[HN Gopher] Whytheluckystiff's original domain back as an archive
___________________________________________________________________
 
Whytheluckystiff's original domain back as an archive
 
Author : samlambert
Score  : 261 points
Date   : 2022-08-18 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
 
web link (whytheluckystiff.net)
w3m dump (whytheluckystiff.net)
 
| numbers wrote:
| this is an important part of the internet, _why taught me to be
| kind on the internet.
 
| pram wrote:
| Why's work had a lot of charm and heart. It was weird and funny
| and avant-garde but in a pretty accessible and (mostly)
| unpretentious way.
| 
| It didn't teach me a whole lot about Ruby but I probably read it
| a dozen times or so lol
 
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Poignant, but good to see. Yay! \o/
 
| O__________O wrote:
| While not a popular opinion, personally feel that people should
| have the legal right to remain anonymous, even if they have a
| public persona.
 
  | Cyberdog wrote:
  | So then what happens if someone's anonymity is stripped away?
  | Do they sue the de-anonymizer, or does the de-anonymizer face
  | criminal penalties? Or both? How does one determine an
  | appropriate penalty for this sort of thing? Does it matter if
  | the victim made themselves stupidly easy to dox?
  | 
  | "It oughtta be illegal" is easy to say but not so easy to
  | actually make happen.
 
  | vlunkr wrote:
  | That doesn't apply here. There's no remaining anonymous for
  | someone who didn't attempt to hide their identity.
 
| roboben wrote:
| Good old Ruby days!
 
| numeromancer wrote:
| Why, indeed.
 
| jmconfuzeus wrote:
| Poignant guide was the only programming book that didn't put me
| to sleep.
 
| shadowgovt wrote:
| His Wikipedia entry reminds me of this quote from him:
| 
| "programming is rather thankless. u see your works become
| replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a
| few more"
| 
| ... and I can't help but think that this experience is
| disproportionately part of the Ruby community he was embroiled
| in. I did some Ruby-on-Rails development back in the day, and
| yeah... It's all completely un-runnable now. But that mostly
| seems to be a Rails-specific issue, where the ecosystem was
| downright hostile to calcification of APIs, workflows, and core
| tools. A person could publish a whole book and have 50% of its
| recommendations obsoleted within two years. That has to be
| demoralizing for an educator and communicator. Contrast that
| massively with Windows binaries that still run that were built
| against operating system versions that existed before college
| graduates were born.
| 
| Various other ecosystems lack the high-speed code churn problem.
| I think even the Ruby ecosystem has cooled from its white-hot
| molten state a decade ago.
 
  | cortesoft wrote:
  | I have a VERY old rails project that I started back in 2005
  | when Rails was like version 0.8 (when migrations were just a
  | series of .sql files you ran in order). I continued working on
  | it for a few years and by the time I stopped, I had upgraded it
  | rails 2.1.
  | 
  | I recently wanted to play around with it again, and I was able
  | to get the entire thing running in Kubernetes. You can find
  | docker images for Ruby 1.8.7 still, and the Rails 2.1 gems
  | still installed fine. It might not be up to date security wise,
  | but it runs!
 
  | rsanheim wrote:
  | Are you being serious? Have you tried to get a "modern JS app"
  | or Python web app running (safely, w/o massive security
  | vulnerabilities) that is even a few years old?
  | 
  | All code rots, and it rots quickly. Its the a reality of modern
  | software.
 
    | azeirah wrote:
    | This is only true for languages that are not taking a long-
    | term vision into account.
    | 
    | Run some 8 year old Clojure Github project, should be fine.
    | 
    | Try a Common 20 year old Common Lisp project, you shouldn't
    | have an issue.
 
      | Nition wrote:
      | Run a forty-year-old FORTRAN program on your mainfram...
      | oh, you already are?
 
      | nonrandomstring wrote:
      | LISPs all seem tremendously resilient.
      | 
      | I wonder what intrinsic quality makes a language long
      | lived, rather than blame communities and whatnot.
      | 
      | Another stalwart is Pure Data, the DSP language I am very
      | fond of. It's based on atomic principles. Indeed the
      | primitive processing elements are called Atoms, being
      | irreducible ops like multiply, add, sin and cos. There
      | really isn't much that _can_ change. For C as for LISP,
      | especially Scheme, it 's hard to break them down any
      | further, yet they are high enough level to be useful for
      | programming. There's some sweet-spot to be found.
 
