has so corroded our society over the past decades. Fame has become a life destroying curse because so many people take it on themselves to use the excuse of being a "public person" to pry into their personal life, to harass them and pursue them and deny them any shred of privacy or normalcy. And those problems are exactly the reason why a person such as _why chose to retreat from the public spotlight. It's also the reason why a lot of folks choose to avoid doing things in public. How many other potential _why's out there have shied away from making their work public because they are deathly afraid of toggling that "public person" bit that serves to some as a signal that it's no longer necessary to act with common decency and respect for privacy toward that person? Certainly more than one, perhaps many. And now with your article perhaps just that one more than otherwise would have been.
You have acted rudely and inconsiderately. You walked into a crowd of people and ripped loose a loud and smelly fart. Some people might be amused by such antics but to me it just smells bad. Did you spend even the slightest amount of mental effort considering how your actions would impact _why personally? How they would affect his emotional well-being?
You've made the world an incrementally worse place to live in. If you have even an ounce of conscience in your being then you should have problems sleeping at night.
I bet you received many downvotes from people who felt the need to justify their morbid curiosity over respecting the innocent will of a person.
Don't let a few downvotes silence you. Pretty sure we are not the only ones who think likewise and won't even make the effort to try to sound PC and complimentary.
You went far past his expectation of privacy, even naming where you think he works. Some would consider that stalking and it certainly was uncalled for.
As a beginning programmer without many programmer friends, I suffered through many of the obstacles that you did when learning how to code - from figuring out which text editor to use to figuring out how to run a program. Most tutorials assume you know these things!
You mentioned Zed Shaw in your article, and he addressed "the little coder's dilemma" in his own way, and I think in the best way. If you feel the urge to learn how to program again, you should check out "Learn Python the Hard Way" by Zed. Zed doesn't assume anything. LPTHW starts with installing a text editor and running a basic program. No shortcuts! He is undoubtably inspired by those who came before, but his sympathy for the novice coder is unmatched.
Annie, please do not call yourself a journalist. That is an insult to real journalists. You are not one. You are a hack, and a irresponsible one. You crossed the line. _why is not a dangerous pedophile who changed his name and went into hiding while secretly working as a school teacher and/or pediatrician/youth minister. He is a private individual who clearly wishes to maintain anonymity and privacy, and you published his contact details in your stalking article. For shame. Your actions are why we need to enact privacy laws in the US, to criminalize what you have done here and ensure that justice can prevail.
Great job, Annie! And what a great way to introduce a lot of new people to Ruby, and _why's unique contributions to Ruby and the open source community in general. I thought your article was very well researched and treated _why with respect. Your appropriate level of persistence in attempting to contact him was just responsible journalism. No editor I know of worth their salt would have accepted any less from a writer.
Annie: _why was a public figure. The person behind _why was deliberately not. That person decided to kill _why, and the integrious thing to do is to respect his decision, particularly in light of the fact that he's not some criminal shunning reporters but someone known only for sharing his creations.
I enjoyed the rest of your article, but everyone should respect the wishes of the person behind _why and leave him alone.
I think you're being a little too harsh. This story isn't for programmers. It's for everyone else that thinks the computer is a magic box.
For us, it gives us a story about someone who is trying to learn how to program and about programming culture. I think the author did a pretty good job of taking a month and exploring both the nuts an bolts of programming and the people behind it. Sure, she still couldn't do much at the end of the month, but at least she understood the process to some degree.
The sub-plot about _why is an interesting one. For those of us around during that time, it brings back memories of those frantic days. For the outside world, it is just an interesting story. The naming of _why at the end wasn't really necessary, but it didn't feel too out of place either. It's been long enough that it was conceivable that he may want to have some comment. She may have gone further than I would have to get a message to him, but she didn't cross the line. And it was clear from the article that he has a sufficient barrier around him to protect him from the public.
