skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. That prosecutors aren't the ones who made the law, but aren't they responsible for their actions?

I think it's important to bring up names and faces of people (state agents) who make/made laws as well. As someone pointed out somewhere on HN today - "killing in the name of duty is an absurd bug in human psyche. The Lucifer effect? [1]. Those in public duty should probably be publicly visible along with their actions."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Zimbardo#The_Lucifer_Eff...

[Edited at few places]
Aaron Swartz dead: Internet activist, programmer was 26
Don't blindly get the torches and pitchforks to treat a symtome, find the root problem and try to change the copyright/science/education/access system at the core.
I think we should pressure JSTOR to release the documents into the public domain. If it is in the best interest.
Ask HN: Why was Aaron Swartz so special?
I see more news about him than about Steve Jobs when he died. What made Aaron special? I never heard about him before today. Sure, co-authoring RSS is something to be proud of, and so is co-founding Reddit. But anyone with a brain could have developed a technical specification and a website that turns out to be good.. right?

I'm probably missing something, so tell me please.
Well that's quite interesting... Try and see if it still happens with fglrx. The progress bar is a CSS3 animation, which means Chromium likely hardware accelerates it, so I could imagine buggy drivers causing issues.
Right - dismissals of some counts often happen as part of a guilty plea.

Still, wording is important: both I and the parent poster should have said 97% was the percentage of convictions which resulted from pleas, not the percentage of indicted defendants which plead guilty. I think taking percentage of convictions is the correct metric to use - given the ideals of innocent until proven guilty and the right to trial, you would hope that most convictions were the result of a trial rather than a vanishingly small (and getting smaller) 3%.

It's also quite telling that even with statistics haggling, the anonymous poster still conceded a whopping 90%.
I posted these question in a comment here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5048729

I can imagine and believe that defending yourself against the US government is costly, what I don't understand is what the breakdown of all expenses would look like.

What services do you need to purchase/hire that you wouldn't get in a normal court case?

Is it because you spend a lot more time in court or in preparation?

Do you need to choose among lawyers with special certification? What type of paperwork do you need to produce?*

In the Latin America (where I am) I could easily see the biggest expenses being bribes and it is in general what I think of when you need a problem solved. (Not a good thing at all...)

P.S. Making an infographic about a case like this vs a regular court case would be an interesting project and could help us make the case for Aaron...anyone want to help by looking for data / making one on your own?
Except that the access fees paid by any single large university would be enough to completely fund an open digital archive.

Yes, the fees are paid to the publishers— who themselves do not pay the authors, reviewers, and even (sometimes) the editors of the journals. As part of the NYC non-profit high society Jstor is far from the most efficient non profit— but their fault is not their inefficient spending and high salaries. Their fault is facilitating a system which is amoral and harmful to society.

Absent Jstor the universities and libraries would have an easier time reforming the system because writing a single big check per quarter wouldn't remove most of their problems (while leaving everyone outside of those institutions without access).
> People need to stop excusing the federal government for the monster that it really is.

As the son of a federal employee, I feel I should address this specific sentence. Let's not confuse a couple of jerks for the entirety of the federal government. Many large organizations produce stupid, indefensible actions but I feel like your phrasing is overly broad.
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Assuming he did it -- or he didn't but was going to be found guilty anyway -- wouldn't fifty years for this nonviolent crime, done in the Martin Luther King Jr. spirit of civil disobedience, by a person with (I assume) no prior criminal record, be Unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment?
I think of it as "defense in depth". They can do whatever they want to your body. They can be cruel and abusive. But the psychological stuff, the horror that this is America, the horror at the wanton abandonment of anything like justice, these are the more serious threats. It is an opportunity to see through the illusion that we as a species, but I think especially as Americans, have about ourselves as honorable and good beings that hold people innocent until proven guilty, and which offers trial-by-jury to anyone accused of wrong-doing.

There is no doubt that life would have been the harder path for Aaron. But I think it would have been the better one for him, and for us all, had he continued to fight with every ounce of strength, physical and mental. I wish he had not given up in the face of even overwhelming strength and odds.
Well, /r/truereddit had something up with some decent commentary but it isn't a default reddit. /r/pics sadly is now the default for news like this and the signal to noise ratio there is as bad as you can imagine it to be. No Lessig, no nothing, just a bunch of guys calling him a criminal and a coward for suicide. Fuck you reddit. You are eternel september's child now. Lowest common denominator trash for the lowest common denominator.

On the upside, I do have faith that once his story gets out of the eternal september kiddie's paws, the facts and deep moral issues here will percolate to the surface, eventually. It'll just take some time.
The "rationalist" approach that I use is to consider :

- death is a final state

- it always happens, sooner or later

- there are ways to alleviate pain, whether physical or moral (drugs and such)

- suicide is a capital sin

Even if death seems or is a better option, it makes sense to wait for it (and even to hope for it - there are really bad moments in anyone's life).

And if you do not believe in god, the first 3 items are good reason enough to wait, and a valid 4th one can be :

- suicide means killing perfectly good organs, than in other situations could have save many people needing transplants.

Feelings and emotions are fallible, especially during depression, a disease of our emotion-processing system.
Wow. It's also worth reading the comments below the original article.

