If you hit someone with enough felony counts sooner or later something can snap. This in response to those that claim the DOJ didn't have anything to do with Aaron killing himself.
For some people the mere fact of being suspected of a crime they didn't commit is enough to push them over the edge. When you're placed in a holding cell the police will remove your laces from your boots so you don't hang yourself, that's how heavy being imprisoned can weigh on some.
Aaron did something that he thought was right, that he truly believed in and that upset a large number of applecarts and that had far reaching implications, had the proverbial book thrown at him and then some. The prospect of significant amounts of jail time (35 years for downloading scientific papers, it shouldn't even be a crime) and/or a felony record must have weighed very heavy on him.
For a person that is of a very stable mental make-up that would already be extreme pressure.
For someone with a mental issue it may very well be all it takes.
Aaron was inspiring to me, I think that no copyrighted piece of paper is worth a human life and that the DOJ, even if they are not directly responsible at least indirectly carry some of the responsibility here for beating down someone who was fighting for an extremely good cause in a somewhat haphazard way. The letter of the law and the spirit of the law should both be taken into account.
I hope those that had a hand in Aarons' continued prosecution will sleep miserably for a long time to come. Likely it won't weigh on their consciousness at all.
Aaron Swartz did something he knew was morally right but very probably illegal in some way, and, him being a prodigy, I'm very confident he was aware of this. It is called activism, and is a very brave and noble thing to do, something most people don't have the guts for. Governments often try to break activists who threaten their agenda (or in this case, that of a dying industry), and it seems they have succeeded with him, which I find very sad and which makes me so angry.
Maybe being indicted while free may even be a bigger psychological pressure on somebody than being in prison. When you are in prison, you can focus all your energy on your case, and the situation can only get better than your current one, not worse. You have certain legal protections, and your basic needs are taken care of.
Imagine having to work a job to earn an income (your assets probably being seized) and function in society with a constant feeling of danger looming ahead. They can fuck up your life one little piece at a time. Imagine working on your defence when the computer you are using to do so can be seized at any time (some DA having convinced a judge that you may be hacking right now). Imagine restrictions on travel that make making a living even more difficult. Imagine randomly being delivered a letter with one more bogus charge.
While being free seems to be better than in prison from an objective point of view, given the workings of the threat detection system in our mind, made for tigers in the savannah, not constant worry and fear, it may be much worse. It is well known that the functioning of our "higher" abilities like creativity and critical thinking are impaired under constant stress. It's easy to conceive what this means for the feeling of self worth of somebody who lives for doing cool, meaningful, big things (one of my favourite essays ever, btw):
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity
Also, it neatly avoids the aura of illegitimacy that imprisoning peaceful activists would have for a government.
One lesson that could be learned from this is to try and consciously provide people in his situation with an environment that feels safe. Nut just a fund for legal and living expenses and therapy to cope with the stress, but much more importantly, reliable relationships with people who are supporting, compassionate and willing to listen.
It really rubs me the wrong way when something like this happens and folks jump to conclusions as you have here. You didn't know this person. For all we know he could have not given two shits about the whole legal process and this is linked to family or relationship problems or long term general depression.
Aaron makes a parallel between the Batman movie and his own struggles, highlighting the corruption of the system and how the Joker was actually the only "sane" person in an insane world. Sadly, he decided to pursue the same path as Heath Ledger.
There is no need to speculate. The DOJ bought by corporate interests is directly responsible for his suicide. They are more worried about protecting corporate interests than worrying about the spirit of law.
Adversity, even extreme adversity, doesn't cause suicide; if it did, many, many people on earth would kill themselves.
I would even argue that it's often the opposite; adversity gives motivation and meaning; meaninglessness is more dangerous.
People I knew who committed suicide did it when they enjoyed a limited level of success. For instance, twenty years ago I was an actor in a play by an author who had been trying to make it for years. This play was a (moderate) success. Two days after the last show, the author jumped out of a window in his grandmother's apartment.
It baffled everyone around him, but I think the reason is that success didn't bring him the joy he thought it would bring. There wasn't anything left to look forward to.
If you hit someone with enough felony counts sooner or later something can snap.
There are the conditions for suicide, and then there's the impulse that drives it to happen. The first is visible and appears over a long period of time-- felony convictions, mental instability, or extreme career adversity-- but it never seems that things are that bad (especially because a lot of people refuse to admit that good things can happen to bad people). The second is fairly sudden and seems "random". This is why suicides are so unexpected. A person can seem to be "not that bad off" one day, and the next day, commit suicide.
