Top all-time · #2514
_why's Estate
Personal blog · whytheluckystiff.netprogrammingwritingculture
_why's Estate is a personal blog at whytheluckystiff.net about programming, writing and culture. Since 2007, 30 different Hacker News readers have linked it 35 times, most often “_why's site is back up”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this personal site of _why the lucky stiff, mostly to discuss its history, its disappearance, and the PCL printer-spool files it hosted. Commenters also point to its Ruby-related pages and essays.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- _why's site is back up5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-08-19
- _why's site updated4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-08-21
- The Little Coder's Predicament3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2007-11-15
- Whytheluckystiff's original domain back as an archive2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-18
What Hacker News says?
I just noticed that _why apparently deleted his twitter account. I then found that that wasn't all he deleted: http://twitter.com/_why http://github.com/why http://whytheluckystiff.net/ http://poignantguide.net/ http://hackety.org/ http://shoooes.net/ All disappeared... For those who don't know who I'm talking about: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff
Comment linking /
on “_why is no more”Submitted _why's site is back up as a story · 453 points
HN discussionThis is not very useful, but since it's a github page there's http://whytheluckystiff.net/CNAME with "whytheluckystiff.net" in it.
Comment linking /CNAME
on “_why's site is back up”Submitted _why's site is updated as a story · 391 points
HN discussionFacts: 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 essenc…
Comment linking /
on “_why's site is back up”Submitted Whytheluckystiff's original domain back as an archive as a story · 387 points
HN discussionHooray for _why! :D Found a fourth PCL: http://whytheluckystiff.net/SPOOL/YOU http://www.scribd.com/doc/119153889/You
Comment linking /SPOOL/YOU
on “_why's site is back up”Submitted _why's site updated again as a story · 245 points
HN discussionI 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.
Comment linking /
on “_why's site is back up”Submitted The Little Coder's Predicament as a story · 138 points
HN discussionSummary: Who's this guy _why? (also known as why the lucky stiff): http://bit.ly/whytheluckystiff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff -- The site http://whytheluckystiff.net is being hosted on GitHub under this account: https://github.com/cwales/cwales.github.com/ -- The git repo for the site has seen activity today, and has sparked conversation: https://github.com/cwales/cwales.github.com/issues -- The…
Comment linking /
on “_why's site is updated”Submitted _why's site is back up and this is the "About Me" [unclear if it is _why] as a story · 62 points
HN discussionThe site just updated with another file: https://github.com/cwales/cwales.github.com/commit/e65bf73e2... http://whytheluckystiff.net/SPOOL/CAPRICE I don't have any pcl to image tools so I can't check what it is.
Comment linking /SPOOL/CAPRICE
on “_why's site is updated”Submitted _why is offering you something as a story · 48 points
HN discussionDoes 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…
Comment linking /SPOOL/TRUMPETS
on “_why's site is updated”Submitted _why's site updated as a story · 12 points
HN discussionhttp://whytheluckystiff.net/ Free combs on his website, apparently...
Comment linking /
on “_why's complete printer spool as one book [pdf]”Submitted _why the lucky stiff's site headers as a story · 8 points
HN discussionErrantX I would highly recommend learning Ruby before trying RoR. The first time I tried to learn RoR I didn't know any Ruby. I had limited success because I had to battle the framework and the language. You don't need to know everything about Ruby to start on RoR, but you should be able to write some basic programs. There are a number of online resources for Ruby: Unofficial and old, but has a lot of good info: htt…
Comment linking /ruby/pickaxe/
on “Ask HN: Why no love for PHP? ”Submitted _why's site has been updated again as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThis is really fantastic stuff, I'm a big fan of _why's work. I really love the principle behind this: http://whytheluckystiff.net/articles/theLittleCodersPredicam... 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.
Comment linking /articles/theLittleCodersPredicament.html
on “Colorful programs for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows”Submitted The Little Coder's Predicament as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'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.
Comment linking /ruby/redcloth/
on “Ask YC: Textile vs Markdown”Submitted Why the Lucky Stiff as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttp://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…
Comment linking /contact/
on “_why's site updated”Submitted This thing will open in two days. as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI tried looking at http://whytheluckystiff.net on archive.org but he was why the lucky stiff throughout.
Comment linking /
on “Where Has _why Gone? (He is not Jonathan Gillette)”Submitted Octopus (A Five-Minute Play for Twins Who Don't Have Their Other Twin with Them) as a story · 2 points
HN discussioncurl -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
Comment linking //
on “_why the lucky stiff's site headers”Submitted New PCL file on why_'s website as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