You're taking the throw-away line about showing up at his house too seriously. She's a journalist... that's what they do - try to get the story. Happily she decided that she didn't need to resort to that to finish the story. I think the line was just added to give a sense of just how deeply he had disappeared.
In our community, we respect _why's wishes and leave him alone. It isn't polite to discuss his private identity. But to the rest of the world, this just isn't a big deal. And I hardly think that he will now be bombarded by publicity. The people who cared about _why know better.
I opened my comment by praising the exact same things you’re praising, so let’s be sure that we both understand I was criticizing just one or two small things that I care deeply about.
I care deeply about _why and his contributions as well, and I still cringe thinking about how I felt the moment I realized he and his work and his wit were gone from the community forever. The Poignant Guide was my intro to Ruby and still sets the whimsical, slightly surreal tone in the back of my mind for how I think about coding to this day.
But, raganwald, upon reading and re-reading it, I didn't take one bit of "praise" from your comment. Perhaps you didn't mean to set the tone as strongly as you did, but my impression right of the bat with "Let's see now" and onward was that you were being harshly critical.
I'm sorry to see yours as the top comment, because Annie did an extraordinary amount of work and I think you've completely distracted from the essence of the article.
Not only that, I really think you've confused "stalking" with "research." Trying to reach someone for a comment about an article on them hardly qualifies as the former. This was simple journalistic persistence, entirely appropriate, and clearly she backed off "hunting a man down." Many if not most other journalists would have gone further to get the quote or create more drama, and Annie apparently got deep enough into the ethic and general tone of the Ruby community to know when enough was enough.
It was an excellent article, very sympathetic to the Ruby community, well-informed and enlightening, and I'm sorry to see that your comments here have caused others "not to read" it.
Annie Lowery did a lot of hard work -- she learned to program as part of the research for crying out loud! She deserves better recognition than this.
my impression right of the bat with "Let's see now" and onward was that you were being harshly critical.
I was being harshly critical of calling the man at work and naming him. I also wrote:
The article spends pages talking about _why and the author’s relationship with _why’s work. Great. It spends a page talking about _why’s desire for anonymity and reclusive nature. Good. It talks about _why’s “infosuicide” and notes that it happened shortly after he was “outed.” Fine.
I mentioned the things I liked and said so. What you don’t seem to like is the lack of “balance,” as if given that I spent a few paragraphs talking about the stuff I didn’t like, I should spend ten or twenty paragraphs about the stuff I liked. But my feelings about the things that I liked were just that I liked them. You have stronger feelings about the things that you liked, so you write your comment in accordance with your feelings.
I am not writing a book review for the NYT, and neither are you, that’s the beauty of the forum. I am obliged to be polite, to avoid name calling and other poisonous behaviour, but I am also obliged to—as the saying goes—sit down at the keyboard and open a vein.
Sure, not a book review for NYT, but it is the top comment on HN, which has the unfortunate consequence of being the first impression a lot of people had of an article that had a lot of hard, thoughtful work put into it.
It also caused some to actually not read the article, and that's what drew me out. Annie's work here deserved a better first impression from the HN community, and I think anyone who has an interest in _why would benefit from reading it. The anonymity thing was a sidebar at best.
I think we agree about most things here... in my initial reading of your comment it seemed to paint the entire article negatively. You just criticized one particular aspect... a lot and perhaps that how I got that initial impression.
I wanted to express that talking about _why's identity wasn't the central part of the story. Anyone just reading your comment might get that impression.
I really just don't think the naming of names at this point is that big of a deal. Anyone who really wanted to know his name could have found him. Anyone who was in the public eye and who has decided to leave it has had to deal with the same issues. And while we don't discuss his name, out of courtesy and respect, I don't think she crossed the line.
I think you're too forgiving of some really awful behavior. Writing a beautiful article or being motivated to get the story doesn't excuse it. The fact that most of the readers of the article won't care doesn't either.
She did cross the line. I would be furious if someone I didn't want to talk to (and who knew it) did what she did. The fact she published his private information leads me to believe no consideration was really ever given to how _why felt.
