Aaron Swartz Used this | Hacker News Reader

Aaron Swartz Used this

aaron.swartz.usesthis.com

26 pointsnimeshneema19 comments

Perhaps it isn't the place (and I fully anticipate the knee-jerk flagging and the subsequent IP ban. Bravery Level:10), but is the idolization of Aaron Swartz perhaps a bit much?

He seems like he was a smart guy. He did several interesting things.

But did he do great things? Is his greatest accomplishment, bizarrely and destructively, that he killed himself?

I've been pondering this lately given the various posts asking why the "greatest minds" are focused on improving ad clicks, etc. Yet they aren't: I'm in awe of so much in our society, so many products we use, so many profoundly society-changing technologies and innovations of enormous complexity that we enjoy each day. Most created by nameless, faceless people just doing their part.

Which again makes me wonder why the tech world has been a week of adulation of Aaron Swartz, whose two greatest accomplishments (if you follow the lede of every story about him) were that he was pushed on the Reddit founders by PG after his own project failed (then exiting before them), and that he was one of a dozen plus people who authored a revision to a brutishly simplistic RSS 1.0 spec, his single celebrated attribute being his age.

I hesitate hitting add comment because I know the above is effectively sacrilegious, but I don't buy it. I will not celebrate someone because they committed suicide.

Nobody gave a shit until he killed himself. It's kind of disgusting that that was necessary.

Really? I had respect for him prior to his death. All of the articles/tributes that I've come across have bestowed me with more knowledge about him than I previously had, but Aaron wasn't a nobody that became a somebody in death. He was a somebody that is achieving a sort of 'sainthood' in death. You could compare this to JFK if you like. JFK might not have been such a memorable President had he not been assassinated.

I'm not happy that Aaron committed suicide, but I am happy that his death is sparking some motivation on serious issues.

Yes. I'm glad something's happening to prevent recurrences, but I hate that it was necessary at all. It's more than likely that no politician would have cared at all if he hadn't killed himself and that had caused a large amount of PR/public outcry.

I can't remember the last time I saw a post on Hacker News about donating to Aaron's defense fund, or about how ridiculous the charges against him were. (We already knew about JSTOR--why didn't we care?) There have been at least 300 different posts about him after he killed himself.

I blame myself for not doing enough, too, but I don't do something _because_ he committed suicide. This piling-on of posts seems odd and morbid to me. I'd hate to live in a country/world where the best choice if you want to effect change really is to kill yourself.

(As a thought exercise to show how the death was "necessary": How much time have you spent caring about/working to assist in a similar, active case after Aaron's suicide?)

Don't blame yourself. Aaron and his associates were the closest to the case and it was incumbent upon them to do the PR necessary to raise the outcry. However, according to recent accounts, Aaron felt barred from fully presenting his cause. It was a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't situation for Aaron, which is a damned tragedy.

I'd say DemandProgress, stopping SOPA, and codirecting the Progressive Change Campaign Committee are all pretty notable as well. If you read the things people who associated with him wrote, there seems to be a rather long tail to the things he's done that are a bit less prominent than, say, Reddit.

Is that honestly all you took away from the stories about him? The only way I could see someone forming this opinion is if they had read only the lede of a piece about him before closing the tab.

The only way I could see someone forming this opinion is if they had read only the lede of a piece about him before closing the tab.

I was speaking specifically to those things that have been singled out as the items that make his story so newsworthy (the RSS one being a particularly odd one, the history completely distorted in the retelling for the purposes of narrative invention). I am fully aware of the various initiatives that Aaron was involved with.

The distortion around his contribution to RSS is strongest in mainstream news articles written by people who don't really understand the history. When you read pieces by people in technology, activist, and art circles, especially people who actually knew and worked with him, you find many other projects he created or contributed to. And if you're fully aware of that, I think it's disingenuous to point to what a confused journalist thinks Aaron Swartz did and act like that's the full story.

You can celebrate someone as a kindred spirit, even if they aren't as accomplished as others in the community. You can feel outrage in the face of injustice. You can feel the loss of someone who was principled and well-spoken. It's a shame that it takes a high-profile suicide for people to actually say nice things about someone.

That said, this non-stop fawning has become somewhat ghoulish and progressively less meaningful.

Actually, some would say his greatest achievement was spurring the grass roots movement that shouted down SOPA. It's not just that he was a strong programmer, but that he passionately cared about civics. He was someone who could've easily had a comfortable life in the tech sector but decided to take on, as they say, the big problems.

There are of course, many who are just as passionate about civics as Aaron, but few with the same technical prowess that is needed to turn a cause into a modern well-oiled movement.

Aaron did a huge number of small things, a few moderately important things (the ones you mention), and one important thing: he organized the opposition to COICA/SOPA/PIPA. Without Aaron, you'd be typing your comment on a COICA-encumbered internet, which means, practically speaking, an internet without Wikipedia.

Tim Berners-Lee doesn't go around calling 26-year-olds his "mentor" or his "wise elder" just because they killed themselves.

he organized the opposition to COICA/SOPA/PIPA. Without Aaron, you'd be typing your comment on a COICA-encumbered internet, which means, practically speaking, an internet without Wikipedia.

Citation required. Just about everyone in the tech industry, including most of the titan organizations of tech and everyone with a voice that could be heard spoke and acted against SOPA. Now it was all Aaron?

This is exactly the sort of thing that makes this whole thing bizarre (and to steal a word another poster used, ghoulish). His legacy grew ten fold the day he died, and his influence and contribution pushes back through time.

Watch Aaron's F2C speech. COICA was voted on three days after it was introduced, long before the titan organizations heard about it. If it had passed into law before the quick-reaction movement Aaron and his buddies put together were able to get Ron Wyden to put the brakes on it — which very nearly happened — the months-long effort to organize the tech titans would never have had a chance.

I admit I didn't know this until after he died, despite our friendship.

>I wish that everyone had perfectionist levels of attention to detail.

>I wish that I could lift up the screen on my laptop so that it would be closer to eye-level

I thought this the first time I opened my Lenovo T530. It has very solid hinges that look like they could telescope up at least a few inches. But no. The monitor is stuck in place strictly limited to swivel action only. After a while I decided that what I really wanted was a pair of HDMI input sunglasses. Unfortunately that's a no as well.

With the amount of personalized sites there are on the internet, and the number a hacker like Aaron was on, one could write a digital biography with that data.

MPW 9? Is he referring to the Macintosh Programmers Workshop?

No, he's referring to a font. [A version of Monaco][1] that shipped with the Macintosh Programmers Workshop editor for a time. The paragraph above the MPW reference notes that he was using TextMate (which he'd be using since the 1.0 release)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaco_(typeface)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com