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Comment by gamache | Hacker News Reader

Name some circumstances which justify pulling down a broadly-used open source project like Hpricot. At a certain point it must be admitted that a project has a life beyond its author.

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He could have had his computer, or email hacked.. have to wait to see if we hear from him before we assume he actually cleared all the accounts himself.

Sure, well of course if he got hacked then I am not gonna hold it against him. I just can't imagine anyone targeting _why.

I can, but only because I'm a cynic.

That explanation seems highly unlikely, especially considering the lack of any messages saying as such.

update: I assume I'm being downvoted because people do consider it a likely explanation? It would be utterly unprecedented AFAIK.

No, you're being down-voted because you're a selfish arse. Is the primary concern the slight inconvenience his disappearance will cause you?? ... to us, the answer is No.

He hosted it on git, the source is still out there: http://github.com/defunkt/hpricot/tree/master

It could be a dead man's switch. (But I'm really hoping it's not.)

Interesting point. I wonder how many people actually implement such things?

An acquaintance of mine did. I had moved to a different state. We kept in occasional email contact. And one day I noticed he had deleted his LinkedIn account. Found him in the obituaries, he had passed on a couple of months before. RIP.

Wow. Thanks for the story. I hadn't heard any concrete examples of people actually doing that.

Well yeah. Let's hope it wasn't that.

Isn't it more likely that a relative simply requested LinkedIn to delete the account? A LinkedIn account doesn't seem relevant to keep online at all after the person has passed away. Facebook, on the other hand, leaves pages up but with most features disabled except for the wall and photos - something I'm unfortunately familiar with.

How exactly do you implement a dead man's switch for your online accounts? Do you just leave your account info for your estate's executor, lawyer, friend, or whatever and he manually deletes them? Or do you have some script that will automatically run and delete your accounts if you don't tell it not to every week or so?

I've often what happens to people's free email addresses after they die. (I suppose nothing in most cases.)

These (dead mans switches) are online services which can terminate accounts for you and send emails on your behalf. Some of them work by sending you an email once a month or so to check up on you, if you don't reply, the switch is triggered.

Really hope that email doesn't get caught in a spam filter...

With all due respect, they were hosted with git, which is by nature distributed. If it's broadly-used, no single person can destroy a repository. Copies of the hpricot repo are all over the internets.

I don't disagree that it's inconvenient, but it's not like he nuked a SVN master repository or something.

That's why we have DVCS these days.

The fact that Hpricot used a DVCS is a godsend in cases like this, but we still confront the fact that the software's canonical source, including its documentation, is gone. That Sucks, DVCS or not.

He got owned?

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