The scary thing is that the first kind of conditions are being more common. We have:
* draconian sentences for minor crimes, including drug possession, white-hat hacking, and file sharing,
* an increasing willingness of corporations to use extreme and illegal career adversity (e.g. blacklisting) against whistleblowers,
* increasing difficulty for a person to "re-invent" him- or herself in the wake of a bad reputation.
Thirty years ago, if your life got fucked up, you could pull a Don Draper. You could pay people off to represent themselves as past employers and reconstruct your career under an alternate name, and move halfway across the country. (I don't consider this unethical in the context of radical reinvention, providing that you're not feigning competences you lack or defrauding people.) In 2013, that's becoming increasingly hard to do.
His work on the web.py framework gave countless Python programmers a head-start on serving information through web applications. http://webpy.org/
His work with DemandProgress gave Americans a political voice to protect and win back their freedom and the freedom of information. http://blog.demandprogress.org/people
His work with Creative Commons promoted the freedom of information and fair use and helped inform content creators of options other than copyright. http://creativecommons.org/
Thank you, Aaron Swartz, for all the above and all the other activism and works (https://github.com/aaronsw) I haven't mentioned here. You'll be missed and remembered by many.
Better eulogies will follow, to be sure, but in the mean time, much of what can be said about him is captured in a touching talk he gave called "How to Get a Job Like Mine" [1]. What I think is especially touching about this is how he gently deconstructs his success, demystifying his own legend by pulling back the curtain on what would have otherwise appeared to be a string of miraculous accomplishments. In the process, he reveals himself to be a sensitive, seemingly grateful, and thoughtful person.
May he be remembered well; he seems to deserve it.
It's easy to deride suicide but fact of the matter is that it is the final but a very powerful option we have at our disposal. Instead of saying that a particular person should not have committed suicide, our hope should be that if a suicide happens, it is well thought through and is not done in haste. If a particular person decides that decades of painful life is much worse than simply ending the existence, who are we to question such a personal decision?
Of course, if everything was alright, I would have loved to see Aaron existing in this world for many more years and do wonderful things but not knowing what led him to this step and how he judged the current/future life for himself. Simply commenting that he should not have committed suicide is being insensitive to a person who has already done so much great work for humanity.
Life is not always better than no life. Context matters. A lot.
Last fall and winter, JSTOR experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners’ content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.
The downloaded content included more than 4 million articles, book reviews, and other content from our publisher partners' academic journals and other publications; it did not include any personally identifying information about JSTOR users.
We stopped this downloading activity, and the individual responsible, Mr. Swartz, was identified. We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed.
The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office. It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.
Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful.
Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss him dearly. The grief is unfathomable.
Aaron suffered from a brain disorder. He had documented periods of extreme withdrawn depression and others of mild manic productivity.
Because of that brain disorder, perhaps because it was not attacked with the requisite treatment, he is dead.
If you or a loved one are ever feeling suicidal, depressed, or are acting abnormally erratic, contact an expert. It's nothing to be ashamed about. It's just a lottery of genetic expression.
There are others going through the same thing. There are excellent treatments available, and they get better each year. You might save someone's life.
I find it bizarre how quickly our minds jump to impossibly unlikely reasons when tragic events like this happen. Troubles with the justice department don't alone cause a bright young man to kill himself.
> I was miserable. I couldn't stand San Francisco. I couldn't stand office life. I couldn't stand Wired. I took a long Christmas vacation. I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign.
> I followed these rules. And here I am today, with a dozen projects on my plate and my stress level through the roof once again.
> I have a lot of illnesses. I don’t talk about it much, for a variety of reasons. I feel ashamed to have an illness. (It sounds absurd, but there still is an enormous stigma around being sick.)
> Sadly, depression (like other mental illnesses, especially addiction) is not seen as “real” enough to deserve the investment and awareness of conditions like breast cancer (1 in 8) or AIDS (1 in 150). And there is, of course, the shame.
In his short life Aaron has produced a wonderful collection of writing, code, and actions, which will all be available for years to come. He will be missed. His effects have not yet ceased.
There is a mental illness here and the mental illness is thinking that his suicide is unrelated to the massive witch hunt against him by the US Federal Government hellbent on his personal destruction at any cost.
