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_why is no more

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Re: _why is no more

#411

Post by bunnny »

alexpopescu wrote: post #149
adbachman wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I do agree that the author(s) of an open source project do not owe me or you anything, I'll have to disagree with you about what is an open source project. Once you've opened up your project it belongs to the community (and even if I'm not a lawyer I think that most of the OSS licenses speak in this direction). Anyways, I'm pretty sure we will hear soon about what happened and it will be easier to understand th…

_why isn't required to maintain his copy of the source forever. Other people have forked/mirrored his projects; deletion of his repos is an inconvenience, but something that can be recovered from.

Re: _why is no more

#412

Post by ekyuri »

KVFinn wrote: post #239
pol wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>>What a mean-spirited thing to do to someone who just wanted to stay anonymous. If this is the reason _why decided to pick up and leave, I understand it. If that's why he quit though it's going to have the opposite effect. I doubt more than a handful of people cared to look into _why's identity before today. I've read the guide, watched his talks, and read probably 80% of his blog articles, and I never knew his iden…

>>But with the disappearance it's now on everyone's mind.

Yeah I totally agree with you!!

Re: _why is no more

#413

Post by sabat »

dazmax wrote: post #150
Jeremysr wrote: post #2

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

Someone outed him here: http://whoiswhytheluckystiff.wordpress.com/

http://www.manta.com/company/mmntyj8

Re: _why is no more

#414

Post by csallen »

Vitamin wrote: post #373
watt wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

privacy must be respected, and actually should be enforced by everybody, including you. meaning: even if you know him, you should pretend that he is anonymous person, disconnecting the _why persona from the real-life person. for example, if you know him, and you hire him, you still should ignore the on-line _why persona, because for privacy purposes, it is separate, anonymous entity, and you should not connect it to…

Uggh. If privacy must be protected by civic order it's already a lost cause. All these good people standing up for privacy--it only serves to increase the market value of violations. Honestly, I think it's better to throw out the notion of digital privacy entirely and start pushing the notion of universal visibility, and accountability. Once everyone is naked, we'll stop obsessing over the naughty bits.

The anonymity and lack of personal accountability provided by the internet rarely have good effects. What's interesting is how fervently people fight to protect this anonymity, even though it doesn't really exist when we interact with strangers in the real world.

I'm not saying that online privacy is worthless of course, just noting that it is quite unique.

Re: _why is no more

#415

Post by _oldhat »

Jeremysr wrote: post #2

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

Old hat, but take a very careful look at p27 of Nobody Knows Shoes (pdf version) with the text: So flows hit the end and move down ...

If that isn't Kylie ...

Re: _why is no more

#416

Post by benjaminbooth »

ahoyhere wrote: post #209
Semiapies wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rude, I'd agree. No more, though - we're certainly not talking about exposing where Salman Rushdie's sleeping tonight. How rude, even, is an open question. This doesn't exactly rise to the level of pestering J. D. Salinger at his house. Trying to be anonymous is one thing. Trying to remain anonymous while writing books and blogs and making public appearances, all under one common identity, is downright quixotic and j…

Except that this enigma was something just about everyone treasured about him. He's a Ruby community treasure, our slightly twisted crown jewels. And the reason nobody tried harder before, or if they did they kept quiet, was out of respect for that cherishing. He has always seemed a bit delicate, and that's why the rest of us always treated him gently. And he repaid us ten-fold with his quirky gifts. This is like the…

As a long-time Rubyist and admirer of _why, I completely agree with this.

The whole thing saddens me. I wonder how _why could ever repeat such a public endeavor, even under a new guise.

Re: _why is no more

#417

Post by adambyrtek »

watt wrote: post #322
moe wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wikipedia page shows an image of him apparently giving a public speech. If his privacy was so precious to him I don't think he would do things like that. Hence I would say this was just a little game - and he lost.

privacy must be respected, and actually should be enforced by everybody, including you. meaning: even if you know him, you should pretend that he is anonymous person, disconnecting the _why persona from the real-life person. for example, if you know him, and you hire him, you still should ignore the on-line _why persona, because for privacy purposes, it is separate, anonymous entity, and you should not connect it to…

Privacy is not the same as anonymity.

Re: _why is no more

#418

Post by bendin »

barrybe wrote: post #232
pyre wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll defer to my friend on this one. He's really heavily into the internals of git and keeping up with the mailinglist. This was about a year ago, and if there was any way to speed up the process I'm sure he tried it. I think that he said it had something to do with the number of branches that have existed over the years in the repo and trying to resolve all of them into git branches.

I think if he tried today he'd be much more successful. I remember using git-svn a year ago, and it had the problem where it would re-checkout every single file for every branch point, because SVN doesn't really keep track of branch points; a branch is just a "svn copy" of the root dir. These days, git-svn is much smarter about recognizing a SVN branch, so it doesn't have to re-checkout the whole world.

I recently (less than a month ago) used git-svn to do a conversion of https://svn.dev.java.net/svn/hudson and discovered a few things.

The git-svn clone was not made from the canonical hudson repository, but rather from a svnsync clone hosted on localhost accessed through the svn:// protocol. Nevertheless, the conversion took about three weeks on a 2.6 GHz Core2.

There seems to be a memory leak in git-svn. The size of the git-svn process grew slowly and after about two weeks it was at 1.2 GB resident size, at which point the OS refused to let it fork. Thing is, this was a blessing in disguise. I was able to resume the interrupted clone with a simple "git svn fetch", and it ran much faster with the now radically smaller heap. This, worked so well, in fact, that I got into the habit of interrupting and restarting the process every evening and every morning. A few days later it was done.

The problem seems to be the structure of the Hudson repository. All modules are in a single huge maven-style multi-module build under /trunk, but the branches and tags are not complete copies of trunk, but rather of individual sub-trees of trunk. This does not mesh well with how git sees the world. For git tags and branches are always for the whole repository. This mean,s that git has to work extra hard to figure out what's going in in a repository like Hudson.

Because of the oddball structure of the Hudson repository, its history is not as browsable in git as I might have hoped. Still, it's proved to be an interesting experiment.

Size: the complete history works out to 203MiB (.git/objects) in git, though 754 MiB including all the cruft in .git/svn. In Subversion 1.6 FSFS format the repository is 795 MiB.

Re: _why is no more

#419

Post by gcb »

random-passerby wrote: post #60
Jeremysr wrote: post #2

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

Couldn't possibly be that he's fed up with Open Source and the ruby community...

he did post some PHP projects lately....

Re: _why is no more

#420

Post by sunaku »

_why's actions remind me of a quote from Hagakure:

"In the Kamigata area, they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. The end is important in all things." (emphasis added)

Rest in peace, _why! You were but a hero, but now you are a legend.

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