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Where’s _why?

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Re: Where’s _why?

#171

Post by [deleted] »

sutro wrote: post #166
tokenadult wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question that has nagged me more than "Where's _why?" is "Where's nickb?" Did anyone ever find out? Work your way up this thread http://hackerne.ws/item?id=152388 from child comment to parent comment and see what you think. See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249499 and other threads I found just by Googling the two use…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Where’s _why?

#172

Post by sutro »

sutro wrote: post #166
tokenadult wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question that has nagged me more than "Where's _why?" is "Where's nickb?" Did anyone ever find out? Work your way up this thread http://hackerne.ws/item?id=152388 from child comment to parent comment and see what you think. See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249499 and other threads I found just by Googling the two use…

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…

FYI:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775507

Re: Where’s _why?

#174

Post by hisyam »

zedshaw wrote: post #96
athst wrote: post #46

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…

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: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex1.html I met with a beginner and watched her go through the first exercise, and she didn't understand that…

I remembered when the first time I learn about Linux commands, I thought I had to type in the dollar sign.

Re: Where’s _why?

#175

Post by avdi »

raganwald wrote: post #5

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. Sen…

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.

Re: Where’s _why?

#176

Post by _exec »

duncanbojangles wrote: post #154
brianpan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting off-topic (although, I think we're already there)- I have been finding HN discussions harder to navigate lately. I still miss seeing the post voting scores. I don't remember if how the comment thread display has changed, but it's getting ridiculous. People respond to the top comment because anything lower will be ignored. This top "thread" is taking up 80% of page. I understand that this isn't supposed to be…

It would help me tremendously if HN offered the option to "fold" comments and children of those comments like on Reddit. I do this often to get past the meme threads and onto the real meat and potatoes. But, I think that may be outside the scope of HN's style or design of the interface.

javascript:(function()%7Bvar s=document.createElement('script');s.type='text/javascript';s.src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.1/jquery.min...;

Save it as a bookmark and run it on each page.

Re: Where’s _why?

#177

Post by lusr »

AnnieLowrey wrote: post #152
muyuu wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You outed him, there is no two ways about it. You can be appreciative of the comments, receptive to criticism blah-dee-blah but you outed him and you know why. As far as I'm concerned that defines you as a person above anything else.

I didn't out him. That had already happened. The debate -- a debate about journalistic ethics I consider really interesting, by the way -- is about whether I should have publicized the outing, whether I overstepped boundaries in reporting, and whether I should have published additional details that were not common knowledge.

Fact is the guy created a persona that many people found themselves intellectually and emotionally invested in, and it doesn't appear as though he ever made a clear statement about wanting to be left alone. Disappearing doesn't count as a clear statement because there's obviously much contention about the situation. His actions had consequences, whether he likes it or not.

While people here can theorize and debate about what should and shouldn't happen with respect to those consequences, the most straightforward thing to do is just to ask him for a definitive statement - which is precisely what you did. And now that his response and statement is on record the matter should never be an issue again. I really don't see a problem with your actions.

Great article by the way. Your experience attempting to create a program in a Word document made me laugh and reminded me of when I started teaching myself how computers worked. 20 years ago when I was 8 and disk space was expensive, I thought I was very clever when I found a program that could change the size of files on my computer. It didn't make any sense how it could possibly work, but I went ahead any way and "shrunk" a bunch of files down to zero size, effectively deleting everything important on the computer. Nowadays banks and other financial institutions trust me to program for them; little do they know! ;)

Re: Where’s _why?

#178

Post by philwelch »

sanderjd wrote: post #158
philwelch wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 phi…

You're conflating two groups with each other, one that is the larger group of people who appreciate or have been influenced by Rand's work, and one that is presumably a subset and is made up by people you have interacted with and formed an impression of. This is how stereotypes work, you conflate a subset of people that you have direct evidence of with the superset of people that they are related to in some way. Just…

I thought it was clear I wasn't conflating the two groups, since I explicitly said _why could easily be part of the larger group. In fact, I know they are separate groups because at age 17 I was a Randroid and today I'm a relatively sane human being who appreciates Rand's work.

Re: Where’s _why?

#179

Post by thinkalone »

duncanbojangles wrote: post #154
brianpan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting off-topic (although, I think we're already there)- I have been finding HN discussions harder to navigate lately. I still miss seeing the post voting scores. I don't remember if how the comment thread display has changed, but it's getting ridiculous. People respond to the top comment because anything lower will be ignored. This top "thread" is taking up 80% of page. I understand that this isn't supposed to be…

It would help me tremendously if HN offered the option to "fold" comments and children of those comments like on Reddit. I do this often to get past the meme threads and onto the real meat and potatoes. But, I think that may be outside the scope of HN's style or design of the interface.

I use a Greasemonkey script which does exactly that, and quite well - I searched for the title of the script to grab a link to it, but it looks like there may be a few different options to choose from: https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sour...

Re: Where’s _why?

#180

Post by pygy_ »

AnnieLowrey wrote: post #121
pygy_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sister figures prominently in the most popular Ruby guide!

From the book, it's hard to know where fiction ends, and where reality begins.

It could have been about the imaginary sister of his persona, or not, but it wouldn't have mattered as long as he was anonymous.

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