Those who deny that that had anything to do with this, and it was only a "brain disorder" or other such claptrap are truly insane.
I've had students who for years were systematically abused and tortured by adults. This abuse caused them pain, distress, depression, and suicide ideation, not a chemical imbalance. Despite this, counselors they saw diagnosed them as having a chemical imbalance and pumped them full of pills that have psychosis and suicide as known and documented side effects.
Who is insane in this situation? Who is responsible for the damage it causes when a young person is targeted for destruction by sociopaths and it causes them to crack? A chemical imbalance? Not the things that are being done to them by others intentionally trying to harm them?
This attitude justifies the abuse of people. This attitude leads to suicide. This attitude needs to stop.
did he have a history of depression? perhaps it was simply due to stress or pressure? The thought of spending the next 35 years in prison for downloading documents can be pretty painful... probably as bad as someone who was wrongfully tried for murder.
For some reason this is a shock to me. It shouldn't be, I didn't know the guy. But I was just playing with web.py framework. It is so strange, I thought just today, I wonder if Aaron would accept a pull request, I could see a few things to improve.
Looking back at his activity on github he was pulling in commits less than a week ago:
I don't know details about the "JSTOR" case or about what he did at Reddit but I can see in his code that he cared and wanted to make something better, smaller and elegant. I respect that and it is a loss to have him gone forever.
I also never met him, but this really upsets me too.
It was a bummer when I saw the headline, but I'm really, really upset now that I was reminded of his legal troubles.
Suicide is complex, so I don't want to speculate on whether or not he committed suicide to avoid a trial and probably incarceration. Regardless, it had to be a factor and it certainly fucked up his life somewhere between a little bit and a lot a bit.
When I realized just how many spiders I've written... When I think about that spider with a $240B+ market cap... When I think "This could have been me or one of my friends"... I started to cry :-(
Meanwhile, the guys who wiped out literally trillions of dollars of wealth by cratered the global economy in an orgy of greed, fraud, and reckless disregard for everything but their own inflated bonuses couldn't get arrested if they tired.
There are a lot of things wrong with this situation, but the egregiously misaligned priorities of the US Attorneys are near the top of the list.
The same page shows that the last Reddit comment he ever made was on /r/HPMOR. I don't think I noticed at the time - I don't think I knew he was a fan.
I have said and will say that Aaron Swartz acted heroically in trying to free the scientific literature. It was a good try.
Shocking and saddening. I've been working with Python lately and feel a particular loss because of web.py and all the other good work he did. My prayers go out to his family.
I wonder why some people here are assuming this tragedy is because of the JSTOR incident. It seems to me that everyone should just meditate on what's been lost, and defer judgement about why he would do this until there is evidence.
> I wonder why some people here are assuming this tragedy is because of the JSTOR incident. It seems to me that everyone should just meditate on what's been lost, and defer judgement about why he would do this until there is evidence.
Thank you so much. It's awful to see people in here blaming the trial when suicide is much more complex than a single incident pushing someone to the edge like that.
Every single person employed by the US Attorney Office involved in this tragedy should be sued to hell by the family. Have some goddamn responsibility for once.
This is utterly disgraceful, I feel for his family.
Did any of the employees of US Attorney Office forced him (like putting a gun to a head of one of his loved ones) to do it? It was his own choice to end his life.
https://www.google.com/search?q=doj+presecute gives me :
DOJ Will Not Prosecute Goldman Sachs in Financial ... - ABC News
9 Aug 2012 – The Justice Department has decided it will not prosecute Goldman Sachs or its employees for their role in the financial crisis...
Share the load
Even if your friends aren’t cheerful, just working on a hard problem with someone else makes it much easier. For one thing, the mental weight gets spread across both people. For another, having someone else there forces you to work instead of getting distracted.
It's always a shame when someone commits suicide in a situation like this. There's always a better option. Everyone makes mistakes.
I've seen this happen in my own life. I had a family friend that committed suicide after being indicted of a felony DUI charge because he swore he never would go to prison.
[+] [-] jacquesm|13 years ago|reply
If you hit someone with enough felony counts sooner or later something can snap. This in response to those that claim the DOJ didn't have anything to do with Aaron killing himself.
For some people the mere fact of being suspected of a crime they didn't commit is enough to push them over the edge. When you're placed in a holding cell the police will remove your laces from your boots so you don't hang yourself, that's how heavy being imprisoned can weigh on some.
