171–180 of 421 posts
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There's a phone number in his whois records for his domain names... though calling it would be a just a little creepy.
I'll call him.
Very sad. No more chunky bacon?? I invite everyone to enjoy a video I set to some of his music, and reflect on his priceless contributions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YReSQfSBz4k
Where did you find his music? I remember seeing on his Wikipedia article before that he made music, but I was able to find very little about it.
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Someone outed him here: http://whoiswhytheluckystiff.wordpress.com/
Something doesn't seem right about that detective work - there's a Jonathan Gillette online who is a web developer in Harrisburg, PA who doesn't seem to be _why. Obviously it's likely that there's more than one Jonathan Gillette on the internet, but it seems odd to me that this other guy is also a web developer, with a decent online presence, in (somewhat) the same geographic area where _why is suspected to live, tha…
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What a mean-spirited thing to do to someone who just wanted to stay anonymous. It makes me sad and angry. If this is the reason _why decided to pick up and leave, I understand it. We have his code, it will live on. Perhaps he will return in another guise.
mean-spirited? he gave the internet a challenge and somebody took it up, that's all. oh, and it doesn't have to be his real name, too.
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No, he shouldn't give people a day's notice. He doesn't owe it to you, he doesn't owe it to me. That makes two of us. Let's imagine we're not unusual in that regard. Who does he owe a warning, then? when you release open source code there's a kind of implied promise that you don't suddenly delete the master repo in a fit of internet pique. You're making a lot of assumptions, not least among them _why's motivations (s…
http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-05-0... why is awesome. he's one of the big reason I'm a ruby programmer. He's contributed so much to the community, and he doesn't owe anybody anything. If he deleted all his repos, sites, etc with no notice, then that was a dick move. It doesn't mean he's an asshole, it means he did one asshole thing. That doesn't mark him as an asshole, but it wouldn't change…
It's more along the lines of one person in the office bringing in bagels every week for a few years, then one Monday morning they aren't there.
The asshole isn't the one who stopped bringing in the bagels, it's the folks standing around the coffee machine empty handed, griping about not getting their weekly cinnamon crunch.
"I wish Mike would've told us he wasn't going to bring in bagels today. What a dick move." Nope, doesn't work.
But that's just the way I see what is happening here. I can understand the divide if you have a different perspective of what's going down.
I agree that failing to hold the elevator is inconsiderate, but I disagree that simply putting information on the web constitutes entry to a similar social contract.
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What a mean-spirited thing to do to someone who just wanted to stay anonymous. It makes me sad and angry. If this is the reason _why decided to pick up and leave, I understand it. We have his code, it will live on. Perhaps he will return in another guise.
mean-spirited? he gave the internet a challenge and somebody took it up, that's all. oh, and it doesn't have to be his real name, too.
That someone outed him is inevitable. But that doesn't excuse the act.
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Something doesn't seem right about that detective work - there's a Jonathan Gillette online who is a web developer in Harrisburg, PA who doesn't seem to be _why. Obviously it's likely that there's more than one Jonathan Gillette on the internet, but it seems odd to me that this other guy is also a web developer, with a decent online presence, in (somewhat) the same geographic area where _why is suspected to live, tha…
That Jonathan Gillette was also going to school in Pennsylvania ( http://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathangillette ) when _why wrote that message, supposedly from Salt Lake City, Utah.
Is it just me, or does Ruby tend have these "personalities" more than other communities? Seems like the Ruby community focuses a lot on the "rockstar" mentality. I don't spend any time in it to know for sure, though.
Which is why I love Zed Shaw's response: "Hmm, I think it's more possible that _why got hacked than he pulled a me." http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/3409334842
I just noticed that _why apparently deleted his twitter account. I then found that that wasn't all he deleted: http://twitter.com/_why http://github.com/why http://whytheluckystiff.net/ http://poignantguide.net/ http://hackety.org/ http://shoooes.net/ All disappeared... For those who don't know who I'm talking about: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff
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Someone outed him here: http://whoiswhytheluckystiff.wordpress.com/
I'm sure someone in the know told me his real name a couple years back (he wrote the foreword to my book) and it certainly wasn't Jonathan Gillette. Of course, he might have changed him name again.. :)