91–100 of 191 posts
Left a bad taste in my mouth.
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…
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 librar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The public gets a say, true, but the public is made up of individuals, and each individual has the ability and responsibility of deciding how to handle someone else. We aren't talking so much about the public here as we are about one person -- Annie Lowrey -- who made the decision to publicize the contact information for someone who clearly wished to remain more private.
Don't forget though, she is a professional journalist writing a story for a professional publication. She didn't setup some 'whyisfoobarbaz.wordpress.com' blog with the sole purpose of outing him. That's already happened.
As someone else already pointed out, his name can now be cited in the Wikipedia article on him.
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…
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 chan…
How can you have the gall to say you were 'humane' after publishing his real name and current employer?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
I feel for you. I have felt the same way. Not so long ago, someone resubmitted an old essay of mine about coffee machines and open source. In that essay, I called myself a small-s socialist. What do you suppose was the top comment on the HN discussion? A long diatribe about someone’s pet subject, Libertarianism, which generated more than half of the ensuing comments. It seems that on Hacker News, one man’s signal is…
Being a writer myself, I'm sensitive (probably overly) to the amount of work that goes into a piece like that. The fact that Annie made herself learn Ruby and get deep enough into the specifics of Matz, _why, dhh and the whole Ruby mythology I think needs to be encouraged. Not a lot of writers take that amount of care and time to understand their subject the way she did. It was good journalism.
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…
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 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.
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 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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 chan…
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…
Until today it was not possible to discover who he was without searching for it. Now you get to know it even if you didn't want to.
The Wikipedia article is the first Google result for his pseudonym. Now his real name is in the SERP. Good job.
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.
Here's the plot on Wikipedia, though it doesn't give a very good explanation of why people choose to disappear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged#Plot_summary
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…
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 chan…