        | spacechild1 wrote:
        | Ha, I just wanted to bring up Pure Data as example. It
        | takes backwards compatibility very seriously. Patches
        | written 20 years ago should run just fine on any recent
        | Pd version. In fact, Miller Puckette strives for at least
        | 50 years of support. Pd just had its 25th anniversary, so
        | there are at least 25 more years to go :-)
 
      | thom wrote:
      | This isn't entirely true about Clojure, because there are
      | things that have broken as new Java versions have come out
      | (especially with modules and exports etc). Obviously you
      | can still run Java 8 if you want though.
 
      | dannyobrien wrote:
      | I would love some concrete data on this! Has anyone done
      | any studies?
 
    | tomohawk wrote:
    | I'm currently bulding a SPA to replace a 25 year old X Window
    | app. That app still builds on modern Linux systems despite
    | being unmaintained during that time. Seeing that old CVS repo
    | brought back some memories. The customer wants to modernize.
    | 
    | By comparison, the SPA is a nightmare of tooling and
    | dependencies that will be unsupportable in a few years
    | without constant maintenance and updating.
 
    | wwweston wrote:
    | It's the unfortunate reality of software, but it's not an
    | immutable law.
    | 
    | The Microsoft example is important. I've never been a fan,
    | but I stand in grudging respect for what they've accomplished
    | with their products as far as backwards compatibility goes,
    | which has significant and enduring value.
    | 
    | Emulators are another example of how software can be long-
    | lived with the right attention.
    | 
    | Personally, I think we have operating environment conceptions
    | all wrong. We continually pay for or fete new versions and
    | thus incentivize change for change's sake. We might do better
    | to respect or even pay for continuing compatibility.
 
      | tomcam wrote:
      | > The Microsoft example is important. I've never been a
      | fan, but I stand in grudging respect for what they've
      | accomplished with their products as far as backwards
      | compatibility goes,
      | 
      | I was a PM for Visual Basic back in the day. A huge amount
      | of work was done within dev and Office to work around
      | problems with Adobe, Borland, etc. so that compat wasn't
      | broken. It was frustrating and heartening.
 
      | bombcar wrote:
      | It is _incredibly_ sad that many /most games that were
      | released for Mac or Linux more than about 4 years ago will
      | run _better_ in an emulated windows environment on those
      | platforms than they will natively (if they run at all).
 
    | anyfoo wrote:
    | I am able to build, run, and use oneko-1.1 from 1995,
    | unmodified on a MacBook M1 Max. It's been almost 30 years,
    | but that cat is still cute when it chases the mouse cursor!
    | 
    | This may be a bit of an extreme example, but generally the
    | unix-y APIs have been relatively stable over the decades,
    | including X11 as we see.                   % ls -l
    | total 176         -rw-r--r--  1 foo  staff    547 Sep  9
    | 1995 Imakefile         -rw-r--r--  1 foo  staff  15666 Sep  9
    | 1995 Makefile         -rw-r--r--  1 foo  staff   7545 Sep  9
    | 1995 README         ...         -rw-r--r--  1 foo  staff
    | 33472 Sep  9  1995 oneko.c         ...         % xmkmf
    | mv -f Makefile Makefile.bak         imake -DUseInstalled
    | -I/opt/homebrew/Cellar/imake/1.0.8_5/lib/X11/config         %
    | touch DarwinMachineDefines; make CFLAGS="-I/usr/X11R6/include
    | -I/usr/X11R6/lib --include=stdlib.h --include=string.h
    | --include=unistd.h"         cc -I/usr/X11R6/include
    | -I/usr/X11R6/lib --include=stdlib.h --include=string.h
    | --include=unistd.h   -c -o oneko.o oneko.c         ...
    | % DISPLAY=:0 ./oneko
    | 
    | If you want to try for yourself, you need XQuartz (to have
    | X11 in the first place), and imake from e.g. homebrew,
    | because it's apparently not part of the XQuartz distribution.
    | Don't forget to start XQuartz. That's all.
 
    | junon wrote:
    | Python I can understand because of the 2 to 3 transition.
    | 
    | But JavaScript that worked in 1995 still works today. All of
    | it.
 
      | robertlagrant wrote:
      | Presumably that's not true for any code that uses modern
      | keywords such as class or super or await as variable names.
 
