_

_why

whytheluckystiff.net · Personal blog · on HN since 2007

The personal site of _why the lucky stiff, the Ruby programmer and artist who left the internet in 2009.

What HN saysHN links it when the site shows signs of life, and commenters recall how much he shaped their early programming.
30HN people shared it
14linked it in comments
17stories submitted
1.8Kstory points
1 year agolast shared
2007people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    _why's site is back up
    13 people · 1.6K points · first shared 2009 · 152 comments on HN
  2. 2
    The Little Coder's Predicament
    3 people · 143 points · first shared 2007 · 104 comments on HN
  3. 3
  4. 4
    This thing will open in two days.
    1 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · 3 comments on HN
  5. 5
    Seeing Metaclasses Clearly
    1 people · 2 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
  6. 6
  7. 7
    New PCL file on why_'s website
    1 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
  8. 8
    Setting Up My Own Software Programming Company
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
  9. 9
    RubyDotJs
    1 people · first shared 2008
  10. 10
    YOU
    1 people · first shared 2013
  11. 11
    \
    1 people · first shared 2013
  12. 12
    Redcloth
    1 people · first shared 2008
  13. 13
    Pickaxe
    1 people · first shared 2009
  14. 14
    TRUMPETS
    1 people · first shared 2013
  15. 15
    CNAME
    1 people · first shared 2013

What HN people wrote when they linked it

espadrine · 2013-01-06
Facts: 0. Since 2012-12-09, the following content was available at http://whytheluckystiff.net/ Public Print Queue SPOOL/TEST 2012-12-09T14:12Z SPOOL/IDEAS 2012-12-13T23:26Z SPOOL/NOTES 2012-12-19T00:28Z 0.0. The style of writing and handwriting corresponds to that of Why. 0.1. Prints are very regular. There are 4.4 days between the first two, and 5 between the last two. 1. Going to those addresses yields, in essence, the following data: http://d.pr/i/qwo8 2. Now the following content is available: Public Print Queue SPOOL/DESOLEE 2012-01-06T08:21Z 2.0. The headers that are sent back from the server changed. The difference is shown in this picture: http://i.imgur.com/6mMPQ.png 2.1. It happened within 12 hours of this very thread. 2.2. DESOLEE is the french for "sorry", from a woman. 2.3. It is 2012, not 2013 (may be a typo). 3. Going to this address yields: http://www.scribd.com/doc/119155590/DESOLEE 3.0. A date of April the 18th is stated as the return of the printer queue.
milesf · 2024-08-20
Watch the last part of this video where he describes his very last project, a card game to help teach coding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ihzA8v89U&t=1560s Does anyone remember him? He had a huge impact on my life back in 2006 when I was trying to learn Ruby to use Ruby on Rails. The Thanks Jonathan for all the foxes, and thanks to whoever is maintaining his legacy: https://whytheluckystiff.net/
kunai · 2013-04-19
http://whytheluckystiff.net/ Free combs on his website, apparently...
dkarl · 2013-01-06
I agree. If something happens on http://whytheluckystiff.net/ it isn't like a celebrity doing something in his back yard and getting photographed by papparazzi; it's more like a celebrity releasing something via his publicist. Maybe he released something cryptic, maybe it's even premature, but he knows he's messing with something public. Listening to a person's publicist isn't an invasion of privacy.
Jeremysr · 2009-08-21
I tried looking at http://whytheluckystiff.net on archive.org but he was why the lucky stiff throughout.
dhotson · 2008-08-14
This is really fantastic stuff, I'm a big fan of _why's work. I really love the principle behind this: http://whytheluckystiff.net/articles/theLittleCodersPredicament.html I hope that this can help make programming as fun and accessible as it was on the C64. I grew up learning QBasic, taking for granted that I could draw some stuff to the screen and play music in a handful lines of code.
JeremyChase · 2009-05-01
gsiener.. I have a similar background to yours; I was writing a lot of C and doing systems programming for a long time. Pretty recently I started playing with Ruby and Rails, and I found some online tutorials helpful, but had the best luck with following along through some books. Just using the following resources I have become a decent ruby/rails developer. If you are interested in Python or another framework, I am sure there are equal resources for that as well. So for ruby: http://qa.poignantguide.net/index.html (got me up to speed) http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/UsersGuide/rg/ (Good reference) http://www.whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/pickaxe/ (great reference) Once you have a fair grasp on Ruby, Rails is really very simple. I got my hands on a copy of Sitepoint's Simply Rails 2.0 and went through the first half of it in about 10 hours. If you paid attention to what you were doing you should be able to make your own basic app(which I did at that point). I then went back and finished that book up and redid a lot of my first app. After things are starting to click the railscasts at railscasts.com are really very useful, and are a way for you to 'learn from someone'. I enjoy these a lot. Also don't forget you can ask questions in irc channels (For ruby or rails it is #rubyonrails and #ruby or #ruby-lang on efnet) So my post is long and rambling, but I want to encourage you to try. There are a lot of resources where you can learn as you go, and while tutorials and books…
predius · 2014-05-29
http://whytheluckystiff.net/contact/ From the owner of the domain: NOTE: For some reason, I’ve been getting a LOT (like more than 1, which is a lot for me considering how long this site has been going) of messages from people asking me if I’m some kind of famous programmer called #why from Pittsburg or something. Whilst I wish I was this famous and did get this much attention, unfortunately I’m not. I’m just a dude trying to turn his life around and take a bit of control over what’s going on.
ndesaulniers · 2013-05-25
curl -I http://whytheluckystiff.net/\#update HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: GitHub.com Date: Sat, 25 May 2013 01:53:14 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 1 Last-Modified: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 05:13:26 GMT Connection: keep-alive Expires: Sat, 25 May 2013 02:03:14 GMT Cache-Control: max-age=600 Vary: Accept-Encoding Accept-Ranges: bytes
cxhristian · 2013-04-12
The site just updated with another file: https://github.com/cwales/cwales.github.com/commit/e65bf73e20c61a90453… http://whytheluckystiff.net/SPOOL/CAPRICE I don't have any pcl to image tools so I can't check what it is.
NathanKP · 2013-04-12
Does anyone here know the tool or technique to convert the printer format on his website to human readable format on screen? Edit: So far I've discovered I can go to http://whytheluckystiff.net/SPOOL/TRUMPETS for example to download a file. Trying to figure out how to read the format at the moment. Edit #2: Looks like it is PCL format. I'm trying to find a decent Mac OS X program for converting PCL to image. Edit #3: Managed to generate this: http://i.imgur.com/AL9mSLr.jpg The quality is horrible though. I see now that some other people have already linked rendered versions in high quality, though. It was fun trying to figure it out though. :)
dblock · 2013-01-06
This is not very useful, but since it's a github page there's http://whytheluckystiff.net/CNAME with "whytheluckystiff.net" in it.
nex3 · 2008-05-12
I'm a fan of the default syntax offered by [RedCloth](http://whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/redcloth/). It's Textile, but with bits of Markdown thrown in, such as link syntax. It's only available for Ruby, though.

Keyboard shortcuts

/Search
j kNext / previous blog
EnterOpen selected blog
vVisit the blog site
fFollow / unfollow
lSwitch grid / list view
dSwitch dark mode
g hHome
g pTop posts
g tTopics
g fFollowing
g lLiked
g yHistory
g qFAQ
EscBack / close