I also noticed that if you rearranged the letters in 'why' you get 'hwy', which, if pronounced a specific way, sounds very similar to the Pacific island of Hawaii, leading me to believe that he made his escape there on the 19th, which you get by fully curving the bottom right part of the 'h' around to make a '9', flipping it over both horizontally and vertically, and placing it to the right of the underscore when propped up to give us the '1'. It was under our noses the entire time.

Your comment has 19 points! That -has- to confirm it!

And now for the unmasking! _why really is.... Bill Gates?!

"...and I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you crazy kids!"

I don't know how to say this politely but we really need a bunch of Erlang articles on HN right now. _this _is _getting _out _of _hand.

It's a brief influx. We've had these before. Two days from now we'll all have forgotten about this.

How is this any different from, say, all the furor when Apple releases a new product, or Google unveils a future technology, or TechCrunch gets called out for doing something dumb? Social news is given shape by social waves.

None of those things involve scads of people freaking out and trying to psychoanalyze a man they don't know.

It's not the volume of stories, it's the tone of the comments.

The freaking out I think is ludicrous. The psychoanalysis, well... I liked the eulogy, and I like the postings of his quotes. I didn't mind this post, but I took it more to be a "look at how this guy made a programming manual moving" than a "look at how he let us know what was going to happen." I'll upvote anything featuring the (P)G.

I do find it silly that this has become so fevered in 24 hours' time. I'd find it hilarious if two days from know _why set up his Twitter and his web site again and was all, "Hey guys, I'm back, how you doing."

By psychoanalysis, I mean all the people talking about why he did this, what he was thinking, etc. Going on about his tweats and things he put in his books and treating them as "clues" is just one expression of that.

I agree. That's all dumb. I didn't think people were being serious about that.

Hell, if there's one thing we do know it's that we didn't get to see _why in his early developing years. When he joined the community, he was already a bright, talented guy with an assortment of interests. It's harder to look at somebody and figure out what they were thinking if you've only ever seen them when they were fairly mature.

A very good point.

> Going on about his tweats

I can't even parse that...

Interesting. Where are you from?

EDIT: Oh, I could actually check your profile. Some people fill those out.

"Going on about <something>" is an idiom I've encountered in Texas and seems common throughout the Southeastern US as well. You can get the essential meaning by thinking of it as a shortening of "Going on at length about <something>" with strong implication of excessive length, though it can be (and often is) used to apply to whole discussions among multiple people.

Can we just truncate the thread at this point? The entire tree underneath here (as it stands now) is entirely inappropriate. Some of the posts even have > 1 upvotes. Should they not be -1?

Whats a tweat?

A tweet for carnivores.

It's tweet sweats, as in "I was tweeting so much I started tweating all over my shirt".

I like this riff on my odd misspelling best.

A tweet with meat.

it's what Tweety bird does on Halloween? Tweak or Tweat! :)

It's what Twitter calls the short posts people make on that service.

No, that's how Tweety pronounces the word treat.

Not untrue!

It may not be the right place to discuss these matters, but it's the only place I have (with the programming reddit, but the userbase is different).

I think it's exactly the right place to discuss it. This is Hacker News, _why is a great hacker. This is the one place in the web where him disappearing is considered important. Those who prefer to read what Julia heard that Scoble said to Arrington about Twitter have the whole Hyposphere for that.

What matters exactly?

Those of _why's disappearing, presumably, and of the work he left behind.

I can provide for you. As an Erlang developer for MS I've been asked to review Axum and give feedback. So they pointed me at the publicly available guide:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/D/5/BD51FFB2-C777-4...

I can only wince and wonder where I even start?

... What the hell?

It's like a C# developer trying to reinvent Erlang... Poorly. And using a needlessly verbose syntax.

Just tell them they're Doing It Wrong.

Now look what you've done . . .

I think what we really need is a new word for 'IT Drama'.

There's an awful lot of it these day, I'm expecting Oprah or someone like her to realize the potential of this real soon now.

Dvorak, Sethi, now this guy _why (_why not ? _who cares ?)

When Hans Reiser turned murderer I think it was newsworthy, most of the rest of this IT Drama stuff is just as interesting as Britneys latest tantrum.

Damned fools who don't get why _why was awesome and worth reading about.

Please stop upvoting this rubbish. Please start thinking before posting. If you have a statment to make, please back it up with exactly what you feel should make it true and justified.

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/images/the.foxes-6... :-(

Tall Fox: -Have you noticed that this book is basically written by a _lunatic_?

Short Fox: -Yup

Tall Fox: -Seriously, he's way too hyperactive. If he keeps at this frantic pace he's gonna burn out quick.

Short Fox: -Burn out? He's gonna shoot himself in the head by the time he hits 30.

--

From that kind of comment and the pace of his work (bouts of rabid coding interspersed with AWOL periods), I'm afraid he's bipolar. His only output (code, writing, mailing list contributions) in june was a single tweet saying that he was trapped in a labyrinth of his own design.

I sincerely hope he's alright.

And here:

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/images/departure.p...

"Ha! I was right! He flipped his lid! He's all burned out and he's going to shoot himself in the head!"

On the bright side, from the little psychology and the little about _why's author that I know, he doesn't seem to fit a psychological profile of someone who would kill himself. I'm sure he works a lot, and his work is curiously personal and I'd imagine exhausting, but his work is also well recognized and celebrated. Many artists don't have that luxury in their lifetimes.

I read his original blog on advogado today. There's a mention of his father undergoing a mental breakdown, and of his sister having drugs and alcohol problems. It ends like this:

-

"and i go home and draw cats and doctors in space. without the medication. i'm a stiff. an upright. i'll never pass a joint. maybe mj works, maybe mj's death. i have too much mental illness in my blood to find out. narco+alco have turned kooky people i love into obliterated people i love. god, god, god, please keep her alive. (if i'm lucky maybe god will let a horse run by.)

families are a network of lost packets and bad routing. cause you got spouses on the vpn. it's not all that bad, but it's fun to moan, ya know."

-

While there are some errements, these themes are far too recurrent to just be whimsical.

I'm confused. When did _why add this section? Recently? Did he even add it at all? It begins: August 19th shall be known as _why Fawkes day.

It was there Feb 8th 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20080208063221/http://poignantgui...

It was there when he wrote the chapter, with the comic section attached next to it.

There are other allusions to him leaving the scene/dying in other writings.

It's strange that no one mentions those sections when they mention the book.

I can't find that "August 19th shall be known as _why Fawkes day" bit - where'd you see that?

surely you mean _why forks day.

Please, go back to reddit.

I didn't know who _why is. Here's a link for non-ruby folks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

i'm in no point a ruby guy or involved with the ruby community, but i couldn't have missed this guys legacy. kinda reminds me of RAW.

It's official. News.ycombinator is now news._whycombinator. And I can't stand it.

gasp he was planning this all along! and he left clues!

and his name is _why? What we are all asking right now!

The Ian Curtis effect.

this is effing lame.

Can we stop discussing this? The more you say, the more it diminishes the effect and the aura of his leaving.