    | [deleted]
 
    | shadowgovt wrote:
    | Modern JS apps I encounter are packaged up with npm and I
    | rarely have trouble running them.
    | 
    | Python, I agree, is a challenge. I don't use it. I used to; I
    | concluded it was too much hassle most of the time to maintain
    | my Python working against other people's Python. Coupled with
    | the lack of static type checking, I pulled it off my quick-
    | grab list years ago (though with the growth of mypy, pip, and
    | conda I may revisit it some day if I get bored with my
    | current tools).
    | 
    | Go code is pretty stable. Java seems downright calcified.
    | And, of course, the whole C library space may as well be
    | igneous stone. You can get FFTW version 3, for example, built
    | from the relatively recent date of last year, but FFTW has a
    | version 2 stable release dating back to 1999.
 
      | rsanheim wrote:
      | I could've been more clear in my original post. I'm not
      | just thinking about "getting an app running": ruby, rbenv,
      | and bundler has had that solved for many years, and npm,
      | nvm (or whatever and js is stable there as well.
      | 
      | If you take any app built three years ago, you are going to
      | have critical security vulns in libraries you depend on.
      | With java think of the log4j fiasco. With Ruby there are
      | nokogiri or rails things. With javascript there are
      | probably at least a handful of downstream packages that
      | have pretty big security issues. Now you have to update
      | dependencies, and then the real fun begins.
      | 
      | If it a walled-off intranet app on a VPN, or a small CLI
      | app, sure, maybe you can ignore that issue. But if its a
      | public web or mobile app that is gonna see real use, you
      | are going to have to head down the security audit + package
      | update rabbit-hole.
 
      | jokethrowaway wrote:
      | JS apps nowadays have so many layers that often something
      | breaks over time or if you run it with the wrong version of
      | node.
      | 
      | Frontend post react is an absolute nightmare: My experience
      | with a fleet of semi abandoned next.js static websites is
      | pretty terrible: just in months something stops working in
      | my pipeline on vercel and I need to spend time to debug it.
      | Running things locally is even worse, I just change the
      | code, push and hope for the best.
      | 
      | Python is a downright nightmare: between 2vs3 and pip, egg,
      | venv, I usually just salvage the code I need and try to
      | make it work or convert it to something saner (eg. I did
      | that with an opencv algorithm I found - I just transposed
      | it to rust + the same opencv api calls). My favourite story
      | happened literally 2 days ago. I was trying to install a
      | dependency (keras_ocr) and I kept failing on some
      | dependency; I tried installing that dependency manually and
      | it worked but no success on installing keras_ocr.
      | Eventually I updated pip and it started working.
      | 
      | I had huge problems running old Go software, I think I
      | succeeded once after a lot of pain and gave up the other
      | times.
      | 
      | I had fairly good results with ancient C, C++, Java and
      | Haskell. Probably because they started before we had cool
      | and glamorous developers on twitter selling you a course
      | and not maintaining his 200 leftpad libraries.
      | 
      | I'm curious to see where Rust will sit in a few years.
 
        | Rauchg wrote:
        | Hey jokethrowaway. I'd love to get more color on your
        | experience upgrading your Next.js sites: feel free to
        | email rauchg@vercel.com.
        | 
        | - On local: `npm i && next dev` is guaranteed to be
        | stable.
        | 
        | - On remote: your pipeline is guaranteed to be stable.
        | 
        | If you have an example where this is not the case, please
        | let me know.
 
      | stormbrew wrote:
      | I mean, bundler goes back a pretty far distance into the
      | history of rails at this point and has been the defacto
      | mechanism of dependency control for ruby for most of its
      | history by now, so barring old gems being yanked you
      | _should_ be able to run any rails app with a lockfile if
      | you also find the right ruby version.
      | 
      | Js (or specifically npm) and python were _far_ slower to
      | adopt this convention, to the point that I think it 's fair
      | to say that neither have fully adopted it yet.
      | 
      | Js at least has made almost no backwards incompatible
      | syntax or core lib changes though, which is a point in its
      | favor. Ruby 2 and python 3 were major breaking changes.
 
        | shadowgovt wrote:
        | For JavaScript, I generally assume backwards-incompatible
        | changes are a non-starter because of its embedding into
        | the browser as its killer app. At this point, we really
        | don't know what websites will break if backwards-
        | incompatible JS changes are made.
        | 
        | Ironically, this has made JS a very stable language
        | (though APIs do occasionally drop out or change
        | drastically for security reasons).
 