Aaron did something that he thought was right, that he truly believed in and that upset a large number of applecarts and that had far reaching implications, had the proverbial book thrown at him and then some. The prospect of significant amounts of jail time (35 years for downloading scientific papers, it shouldn't even be a crime) and/or a felony record must have weighed very heavy on him.
For a person that is of a very stable mental make-up that would already be extreme pressure.
For someone with a mental issue it may very well be all it takes.
Aaron was inspiring to me, I think that no copyrighted piece of paper is worth a human life and that the DOJ, even if they are not directly responsible at least indirectly carry some of the responsibility here for beating down someone who was fighting for an extremely good cause in a somewhat haphazard way. The letter of the law and the spirit of the law should both be taken into account.
I hope those that had a hand in Aarons' continued prosecution will sleep miserably for a long time to come. Likely it won't weigh on their consciousness at all.
[+] [-] konstruktor|13 years ago|reply
Maybe being indicted while free may even be a bigger psychological pressure on somebody than being in prison. When you are in prison, you can focus all your energy on your case, and the situation can only get better than your current one, not worse. You have certain legal protections, and your basic needs are taken care of.
Imagine having to work a job to earn an income (your assets probably being seized) and function in society with a constant feeling of danger looming ahead. They can fuck up your life one little piece at a time. Imagine working on your defence when the computer you are using to do so can be seized at any time (some DA having convinced a judge that you may be hacking right now). Imagine restrictions on travel that make making a living even more difficult. Imagine randomly being delivered a letter with one more bogus charge.
While being free seems to be better than in prison from an objective point of view, given the workings of the threat detection system in our mind, made for tigers in the savannah, not constant worry and fear, it may be much worse. It is well known that the functioning of our "higher" abilities like creativity and critical thinking are impaired under constant stress. It's easy to conceive what this means for the feeling of self worth of somebody who lives for doing cool, meaningful, big things (one of my favourite essays ever, btw): http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity
Also, it neatly avoids the aura of illegitimacy that imprisoning peaceful activists would have for a government.
One lesson that could be learned from this is to try and consciously provide people in his situation with an environment that feels safe. Nut just a fund for legal and living expenses and therapy to cope with the stress, but much more importantly, reliable relationships with people who are supporting, compassionate and willing to listen.
[+] [-] wheels|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zatara|13 years ago|reply
Aaron makes a parallel between the Batman movie and his own struggles, highlighting the corruption of the system and how the Joker was actually the only "sane" person in an insane world. Sadly, he decided to pursue the same path as Heath Ledger.
[+] [-] judofyr|13 years ago|reply
Can we stop the speculations until we actually know what happened? :-(
[+] [-] option_greek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|13 years ago|reply
I would even argue that it's often the opposite; adversity gives motivation and meaning; meaninglessness is more dangerous.
People I knew who committed suicide did it when they enjoyed a limited level of success. For instance, twenty years ago I was an actor in a play by an author who had been trying to make it for years. This play was a (moderate) success. Two days after the last show, the author jumped out of a window in his grandmother's apartment.
It baffled everyone around him, but I think the reason is that success didn't bring him the joy he thought it would bring. There wasn't anything left to look forward to.
[+] [-] DennisP|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacques_chester|13 years ago|reply
They're not the same.
[+] [-] vor_|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
There are the conditions for suicide, and then there's the impulse that drives it to happen. The first is visible and appears over a long period of time-- felony convictions, mental instability, or extreme career adversity-- but it never seems that things are that bad (especially because a lot of people refuse to admit that good things can happen to bad people). The second is fairly sudden and seems "random". This is why suicides are so unexpected. A person can seem to be "not that bad off" one day, and the next day, commit suicide.
The scary thing is that the first kind of conditions are being more common. We have:
* draconian sentences for minor crimes, including drug possession, white-hat hacking, and file sharing, * an increasing willingness of corporations to use extreme and illegal career adversity (e.g. blacklisting) against whistleblowers, * increasing difficulty for a person to "re-invent" him- or herself in the wake of a bad reputation.
Thirty years ago, if your life got fucked up, you could pull a Don Draper. You could pay people off to represent themselves as past employers and reconstruct your career under an alternate name, and move halfway across the country. (I don't consider this unethical in the context of radical reinvention, providing that you're not feigning competences you lack or defrauding people.) In 2013, that's becoming increasingly hard to do.