The one line about deciding not to go to his house didn't sway that belief. The decision could have been made to avoid liability in a potential harassment lawsuit as easily as concern over _why's feelings.
What you decry is standard journalistic fare. Tracking down a central figure in your article is a mark of investigative journalism. The individual's desires for privacy do not, by that fact alone, afford them the right to never have anyone try and contact them.
We respect his privacy both because of his contributions, and because his feelings are clear. That does not mean everyone else on Earth is obliged to.
Trying to contact him is one thing. Publishing the current location and employer of a peaceful person who wishes to remain anonymous and private in an article, for no legitimate reason, is totally different. Surely you see the difference? Or do you.
Tracking someone down because you suspect wrongdoing is not the same as someone who as far as I can tell has done nothing but contribute to the Ruby community.
I am a programmer and I think of my computer as a magic box. It has very specific principles, but is basically magical in nature. The mystery of all of the things that I could possibly do with it is what keeps me programming. I like to think that there are others who share this intuition.
In college, I went through a Thomas Pynchon phase. I read everything of his I could get my hands on, and I tried to learn everything I could about him. Like Salinger and _why, he doesn't want you to do that. No photos, no interviews, etc. I tracked down stories he had written but banned from being reprinted (elusive photocopies that I still love), I read books written by his friends (?!), I wandered around the library in NYC where he wrote a lot of his first novel, I subscribed to a journal devoted solely to his writings (and struck up a friendship with the journal's editor), I even went so far as to phone his then publisher and try to get an interview (lying and claiming I wrote for a college paper).
Everything beyond "reading his books" was silly, and some of what I did was invasive (if not very inventively so). So what is my point? There's something powerfully magnetic about certain people - despite their telling us to stay away, and maybe even more so because they tell us to stay away. I'm not sure that I really disagree with what you're saying, but I think there's almost a degree of inevitability about people wanting to know more in such a case. It's how many of us are made.
It's not so clear to me that a person has the right to intentionally become a public figure and then vanish at the moment of their choosing.
_Why has a perfect right not to answer questions, but having raised those questions in the most dramatic way possible, I don't think he has a right for people not to ask.
Publishing his name and especially the name of his employer didn't advance the story, screwed him over in google results forever, and is basically just doxing to show she can dox him. At best, a douchebag thing to do. It doesn't matter how great the rest of the article was.
I agree. It's outrageous and irresponsible to not only stalk down his current location and place of employment, but then to announce it to the world, even though it serves absolutely no purpose. This is not a journalist, it's a hack. The publisher, in publishing this crap can no longer be taken seriously. It's tabloid journalism at its worse.
Article would have been fine without the "I found him nyah nyah nyah and here's where you can find him and harass him too!" stuff. How would the journalist like people to post her personal details on the internet and encourage people to contact her in her private life.
I dunno reg, it struck me as ordinary journalistic due diligence. Showing up at his doorstep might have been a bit much (although we praise reporters for doing that in cases with just slightly more scandal than this one). But she didn't do that.
Overall, I thought it was one of the best-written pieces of of mass-market journalism about our community that I've read in... well, years actually. Stuff like this should be encouraged.
In a fit of distractedness, I actually read this comment before I reached the end of the article.
I stopped reading. I'm familiar with the story of _why, so I don't really feel the need to hear it again. But most of all, I don't want to know what his real-life name was. _why he was and _why he shall be.
Note that I praised the parts I liked. I have a strict “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” policy. If a post or article has 99 things I dislike and one that I learn from, it’s a good thing to read, no?
Thank you for this review. It helped me decide not to read the article, both because it doesn't have content and because I have been deliberately avoiding knowing _why's "real" name.
I disagree that it doesn't have content. It's an article oriented to relating to non-programmers what it is like to learn to program, and for that audience I think it does it's job well.
edit: also I am curious how you can decide an article that you haven't read has no content.