    | thomashabets2 wrote:
    | I just found some of my C and C++ code from around 2001. I
    | just needed to add one missing prototype I'd let be implicit
    | in my sloppiness, and it all built and ran just fine.
    | 
    | Just runs a lot faster. :-)
 
    | snickerbockers wrote:
    | Nobody's trying to argue that python and javascript aren't
    | terrible, just that there are other languages and APIs that
    | are standardized and maintained by people who prioritize
    | reliability over following dumb trends that bloggers come up
    | with.
    | 
    | C is a great example of this. Even if the ABI changes, in the
    | worst case scenario a well-written C program only needs to be
    | recompiled.
 
  | kbenson wrote:
  | Pick your poison. Either you evolve your language to keep
  | people interested and old code becomes stale and eventually
  | stops working, or you don't and you lose your community and
  | interest in the language, like Perl.
  | 
  | We run twenty year old Perl scripts on new hosts at work all
  | the time, with little to no change required in them. We have
  | lots of microservices written in Perl over the last decade or
  | more, and those generally have very little to no problem being
  | ported to new systems as well. The problem now? Finding people
  | that know Perl or want a job writing it.
 
    | ww-picard-do wrote:
    | > Finding people that know Perl or want a job writing it.
    | 
    | Indeed. Although writing Perl is not so bad, reading not so
    | much.
 
    | enneff wrote:
    | It doesn't have to be that way. 10 years since Go 1 and
    | almost all Go programs written then will run correctly,
    | unchanged, against Go 1.19. It takes a lot of effort but the
    | effort pays off big time. Any programming language that wants
    | to survive the test of time should push hard on maintaining
    | compatibility imo.
    | 
    | I think people lost interest in Perl because Python was just
    | a better language for a lot of people's use cases (and
    | arguably a lot less mysterious). And the focus on Perl 6 (now
    | Raku) arguably distracted a lot of people from Perl 5 and
    | then took too long to mature. (At least that's how it looked
    | from my outside perspective.)
 
      | kbenson wrote:
      | I wasn't very clear, but I view this specifically as
      | something interpreted languages have to deal with far more
      | than compiled languages. Compiled languages have a slightly
      | different set of trade offs that make this less of a
      | problem (less, but not nonexistent).
      | 
      | > Python was just a better language for a lot of people's
      | use cases
      | 
      | I won't argue that about the short term, but long-term?
      | Long-term the difference in policy in how it deals with
      | changes ends up at exactly the problem we're discussing.
      | The fact that (IMO) pyenv and virtualenv are needed to
      | manage python deployments in any sane way is evidence of
      | this.
      | 
      | Long-term a lot of projects that ended up using Python
      | would likely have been better served by Perl because of the
      | expected target and lifecycle of the programs in question.
      | There are a lot of aspects of languages which aren't
      | necessarily the thing people were thinking of at the time
      | that they do think of now, because of very negative
      | examples. Examples such as package distribution, which
      | Javascript has had numerous problems with in the past with
      | NPM, and Python occasionally still struggled with (I'm
      | looking at you, pip, and your CLI search interface
      | brokenness).
      | 
      | These days new languages take package management and
      | deprecation policies and cycles and how to deal with long-
      | term stability extremely carefully, because of the examples
      | of Perl and Python and Javascript, etc. At least the ones
      | that plan to have any real adoption do. Rust is a somewhat
      | recent example of that. Look at all the effort they put
      | into making sure they got those aspects as correct as they
      | could and communicated them well to users. I don't think
      | Rust would have nearly as many people using it or
      | interested in it if they didn't give those the importance
      | they did (I imagine C# and Java are similar, but I follow
      | news about them somewhat less).
 
    | jonas21 wrote:
    | An exception is C++, which HN loves to hate, but has managed
    | to remain mostly backwards-compatible while evolving into a
    | modern language and maintaining a large community.
 
| vfclists wrote:
| Some people don't like chunky bacon, but a lot of others do.
 
| foxbarrington wrote:
| chunky bacon
 
  | whitepoplar wrote:
  | chunkybacon chunkybacon !!!!
 
    | partomniscient wrote:
    | come on, seriously. chunky bacon.
 
| fwip wrote:
| It seems almost disrespectful to republish all of the writings
| that _why had decided to delete.
 
  | UncleOxidant wrote:
  | Are we sure _why isn't somehow involved in this?
 