[+] [-] lucian303|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tricolon|13 years ago|reply
His blog was thought-provoking. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/
His work on the RSS 1.0 Specification enabled richer, more efficient information consumption. http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec
His work on Markdown enabled intuitive, unobtrusive formatting and structuring of information in plaintext and conversion to HTML. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/#acknowledgement...
His work on reddit enabled thousands—now millions—to share online information in a social manner. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit
His work on the web.py framework gave countless Python programmers a head-start on serving information through web applications. http://webpy.org/
His work with DemandProgress gave Americans a political voice to protect and win back their freedom and the freedom of information. http://blog.demandprogress.org/people
His work with Creative Commons promoted the freedom of information and fair use and helped inform content creators of options other than copyright. http://creativecommons.org/
Thank you, Aaron Swartz, for all the above and all the other activism and works (https://github.com/aaronsw) I haven't mentioned here. You'll be missed and remembered by many.
.
[+] [-] DustinBoyer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kzar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhnz|13 years ago|reply
This guy was definitely making a positive impact in the world.
[+] [-] dholowiski|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antics|13 years ago|reply
May he be remembered well; he seems to deserve it.
[1] https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget
[+] [-] cezary|13 years ago|reply
I winced when I got to that. It's sad to think this isn't the first time he's had these thoughts and how long he must have had them. Rest in peace.
[+] [-] nanook|13 years ago|reply
Definitely. He wrote a bunch of blogposts last year on improving life, called "Raw Nerve": http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve
Wonderful writing.
[+] [-] paraschopra|13 years ago|reply
Of course, if everything was alright, I would have loved to see Aaron existing in this world for many more years and do wonderful things but not knowing what led him to this step and how he judged the current/future life for himself. Simply commenting that he should not have committed suicide is being insensitive to a person who has already done so much great work for humanity.
Life is not always better than no life. Context matters. A lot.
[+] [-] Claudus|13 years ago|reply
What Happened
Last fall and winter, JSTOR experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners’ content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.
The downloaded content included more than 4 million articles, book reviews, and other content from our publisher partners' academic journals and other publications; it did not include any personally identifying information about JSTOR users.
We stopped this downloading activity, and the individual responsible, Mr. Swartz, was identified. We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed.
The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office. It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.
[+] [-] beadmomsw|13 years ago|reply
Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss him dearly. The grief is unfathomable.
Aaron's mother
[+] [-] bpdthrow|13 years ago|reply
Because of that brain disorder, perhaps because it was not attacked with the requisite treatment, he is dead.
If you or a loved one are ever feeling suicidal, depressed, or are acting abnormally erratic, contact an expert. It's nothing to be ashamed about. It's just a lottery of genetic expression.
There are others going through the same thing. There are excellent treatments available, and they get better each year. You might save someone's life.
http://www.reddit.com/r/suicidewatch http://www.reddit.com/r/depression http://www.reddit.com/r/bipolarreddit
I find it bizarre how quickly our minds jump to impossibly unlikely reasons when tragic events like this happen. Troubles with the justice department don't alone cause a bright young man to kill himself.
> I was miserable. I couldn't stand San Francisco. I couldn't stand office life. I couldn't stand Wired. I took a long Christmas vacation. I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign.
> I followed these rules. And here I am today, with a dozen projects on my plate and my stress level through the roof once again.
https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dying
> I have a lot of illnesses. I don’t talk about it much, for a variety of reasons. I feel ashamed to have an illness. (It sounds absurd, but there still is an enormous stigma around being sick.)
> Sadly, depression (like other mental illnesses, especially addiction) is not seen as “real” enough to deserve the investment and awareness of conditions like breast cancer (1 in 8) or AIDS (1 in 150). And there is, of course, the shame.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick
In his short life Aaron has produced a wonderful collection of writing, code, and actions, which will all be available for years to come. He will be missed. His effects have not yet ceased.
[+] [-] alrs|13 years ago|reply
EDIT: The guy was facing 13 felony counts for downloading academic articles.
[+] [-] gfunk911|13 years ago|reply
My reaction to this is that he was a brilliant guy, and it was such a waste. Such a pointless waste.
It makes the idea of giving up myself seem so wrong.