It's an article oriented to relating to non-programmers what it is like to learn to program
I am not sure that is true. I think it is one very non-technical person's experience with self-thought Ruby. And as such it is very much what you'd expect, hard and full of frustration.
Beyond that it's a pleasant read, right until the end where she actually tracks down _why and prints that information!
Journalistic duty my ass. Journalistic duty would be hounding the administration over the whole "due process is not judicial process" when it comes to killing Americans.
Stalking some guy because he was Internet famous for a while is not it.
This is a really great article. I didn't realize that Slate gave their journalists a month out of every year to do something like this.
I think the description of her initially trying to learn ruby is really instructive for everyone who wants more people to learn how to code. There are just simple things you don't think about that a beginner can really get hung up on. For example, why can't you enter code into a word processor? How do you run scripts? I don't think programming books do a very good job of explaining these types of things, even now. Zed Shaw's Learn X the Hard Way series is probably the best at it I've seen so far.
One thing I do with my books is I actually meet up with beginners and watch them try to use it. It seems every time I do that I find something new I hadn't anticipated. Like recently I changed the first exercise of LPTHW to have screenshots of what they will literally see:
I met with a beginner and watched her go through the first exercise, and she didn't understand that she's needed to type "print" and not the line numbers. I talked her through it then realized if I just show a screenshot then people could step from literal thinking about the code blocks in the book to abstract thinking in one exercise.
Same for the terminal/powershell screenshots. People didn't get that they just type into powershell. They thought they had to run python, then type the powershell commands into the python REPL.
Doing this kind of "usability study" on my books, and having the comments on each exercise, has really taught me a lot.
Great job -- it really takes dedication to do this. I've been teaching python for several years to large roomfuls of google employees and I know this will make a huge difference. I'm often asked for python book recommendations and have started recommending LPTHW.
Another huge problem seems to be making the connection from files in the terminal to files in finder/explorer. Neither OSX or windows makes this intuitive.
I think you hit on one of the fundamental failings of education in general, in that the only ones qualified to do it by necessity forget what it's like to be learning. The kind of hands-on testing you do is, I think, both commendable and necessary if we are to improve the way we teach and learn.
People email me sometimes or ask, sometimes I mention I'm looking for someone on twitter. It's not as often as I'd like since I don't have a stable meeting place and coffee shops sort of suck.
I liked the article. I'm happy that _why didn't commit _real_ suicide. I will now forget the name of the person that the journalist tracked down, and if I ever meet the guy in person, I'll try not to know it.
And _why himself thought of his [(poignant) guide to Ruby] as a literary project. “The book I feel is closest to my book is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which interleaves brief math puzzles and astronomical diagrams with the story,” he wrote to a listserv. “[I’m] interested in presenting an initial stab at giving literary value to a programming text. I’m also interested in getting people to at least feel what I feel when I program.”
I think there's a kind of agreement amongst those of us who look up to _why — and we are not all Ruby programmers — that although it is quite easy to discover _why's true identity, we'd rather just think of him as why the lucky stiff. That said, when he disappeared I read chapter 6 of the Poignant Guide, and his blog, and I feared the worst. When I looked into it and discovered that he was still alive it made me feel a lot less worried. So I'm glad it's made clear that he's really okay.
I'm less sure about broadcasting his real name, but it's been done before and it'll be done again. To me he's just _why.
There's a tremendous amount of pressure to becoming well-known. Musicians self destruct under it. Movie stars' private lives blow up. I can totally understand how a super talented but sensitive dude might want to maintain a pseudonym to deflect this pressure.
While I still wish he were around (in a public sense), because he was a big part of why I jumped into the Ruby community, I don't agree with hunting him down. Ultimately he's a typical human being with some big talents and shortcomings.
_why, if you're out there, thanks. Wish I could buy you a beer.
On a slightly less controversial tangent, the author did a nice job explaining getting up and running with her first program as well as explaining what programming does. The comments at the article thus far are mainly from programmers. It would be interesting to see how much non-technical folks take away from it.