    | that_guy_iain wrote:
    | It's a pretty good guess, he has been found, reached out to,
    | etc. He just wants to move on from that time in his life.
    | 
    | So it must feel really weird to him that people go to so much
    | trouble to keep his old texts alife. It's like the whole _why
    | thing is now completely separate to him and it's now about
    | the idea of him and people care more about the idea of _why.
    | It kinda feels like making a tribute site/song/whatever to
    | your first love years a decade later.
 
  | andrew_ wrote:
  | The internet is forever, as they say.
 
  | cecilpl2 wrote:
  | For better or worse, when you publish something on the internet
  | it no longer belongs entirely to you.
 
    | qbasic_forever wrote:
    | No _why still owns the copyright on them and if you try to
    | republish them in violation of any license they put on them
    | (like requiring attribution, etc.) then you are in violation
    | of their copyright and the law.
    | 
    | The files and such may live forever, but your ability to
    | publish them, reproduce them, etc. is only allowed if you
    | were granted a license to do so.. i.e. if _why published them
    | under a permissive or open source license.
 
      | jopperdoo wrote:
      | You're explaining this to someone who undoubtedly knows
      | that, and is making a different point than you think (which
      | is that it doesn't matter).
      | 
      | We all know what copyright is. We all know nobody cares
      | online, too. Those of us who remember the work when
      | published originally also know that you're making an
      | argument that _why would hate you making, and that they
      | consciously chose to avoid through how they published. I
      | can tell how you're arguing here that you don't remember or
      | didn't know _why's preferences, which is itself somewhat
      | disrespectful.
      | 
      | Stick to the respect, which is an interesting thought to
      | consider, and spare the copyright litigation. It's honestly
      | tedious.
 
        | qbasic_forever wrote:
        | No one other than _why can say what their intentions and
        | desires for their works are.
        | 
        | The exact same argument you're making is what someone who
        | would steal _why's work and charge money to republish it
        | would make. Imagine if someone ganked the poignant guide
        | to ruby and it became a NYT bestseller... can they just
        | say "oh this is what _why would have wanted, for more
        | people to read this" and walk away with all the profits?
        | 
        | Copyright is there for a reason, to protect the owner of
        | a work. If _why chooses to do so they can go after anyone
        | republishing their work for money or not.
 
        | enneff wrote:
        | That's totally different to republishing something for
        | free.
 
        | pessimizer wrote:
        | It's not disrespectful to argue that putting something on
        | the internet doesn't make it public domain, no matter
        | what _why thought or thinks. If _why doesn't want it
        | taken down, he won't ask them to take it down. That
        | doesn't mean that conversations about whether things put
        | the internet become publicly owned, even sparked by
        | someone bootlegging a defunct site under the original
        | domain name, have to hinge on what _why thinks.
        | 
        | Or whether things put on the internet are any more
        | publicly owned than books, television shows, or movies,
        | which can all easily be put on the internet (and which
        | everybody agrees is extremely problematic irt the law.)
        | 
        | edit: also, this really reeks of weird parasocial hero
        | worship unless you know the man and have asked him about
        | it.
 
        | jopperdoo wrote:
        | He discussed his preferences on copyright. It's
        | projecting a weird kind of parasocial hero worship to
        | assume I meant otherwise despite my not giving you a
        | single shred of evidence on my opinion of him. I actually
        | detest your little edit because you've charged my opinion
        | and put me on a defensive footing regarding my opinion of
        | somebody who I honestly couldn't care less about (sorry;
        | wasn't my scene). I worked very hard to avoid saying that
        | because I know he's loved and my opinion doesn't matter.
        | But you had to make me say it.
        | 
        | I've not written a single line of Ruby in my life and
        | even I know his thoughts on copyright and public domain
        | and intellectual property, is the point. I actually hate
        | how many people worship him like he's Jesus because the
        | content is more interesting than the person, which is the
        | case for pretty much anyone creative and has nothing to
        | do with him. (Something tells me he'd vibe on that take,
        | too, given how he left.)
 
    | tomcam wrote:
    | I agree with you morally but legally you are completely wrong
    | of course. Anything you originate is owned by you, at least
    | in the United States
 
    | ben0x539 wrote:
    | Does that mean it's not disrespectful?
 
      | shadowgovt wrote:
      | This is a long-standing question.
      | 
      | They teach stories in high school these days that came from
      | manuscripts Franz Kafka explicitly demanded be burned upon
      | his death. It is, perhaps, disrespectful.
      | 
      | Perhaps we all disrespect him with every new generation of
      | students.
      | 
      | Perhaps that's a strangely fitting fate for the man who is
      | the namesake of the term "Kafkaesque." I'd like to hope
      | he'd laugh, but I know only the writings and not the man.
 
