Interestingly enough, even an interview of his has disappeared, while others on the site continue to work:
HN post re: inteview: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=483207 http://_why.usesthis.com/ http://usesthis.com
_why is no more
131–140 of 421 posts
Re: _why is no more
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was pretty immature, to delete the repos as well. Sure, nuke your Twitter, who cares. But people might have been depending on the repos; it's a breach of trust IMO. Not impressed.
That was pretty immature, to delete the repos as well. They were git repos, right? I am new to git, but my understanding is you pretty much have to type git clone --i-dont-want-a-full-copy-of-the-repository-please-screw-me-over-if-the-master-vanishes to be in a position where you are "dependent" on the code (i.e. have looked at it, ever) and do not have a full copy of the entire project extending to the mists of preh…
Even without git, everyone has a local copy of the source on their machines, at worst we can get Hpricot back up without the commit history... but that's not the issue.
The problem is GH was hosting all the Hpricot wiki HOWTO docs, which frankly, were invaluable resources to anybody using the library.
It's perfectly fair to leave the community. Destroying the ability for others to use your past work, however, is pretty lame. I'm hoping this was a hack for the benefit of my respect for him.
Re: _why is no more
#133Does anyone have a copy of all the source code he published? Specifically, does anyone have a copy of his Potion ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=425258 ) repository somewhere online?
Re: _why is no more
#134camping 4eva!
note to downvoters: "camping" is a brilliant and bizarre microframework for MVC web apps, courtesy of our friend why.
Re: _why is no more
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name some circumstances which justify pulling down a broadly-used open source project like Hpricot. At a certain point it must be admitted that a project has a life beyond its author.
He could have had his computer, or email hacked.. have to wait to see if we hear from him before we assume he actually cleared all the accounts himself.
That explanation seems highly unlikely, especially considering the lack of any messages saying as such.
update: I assume I'm being downvoted because people do consider it a likely explanation? It would be utterly unprecedented AFAIK.
Re: _why is no more
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point; hopefully he's not suicidal. Anybody know the guy personally?
Nobody knows much about _why. He's always been a mystery.
Definitely there are people that know _why. He has family and friends and such. He just is unique in his style and doesn't want to be famous for his art, he wants the art itself to be famous.
Re: _why is no more
#137Version 0.5 of _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby is still available on Rubyforge:
Re: _why is no more
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name some circumstances which justify pulling down a broadly-used open source project like Hpricot. At a certain point it must be admitted that a project has a life beyond its author.
That's why we have DVCS these days.
The fact that Hpricot used a DVCS is a godsend in cases like this, but we still confront the fact that the software's canonical source, including its documentation, is gone. That Sucks, DVCS or not.
Re: _why is no more
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name some circumstances which justify pulling down a broadly-used open source project like Hpricot. At a certain point it must be admitted that a project has a life beyond its author.
It could be a dead man's switch. (But I'm really hoping it's not.)
Interesting point. I wonder how many people actually implement such things?
Re: _why is no more
#140I had a copy of Potion cloned on my machine, so I stuck it on Github. If someone has a newer one, please post it, or let me pull from you or something: http://github.com/randrews/potion _why had a lot of projects, we can probably preserve most of them just with people pushing stuff they had cloned.
This one has commits through Aug 11/12: http://github.com/adamsanderson/potion/tree/master