Yes, I think it illustrates what I think is the actual steepest learning curve to start programming and that's abstraction, to apply meaning to arbitrary things. It's something we are not really used to learning in standard education. Sure there's math, but most of the time it's taught by applying some kind of method without most ever questioning further.
I think the best way to learn programming is by doing puzzles and logic mind-benders. Get your brain used to abstract thinking and following logic, as well as being rewarded for solving a difficult problem.
If you manage that, than programming becomes simply applying conventions logically to solve problems (also prepare to be flooded with increasingly higher level conventions).
and other threads I found just by Googling the two usernames in question. I don't claim to know the "official" correct answer to the question of what happened to nickb, with whom I interacted mostly as co-founder of the former New Mogul site, a website with HN's interface for business news.
I had seen all those previous threads except for raganwald's "Worse is Better" link. I admit that link does make a decent case for the sock-puppet theory. However, I still think that nickb was a real person. I was an avid reader of New Mogul (great site, well done), and nickb's contributions there, as you know, were very extensive. The sheer volume of Nick's combined activity on both HN and NM casts doubt on the sock-puppet theory in my mind. Furthermore, in addition to finance, Nick seemed genuinely interested in B2B enterprise software sales strategy. I corresponded with him on email about that subject a few times. If you follow PG you know that is a subject that he takes no interest in and in fact encourages all the YC companies to eschew enterprise sales. Also I remember someone during one of the "where's nickb" discussions here or on NM around the time of his disappearance saying that he knew that Nick lived in Ottawa and was going to try to check up on him in person. The idea that Nick lived in Ottawa was corroborated by other comments that Nick or others had made in the past...I believe he might have been a professor there. Anyway my point is that there was so much effort behind nickb's contributions and enough detailed differentiation between him and PG that if he were indeed a sock-puppet the ruse would seem to go beyond being a joke and cross into the realm of split-personality, and for me that is a bridge too far. Then again I did always wonder why PG pulled him off of the leaders board after he disappeared:
And as far as I remember PG never really commented on his disappearance. Either way, sock-puppet or no, I would very much like to know the rest of the story. Perhaps Ms Lowrey will one day solve the mystery for us.
It's obvious that _why (before his disappearance) kept to this name, as opposed to his real name, because he wanted to hold on to his privacy. Now that he's relied on that to vanish and not be bothered, he's been found out and I'm sure people are still bothering him. I feel sorry for the guy, he did awesome things for the community, but everyone has a right to be left alone should they so please. Let's keep remembering what he did for the community and honor that, and him, by catering to his wishes of privacy and a peaceful life.
I have a theory about what motivated _why to quit. Partway through the article it says that the name "_why" is a reference to The Fountainhead. (The precise reference is here: http://books.google.com/books?id=3WiS2jWThFAC&lpg=PT133&...) If he read that, maybe he also read Atlas Shrugged (also by Ayn Rand) -- a story in which several successful and prolific characters "disappear" in exactly this manner.
I won't spoil the plot for anybody who's planning to read it, since this mystery is one of the main parts of the story, but this explanation sounds pretty likely to me.
You're painting pretty broadly with that stereotype brush. Books influence people but are not the only influence on people. You have no idea which books _why appreciates or the extent to which they have influenced his personality, so stop guessing.
I hate words like "Randroid", "Republitard", "Democrap", etc. regardless of whether I agree or disagree with their connotation. They are the adult, but no more mature, equivalent of the childhood poopypants slur - you are other so you are bad.
I used to be a Randroid myself--it's a surprisingly apt moniker, and when you run into enough people on forums relentlessly parroting Rand's idiosyncratic style of argumentation you'll see why.
I'm not ruling out the idea that _why may have read or appreciated Rand at some point, I'm just ruling out the idea that she was a major influence. If you understand Rand and you understand _why, you can see some very deep philosophical differences.