        | googlryas wrote:
        | Ironically enough, _why's last act "CLOSURE", he talks
        | about how he read everything by Kafka, even the deleted
        | stuff. So I have to hope he wouldn't have a problem with
        | someone creating this archive to keep his deleted
        | writings alive.
 
        | drewcoo wrote:
        | Kafka is dead. It's difficult to show he is harmed by
        | anything we do today without resorting to the
        | supernatural.
        | 
        | _why is invisible, not known to be dead. It is possible
        | to harm unseen people.
 
    | jholman wrote:
    | As a matter of legality, that's wrong, of course. This is
    | copyright violation. For whatever that's worth.
    | 
    | But I think the bigger point is, if you're a _fan_ of WTLS,
    | it seems very odd to be so disrespectful of WTLS 's desires.
    | I can only conclude the the party who put up the archive is
    | someone who wants to hurt WTLS's feelings, or at least is
    | quite willing to do so.
 
      | upupandup wrote:
      | You can't take back what you publish in public domain which
      | is what happens when you publish content on the internet.
      | You may own the copyright in technically but it would be
      | freely shared and distributed on the internet with your
      | only recourse being submitting DMCA notices to platforms.
      | Youtube does this very well but only because they are
      | required to by large corporations that can litigate.
      | 
      | The average HN user who posts blog content and deletes it
      | is not going to be able to stop it from being distributed.
      | Technically they own the copyright to its content but the
      | end result would be identical to if he or she had announced
      | it to be in public domain. Anybody anywhere could freely
      | share and publish its content on platforms without any
      | consequences unless you notify the platform with DMCA
      | notice and it would be largely up to the discretion of the
      | platform to comply or not as many hosting services
      | explicitly advertise such "bulletproof" hosting.
      | 
      | Your own take on what's moral and not has no bearing here
      | since we don't know how the author feels about his work
      | being shared. Yeah I get it that he has copyright to it but
      | its not exactly enforceable on the internet.
 
        | shadowgovt wrote:
        | The scale of the Internet makes it, in the general case,
        | impossible to prevent such re-hosting somewhere, at some
        | level of publicity.
        | 
        | Of course, as per the laws of most countries it is also a
        | copyright violation and the copyright holder can
        | absolutely sue for such behavior, with penalties ranging
        | from a legal obligation to cease to host the content to
        | damages.
 
        | bitwize wrote:
        | I think _why is only slightly more likely to sue over
        | these materials than William Gibson is to sue over the
        | text of _Agrippa_ , the "ephemeral poem" whose text was
        | recovered and sent all over the internet shortly after
        | its release.
 
        | qbasic_forever wrote:
        | Everything on the internet is not assumed to be public
        | domain. In fact if you don't put any license on it then
        | it is assumed to be de facto copyright material and other
        | people can't republish it without your explicit
        | permission.
 
        | upupandup wrote:
        | The internet is no different than any other public
        | domain. If you send nude pictures to your partner and
        | they leak it, there is an implicit understanding that it
        | is intended to be private and they can be held liable.
        | 
        | However, the platforms and websites that publish that
        | leak cannot be held accountable nor are they beholden to
        | any agreement between you and your partner. Simply
        | because there is no explicit /implicit agreement outside
        | those two parties.
        | 
        | The same logic applies to whatever material you publish
        | on the web. Once it enters public domain, you've
        | relinquished the control over its distribution. The
        | principle here is that once you publish to a public
        | domain and while you can claim copyright and take down
        | the material using DMCA, as long as the platform complies
        | they are granted safe harbour and you are not going to be
        | able to claim damages especially if you did not
        | commercialize it. Even if a game you were selling were
        | distributed online, it would be very tough to stop or go
        | after platforms that hosted it.
        | 
        | Following the "partner leaked pictures" scenario, the
        | opinion of courts with precedent ruling is that it
        | demonstrates an explicit boundary between the parties
        | involved in the original leak of the picture who are
        | known to each other vs third parties that consume it who
        | have no idea what agreements took place between them.
        | Damages to the partner that leaked it can be held
        | responsible but neither the platform or its audience.
        | Even if they monetized the content, they would not be at
        | fault because there is no implicit/explicit agreement
        | once those leaks enter the public domain.
        | 
        | I don't know why we are getting side tracked with leaked
        | nudes scenario but the gist of it is that only your
        | partner that leaked your nudes are liable. If he/she
        | uploads and it enters public domain and is shared amongst
        | the entire cities spanning the globe the platform and its
        | audience cannot be held responsible because of the lack
        | of implicit/explicit agreement between the subject in the
        | photo and the original distributor.
        | 
        | > it remains a violation of copyright for him or anyone
        | else to post them without your permission, and damages
        | can be claimed.
        | 
        | You can file DMCA to take down the photos and you can
        | claim damages from the leaker, not the people who
        | distributed it after the fact and the platforms that
        | monetized and hosted the content.
        | 
        | Otherwise we would not be able to enjoy websites like
        | xvideos or pornhub, who would take down the photos/videos
        | if requested through DMCA but would not be liable for
        | further dissemination nor will its audience.
        | 
        | Simply said and put: Once you put out content in the
        | public domain or view, you lose control of it, and you
        | cannot put the cat back in the bag. Copyright laws and
        | right to privacy IS NOT going to change this principle.
 