Rest in Peace Aaron. I'm sorry it had to end this way.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|13 years ago|reply
If it happens again, get help. I'm quite serious.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|13 years ago|reply
Depression is treatable. If you find that you are thinking about suicide, even speculatively, seek help immediately.
You are not alone and it will get better.
[+] [-] droithomme|13 years ago|reply
Those who deny that that had anything to do with this, and it was only a "brain disorder" or other such claptrap are truly insane.
I've had students who for years were systematically abused and tortured by adults. This abuse caused them pain, distress, depression, and suicide ideation, not a chemical imbalance. Despite this, counselors they saw diagnosed them as having a chemical imbalance and pumped them full of pills that have psychosis and suicide as known and documented side effects.
Who is insane in this situation? Who is responsible for the damage it causes when a young person is targeted for destruction by sociopaths and it causes them to crack? A chemical imbalance? Not the things that are being done to them by others intentionally trying to harm them?
This attitude justifies the abuse of people. This attitude leads to suicide. This attitude needs to stop.
[+] [-] catch23|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|13 years ago|reply
Looking back at his activity on github he was pulling in commits less than a week ago:
https://github.com/aaronsw?tab=activity
I don't know details about the "JSTOR" case or about what he did at Reddit but I can see in his code that he cared and wanted to make something better, smaller and elegant. I respect that and it is a loss to have him gone forever.
[+] [-] snprbob86|13 years ago|reply
It was a bummer when I saw the headline, but I'm really, really upset now that I was reminded of his legal troubles.
Suicide is complex, so I don't want to speculate on whether or not he committed suicide to avoid a trial and probably incarceration. Regardless, it had to be a factor and it certainly fucked up his life somewhere between a little bit and a lot a bit.
When I realized just how many spiders I've written... When I think about that spider with a $240B+ market cap... When I think "This could have been me or one of my friends"... I started to cry :-(
[+] [-] chewxy|13 years ago|reply
RIP I guess.
[+] [-] alexqgb|13 years ago|reply
There are a lot of things wrong with this situation, but the egregiously misaligned priorities of the US Attorneys are near the top of the list.
[+] [-] Eliezer|13 years ago|reply
http://www.reddit.com/user/AaronSw#c4e7n4h
The same page shows that the last Reddit comment he ever made was on /r/HPMOR. I don't think I noticed at the time - I don't think I knew he was a fan.
I have said and will say that Aaron Swartz acted heroically in trying to free the scientific literature. It was a good try.
[+] [-] pajju|13 years ago|reply
In HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=aaronsw
Pinboard: https://pinboard.in/u:aaronsw
His last tweet was on Jan 9th, https://twitter.com/aaronsw
Reddit: https://aaronsw.jottit.com/reddit
Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PGTlB14AAAAJ
Writings: https://aaronsw.jottit.com/writings
---------------------------------------------
Things he made:
https://www.jottit.com/
http://openlibrary.org/
http://watchdog.net/
http://reddit.com/
http://webpy.org/
HN will miss your contributions.
Rest in Peace. #Love.
[+] [-] SquareWheel|13 years ago|reply
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9r8on/aaron_swar...
https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/93374221685755904
Still very sad, of course. I was fully in support of Aaron during the JSTOR fallout.
[+] [-] colmvp|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guywithabike|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyclif|13 years ago|reply
I wonder why some people here are assuming this tragedy is because of the JSTOR incident. It seems to me that everyone should just meditate on what's been lost, and defer judgement about why he would do this until there is evidence.
[+] [-] ceol|13 years ago|reply
Thank you so much. It's awful to see people in here blaming the trial when suicide is much more complex than a single incident pushing someone to the edge like that.
[+] [-] josh2600|13 years ago|reply
He had his troubles and he made some bad decisions, but it didn't have to be like this.
I wish his family peace and clarity in this dark hour. I'm just so sorry.
[+] [-] veemjeem|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|13 years ago|reply
This is utterly disgraceful, I feel for his family.
[+] [-] krzyk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] empthought|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smogzer|13 years ago|reply
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity
Share the load Even if your friends aren’t cheerful, just working on a hard problem with someone else makes it much easier. For one thing, the mental weight gets spread across both people. For another, having someone else there forces you to work instead of getting distracted.
[+] [-] firloop|13 years ago|reply
I've seen this happen in my own life. I had a family friend that committed suicide after being indicted of a felony DUI charge because he swore he never would go to prison.
Tragic. My thoughts are with his family.