I just don't see the point of finding his name, place of work and throwing that in the article, when it was pretty clear that he wouldn't want that information to be public. It doesn't really add anything to the article and it just seems (to me) like it was done for no other reason than curry favor with the hacker crowd.
I thought this was a really great article. I remember _why's disappearance with sadness, but even his info-immolation could take nothing away from how much his work meant to me.
It was 2005 or so and I was at university, feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything. Going from a high school where just knowing what a command prompt is makes you the baddest dude in computer class to sitting in a lecture where breadth-first search is assumed knowledge is... humbling, to say the least.
It was around that time that someone pointed me to Joel on Software, which was bombshell number one. He wrote so beautifully about software and software projects that I just read through his archives straight from start to finish in a few days. He had positive things to say about Ruby, and mentioned _why's poignant guide, so I gave it a look.
Bombshell number two was the poignant guide, or just Ruby itself, or maybe both. In my memory, it's hard to disentangle the two, because _why was so much a part of Ruby, and in so many ways a product of Ruby. I'd written C, and that felt like being a badass basement-dwelling hacker, flipping bits by night and making out with Angelina Jolie by day. With Perl I felt like some kind of rambling longbearded wizard who could topple mountains if only he could get his sigils sorted out.
But Ruby? Ruby felt like fun. It felt like: hey, relax, it's only programming, you know? Code doesn't have to be for building bridges or hacking Gibsons; it can be a craft, an art in itself. _why's guide was the distilled essence of that message. Cartoon foxes, a soundtrack(!), and self-reference applied with the subtlety of a child's fingerpaint. I loved every minute I spent with that wonderful guide and its wonderful language.
So Ruby got popular and started to grow up. We got web frameworks, JIT compilers and package managers. We got to be a ghetto for a while, which was sort of a joke but not really. DHH swore at people and made 37 billion dollars. Later on there was some stuff about porn stars but by then I wasn't really paying attention.
I mainly write Node and Coffeescript now; they feel like successors to Ruby's technical legacy but the culture's not the same. Maybe it's just that I'm different now, or maybe the programming community's fallen hard for the Jobs and forgotten the Woz. Still, every now and again I pull up irb and Project Euler, foo.each-do-|bar| my way through a few problems for old times sake, and a part of me relives that feeling of childlike joy.
Not many languages get to have their own Peter Pan, but Ruby had _why, and it was better for it. A person, a language, and a community; none of them can stay young forever. But a legend never ages, never goes into maintenance mode, never gets buried neck-deep in strategy tax. I can't hate _why for info-dying young and leaving a good looking cyber-corpse. The memory will stay with me long after the code is irrelevant. So thanks, _why, if you're out there. And thanks, Annie, for an article that did the memory justice.
By choosing not to respond, this may be a brilliant move on his end in making "immortal" the persona _why (and keeping the fire hot). An article in slate, followed by discussions in various communities such as Hacker News show that he left on a high note and his persona still has a lot of "pull".
Does anyone else find the deletion of the infosuicide Wikipedia entry linked to in the article as deliciously ironic as I do? Which is a bit sad, because I'd never heard the term before, even though I have been online long enough to participate in my own infosuicide from time to time.
Internationally, and for many years, over many different survey bodies, "reporter" turns up on the lists of "unpopular professions".
What is the public interest in giving his real name? What possible purpose does it serve? I understand that the journalist wanted to give him the opportunity to respond, but that's no reason to publish the name.
He made it very clear that he wanted to stay private. Until there's an important reason to breach his privacy you should respect that.
I like to think he's on a beach on a remote indonesian island, drinking out of a fresh coconut he just harvested, resting in the shade to the sound of the waves rolling on the sand and the far away cries of the Gibbons and paradise birds in the forest.
I once joked that _why worked for an ASP.NET firm writing enterprisy middleware, and his employment contract forbid him from participating from open source projects, which is why he had to remain anonymous.
That now seems somewhat close to the truth.
