He's a top notch high and low-level programmer with excellent taste for API design (and a language geek). He's also a talented poet/writer, painter/cartoonist/web designer and composer/singer/musician.

From ~2002 to 2009, he released a tremendous amount of material (dozens of code projects, thousands of blog posts), then disappeared abruptly, deleting almost everything he had ever published. His blog posts were humorous yet insightful. His libraries were excellent, some of his snippets were completely baffling. The libraries were always artfully and pedagogically documented.

He wrote in 2005 an essay lamenting the high barier of entry to programming for children in the 2000's whereas Basic was available in every 8/16bit computers when he was a kid. From then on, he tried to improve the situation: first by writing his Poignant guide to Ruby, then by writing http://http://tryruby.org/, the first online REPL, wrapped in an interactive tutorial. At last, he started the Hackety Hack project: an development environment to teach programming to children.

Extremely creative, he (used to?) consider programming to be an art in and of itself, but frequently mixed genres too. His programming book is illustrated with cartoons, fantastic stories and has a sound track that illustrates either the code, the stories, or the book writing process itself. The "This book is made (of rabbits and lemonade)" and "The parts of Ruby/Chunky Bacon" songs gives you a good sample of what his overall production felt like (see below).

He was also excellent at promoting his works, but was ambivalent regarding his own fame.

He also sometimes displayed a darker side (like in the Poignant Guide where he jokingly predicted that he was going to burn out and shoot himself in the head).

Watching him was at the same time entertaining and enlightening, and more, and I definitely wasn't the only person to deeply enjoy what he was doing... When he disappeared people went to no end to recover his works.

Most of his deleted work has been restored from backups (git forks and RSS feeds helped with this). Some of his code projects have been taken over by others, and all are archived here: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/

While active, he was admired. When he disappeared, he became a legend. It's a pity he left so many things unfinished.

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The Poignant Guid to Ruby: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

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The Redhanded blog, covering all things Ruby: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/

Hackety.org, his next blog on artful programming: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/hackety.org/

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The SoundTrack of the Poignant Guide: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/soundtrack/

Recommended:

- This book is made (of rabbits and lemonade): http://s3.amazonaws.com/mislav.baconfile.com/poignant-guide%...

- The parts of Ruby / Chunky Bacon : http://s3.amazonaws.com/mislav.baconfile.com/poignant-guide%...

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I just found out that it was still possible to buy Chunky Bacon t-shirts: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/blixytees

Also interesting: a Sun engineer uses dtrace to show HDD latency spiking after he yells at his disks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

There actually might be a precedent over here.

Heinlein came up with a "waterbed" for a few of his books (it was mentioned quite prominently in Stranger in a strange land) Later on a man called Charles Hall tried to patent his design, and he was denied the patent by the USPO on the grounds that Heinlein's description in Stranger in a strange land, and Double star constituted prior art.

It would be fascinating to see if this precedent is followed...

And this is why competition is a good thing. If you read between the lines, it's clear a lot of these features are motivated by Google+'s privacy controls. Facebook has even exceeded Google+ in a few areas like tag approval. What's interesting here is that people have been asking for features like tag approval for several years. Honestly, it's a no-brainer feature that has had widespread support. But it took the entrance of a serious competitor into the market to force Facebook to respond to user demands.

As a Venezuelan, this is terrible news. Forget economic consequences for a minute.

The corruption levels in Venezuela are incredibly high. Is widely known that the Chavez government has been one of the most corrupt government in Venezuela history.

What do you think is going to happen to this gold when it gets to Venezuela? (If it ever gets there)

I mean, I don't know the dynamics of this, but which authority is going to weigh the incoming gold? Who are we supposed to trust when every institution in the country is in Chavez hands? They basically say what they are told.

Also, our Central Bank does not have the physical capacity to store that much gold. Chavez already offered the basement of the Presidential Palace :S (which I have been to and is as a regular basement can be).

What about the cost of moving that quantity of gold? They are already talking about 40 trips. Yeah, that's going to cost, 400 million according to the article. Money that could be very well spent in say, hospitals: http://www.noticias24.com/actualidad/noticia/302153/en-fotos... )

As for the cash reserves: they are going to Russian and Chinese banks. Sorry to those that might be offended, but personally I have as much trust in these governments as I have in mine.

We have an election in 2012. If Chavez looses (or if he evens runs... he might die from his cancer before that, dunno), that gold is going back. More gold will be lost along the way.

What about the cash reserves? The new government will have to deal with Russians and Chinese institutions under a different premise, because the new government will be or will try to be very close with the US. I think we can expect things to get a bit rough and a lot of gold will go unaccounted for.

Sad news for Venezuela, once again.

This really hit home for me. All too often we view the unemployed as a statistic, but this article really put a human face on the issue. As pundits & politicians argue about various macroeconomics theories, levels of taxations etc. there are real life people out there trying to find a way to live, never mind advance in life. It's gut wrenching.

Speaking of serious comments:

It used to be possible to have a submission related to Apple on Hacker News wherein the top comment was something other than shitting on John Gruber.