        | pessimizer wrote:
        | "Public domain" isn't a smart way of saying "things that
        | people have seen publicly" it's a legal term. You're
        | confidently wrong about every single point you've made
        | here. Including the first: if you send your boyfriend
        | nude pictures, and also post them on the internet for the
        | public to see, it remains a violation of copyright for
        | _him or anyone else_ to post them without your
        | permission, and damages can be claimed.
        | 
        |  _More_ damages could be potentially claimed if the
        | pictures your ex are posting are pictures you sell
        | commercially, in fact, because you 've demonstrated that
        | those photos have value and that you depend on your
        | copyrights to make a living.
 
        | upupandup wrote:
        | You are repeating what rest of us know but the outcome
        | here is exactly the same as you would when you declare it
        | a public domain. You lose control over its distribution.
        | 
        | You are also wrong on the scenario with leaked photos.
        | The partner who leaked is liable not the rest of us who
        | view it and share it.
        | 
        | Your last sentence also couldn't be further from the
        | truth. Someone who is making ad revenues also isn't at
        | fault and compliance with DMCA notice would be enough for
        | them to continue operating.
 
        | qbasic_forever wrote:
        | You are confused, 'public domain' is an explicit legal
        | definition of a work being licensed for any use. You have
        | to explicitly put a work into public domain. Just
        | uploading something to a server people can access for
        | free does not make the work 'public domain'.
        | 
        | Think about it... if the opposite were true then I could
        | watch or download a TV show from Hulu for free and claim
        | I own it and rebroadcast it to others while charging them
        | money. That's not how it works though, just because I
        | watched it for free doesn't mean it's public domain and I
        | am free to do whatever I want with it.
 
        | upupandup wrote:
        | yes in aware of the technicality but here nobody really
        | cares. if you publish it and its posted on reddit or some
        | other forum all you can do is hope the web host respects
        | your DMCA notice. Often the process is offputting that
        | most would not bother and claiming damages is even more
        | expensive and difficult with very low chance of success.
        | 
        | putting it in public domain or publishing it on the
        | internet results in the same outcome, you lose control
        | over it's access and distribution. its even worse because
        | if you try to censor it or known to litigate, it would
        | cause streisand effect.
        | 
        | you are not hulu and you cannot afford the legal costs.
        | even then it still doesn't stop torrent websites from
        | hosting your content and distributing it.
 
        | ska wrote:
        | > Once it enters public domain,
        | 
        | Public domain is a legal term of art. It is not the
        | internet, and it is not achieved by publishing something
        | on the internet.
        | 
        | Common carrier status is orthogonal to all this.
 
        | [deleted]
 
        | burntsushi wrote:
        | Things like the Internet Archive have an opt-out process
        | rather than opt-in. The extent to how the IA operates
        | within the law isn't clear to me, but it does suggest
        | that the case isn't as open-and-shut as you make it seem.
 
        | jyxent wrote:
        | I think they are opt-out because Wayback Machine would be
        | very incomplete if it required opting in. They are just
        | willing to deal with legal issues that occur due to this
        | policy.
        | 
        | They have removed web sites before due to copyright
        | claims and have a DMCA claim process.
 