Regardless, he obviously wanted to keep his real life (and perhaps his real job) isolated from the _why persona, and there are all sorts of perfectly legitimate and understandable reasons for wanting that separation. If some jackass started stalking me in the way the _why was stalked, I would be extremely pissed and would close up shop just like he did. Why that's so difficult for some people to understand, I'll never know.
Anyway, I enjoyed the article and I think he gave the perfect response to the reporter.
My favorite part was this analogy by Guido van Rossum:
In Python, I would just say something like, ‘Get up and go through the door.’ In other languages, I might have to say something like, ‘Stand up, but not with so much force that you fall over, take three steps to the north, take one step to the east, approach the door, check that it is open, if it is not open, open it, then step through it with this amount of speed …’
I would like to say only one thing: once you know _why's way of thinking and artsy way of hacking, calling him a sloppy programmer is unfair and frankly a little bit dumb.
He was a great programmer, he just didn't follow common wisdom, probably because the reasons behind his work were very different from ours.
I enjoyed this article to be honest, I haven't written any Ruby in a while but it was nice to get a history of the language interspersed with the enigma that is _why.
Could have done without the "journalist trying to learn to program" bits though
I think the main thing that scares me about this is how just being a prominent (in terms of garnering attention) open-source hacker seems to give people the right to pry into your privacy and reveal your personal information to the world.
It's ironic that in _why's quest to disappear he permanently implanted his real identity in web folklore instead of quietly fading away.
<<Third, Rubyists possess an often exaggerated, yet nevertheless merited, reputation for being the quirky hug-everyone kids of the programming world. Their motto is MINSWAN, or Matz Is Nice So We Are Nice, a reference to the language’s legendarily sweet founder, Yukihiro Matsumoto, nom d’Internet Matz. We might just all get along.>>
For real? Most Rubyists I meet these days are annoying hipster types that I want to smash with their skateboard (yes, yes, I'm huge _why fanboy).
The author gives the background of _why, including apparently outing his actual identity and current city of residence.
The author also discusses his own experiences trying to learn programming and specifically ruby. I found this part interesting, because neither the pickaxe book or _why's poignant guide did very much for him, but tryruby.org did seem to help.
While I'm uncomfortable with the fact that they outed _why, the article is pretty interesting to see the non-programmer / beginning programmer perspective in all this. To be fair to the author, apparently _why's identity has already well established in the ruby community.
Personally I think _why's largest contribution to programming(or even culture) wasn't inspiring people to program. It was inspiring people to teach. We read his book and saw that teaching itself could be fun, wacky, and rewarding and it stoked a fire in lots of us to turn ourselves into educational magicians.
He's out there somewhere making an AMAZING coding tutorial starring two really cool-looking shoes who hang out with each other and crack hilarious jokes.
I read this with interest. I don't want to bs you about that. I'd even go so far as to say this is an article your girlfriend or boyfriend should read... BUT what this journalist; would be programmer did for the record is the equivalent of coming into my home and pooping on the floor. THAT, I can not abide. My personal rule of thumb when learning anything new... LOOK AND LISTEN.
And then we get paragraphs detailing how this journalist stalked him trying to get him to comment about the article. Send an email or two, fine, but after sending emails and leaving messages that were all unreturned, after leaving messages with people who know the man behind the pseudonym which were ignored, this journalist still had to track him down to where is is now working and try to get through to talk to him.
Being a journalist does not give you a right to stalk people. You have no special immunity to care and consideration for other people’s feelings. This man is not some sort of villain on the run from the law, he’s a private citizen who wishes to be be left alone, and this “journalist” admits to flirting with the idea of showing up at his house after being repeatedly refused contact.
I strongly disapprove of this conduct, it smacks of hubris to think that some fleeting bit of text, written for the business purpose of getting eyeballs to look at advertisements, is worth huntimg a man down and cornering him when he does not want to be interviewed.
p.s. And regardless of how well the name of the man behind _why is or isn’t known, I also disapprove of repeating it in the article, it was not necessary to the story at all.