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".

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

A tweet with meat.

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

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

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.

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.