        | upupandup wrote:
        | Bill Clinton signed the DMCA law into effect at the start
        | of the internet boom because somebody could have power to
        | shutdown a platform because their doodle got shared. Then
        | they could go after the host, and even the software
        | providers. To prevent these recursive litigations that
        | could easily have malicious intent (competition uploading
        | copyright material to your platform to shut you down),
        | the DMCA safe harbour was born.
        | 
        | Internet Archive operates the same way, if they receive
        | DMCA notice, they need to comply in order to keep the
        | safe harbour process.
        | 
        | As to whether WTL will file a DMCA to take down his
        | material, it looks unlikely. For whatever reason he
        | suddenly wanted to be out of limelight and I get the
        | feeling that he doesn't care much whether his work is
        | shared or not but who knows, maybe he will come out of
        | the woodwork to raise his voice (which would be in
        | contrast to his reclusive state).
        | 
        | He really is a mysterious figure and even more mysterious
        | is the sheer amount of effort he put into his work and
        | passion to share it suddenly relinquished overnight, out
        | of whim? stress? depression? We can only guess.
 
        | pessimizer wrote:
        | And their opt-out policy for books was ended after their
        | extremely-optimistic ploy to parlay becoming America's
        | covid library into a general weakening of copyrights. I
        | don't even know if they have an opt-in _process_ for the
        | copyright holders of books.
 
        | ska wrote:
        | > No implicit agreement between
        | 
        | True; instead it is explicit. This isn't controversial at
        | all, in typical jurisdiction unless explicitly released
        | into public domain the author retains all copyright -
        | your consuming one of those copies gives you no further
        | rights at all.
        | 
        | As a matter of practicality, it probably wont be acted
        | on. Unless there is enough money involved to go after
        | such copyright violations, it's unlikely anyone will
        | bother...
 
  | MatthiasPortzel wrote:
  | Did _why take them offline because he didn't want anyone to
  | read them?
  | 
  | I thought it was more like a book going out of publication--
  | there's no desire from the author that people should stop
  | reading it, just that it's out of the author's hands.
  | 
  | I don't know if _why ever expressed a desire that people
  | shouldn't go back and read his writing.
 
    | WorldMaker wrote:
    | It is assumed but not proven that _why's final thoughts about
    | killing that pseudonym are captured in CLOSURE [1].
    | 
    | There's a lot of different takeaways from that and other
    | contemporary writings of _why. Some of them are that _why
    | wished to pursue the Right to Be Forgotten, not just in the
    | GDPR terminology sense, but in a "Last Chance to See"
    | existential way. Those impressions yield that _why watched
    | the internet transition from "pseudonyms are fine and
    | ephemeral" to "everyone knows your real name and pseudonyms
    | are permanent fixtures in the modern internet" and tried as
    | hard as possible to kill everything about that pseudonym as
    | Performance Art. As a reminder of an internet long gone. As a
    | reminder of a Right to be Forgotten.
    | 
    | From that perspective, this archive is maybe a bit of putting
    | a Banksy into the Louvre. It's out of context, it's maybe
    | against the artist's wishes, it's kind of weird and over-
    | pedestalizing a legendary figure.
    | 
    | (Arguably _why's last stand failed to account for that little
    | last bit, that human tendency even older than the internet of
    | myth making and legend building. As this shows, as the
    | history of mentions of _why on HN alone every few months
    | shows, legends loom large in culture and _why was already a
    | part of the programming legendarium before he tried to murder
    | that pseudonym.)
    | 
    | [1] https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/raw/master/CLOSUR
    | E.p...
 
| blonky wrote:
| _Why's work led me to where I am. At a crucial time in my life I
| found _Why. That put me on a path to learning Ruby and then a
| whole bunch of steps now I have an actual job as a web developer.
| I work in Python, but I'm sure _Why won't mind. Before I found
| _Why I wasn't sure what to do with my career-life. He showed me
| that programming can be art and science.
 
  | mavu wrote:
  | Exactly the same for me (except its still ruby). I really hope
  | he knows how many lives he touched with his work/art.
 
  | invalidator wrote:
  | _Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is what got me hooked. His
  | quirky little foxes made it fun to just burn through the whole
  | book and left me with enough knowledge to be useful, and able
  | to ask the right questions to learn more.
  | 
  | It was just the right kick at the right moment, and he will
  | have a place in my heart forever.
 
| lioeters wrote:
| A related link posted here recently.
| 
| Why the Luck Stiff Documentary -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64anPPVUw5U
 
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