"You’re scaring me here. Please sick around and talk to us. You can always die later. There’s no rush."

"Jeez, Aaron - get some help. Now. Suicides talk about it before they do it."

etc.
A huge part of the problem is that there is no lobby for largely innocent people who are stripped of all their assets and locked in prison indefinitely, but there are strong lobbies for "tough on crime": Police unions want more "resources" (i.e. cash in their members' pockets) for crime fighting, especially if the "crime" involves suspects who are very unlikely to harm investigators, like "computer" crimes. Private prisons want more prisoners so that they grow their "business" -- and if they're innocent all the better, because good, honest people are less violent inmates. Victims' groups suffer from "what have you done for me lately" disease, where to get support from their constituencies they need to continually be making it harder for anyone accused to not be convicted and anyone convicted to ever see the light of day again, with no real incentive to care whether those accused and convicted are guilty or innocent.

And, of course, there are no strong "innocent convicts" special interest groups because their constituencies, though numbering in the millions, have no money and can't vote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync
Well said. The prosecutor seems to be the party acting criminally in this case. What balance is there in the system to prevent such blatantly evil prosecutorial excess from occurring?
It is totally true. And it's very hard to understand this when you're twenty-six years old.

My heart just breaks . . .
This project emerged out of Rhizome's Seven on Seven conference, which Aaron took part in last year.

http://rhizome.org/sevenonseven/

He was paired up with artist Taryn Simon. It was an elegant project in that it demonstrated how something as fundamental to web interaction as "searching" is actually bound and determined by many cultural and political forces.

You can watch the full presentation here. Very worthwhile.

http://vimeo.com/40651117

Also: http://tarynsimon.com/
Am I strange for not understanding it?
This news shocked me today. I didn't know much about your son but I admire what he did. This world has lost another great person.
:( Same here, but rather perplexed...
They are responsible for their actions. Not Aaron's. I think the conscientious thing to do would have been to drop the charges, but then again I thought that when Aaron was alive, too.
The person who pushed this prosecution was Steve Heymann, not Carmen Ortiz. Before you name and shame, make sure you have the right name.
What would you prefer it be, 50/50? Would you prefer the US charge more innocent people with crimes to bring down the conviction rate?

If someone is formally charged with a federal felony, that means they have been indicted by a federal Grand Jury; i.e., a majority of the 23 Grand Jurors felt that there is probable cause for charging the defendant(s) with the alleged offense(s). People indicted by Grand Juries should end up getting convicted the vast majority of time, otherwise Grand Juries (and the prosecutors that bring cases before them) aren't serving their function, and their findings of probable cause are erroneous.

I actually don't think a conviction rate of 9 out of 10 is too high; rather, too many things are illegal (and felonious in particular), and the penalties are too severe. But I don't think the actual trial and pretrial systems are irredeemably bad, as many of the posts here are suggesting.
Same thoughts myself. I am still in Vegas for CES, and I can't even imagine partying- instead I just feel I need to write more articles and I want to donate to EFF and the likes this year more. We need to support those who make us have access to "real information". Such a tragic day for not just information advocacy spaces, but new media...

This post pretty much sums up my thoughts of how I feel I should deal with what happened. http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bull...
Justice is thwarted and heroes are painted as evil... the brilliant work hard to give us information and the government makes their life hell.
An attempt to set academic knowledge free should be celebrated and commended not penalized. Certainly not used to bully people like this.
Yes you can. It just requires sufficient karma.
It was Carmen Ortiz who was responsible for the unjust overzealous prosecution of Aaron Swartz which ultimately contributed to his death.

Carmen Ortiz's blind ambition has caused her to run roughshod over people's freedom in the past: http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/141253-15th-annual-muzzle-...

We can only discourage the over-zealousness of prosecutors by making sure that it becomes a career limiting move instead of a career advancing one.

Lessig was kind enough in his writeup to not name names: http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bull... but this kindness is both undeserved and unwise. Carmen thinks big convictions will get her a federal judgeship or other appointment. The public needs to make sure this isn't the case.
Not so surprising if you consider that 8 hours after sandy hook the only current event on the front page was was guyin china knifing a few students to death.
I have a question for the community here. Aaron writes "I ask that the contents of all my hard drives be made publicly available." Should we unmask his secret Beeminder goal? http://beeminder.com/aaronsw (Assuming it's nothing embarrassing, or even helps shine light on what's happened.)
He fought for freedom of information.
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Front page changes depending on your subs. I've seen multiple stories about it. Also keep in mind that stories can rise a lot faster on HN, so it's not necessarily indicative of disinterest.
You can downvote comments, not submissions. You can only upvote and flag submissions.
JSTOR doesn't own the copyrights, they have the documents under licence from the journal publishers.
> You don't know what will happen.

You're right. But I do know life in general will always be difficult for me. Say I knew for certain things would get better in 10 years. I don't if I could wait that long.

> Instead of telling you it'll get better, I'd tell you this: learn to stop thinking. It sounds weird, but it's possible. It doesn't mean go catatonic, it just means learning to recognize the thoughts that resonate with your negativity, and moving your focus away from those. Technical detail: there are actually two layers of thoughts, those that resonate, and then a deeper layer that seeks that negative resonance. The default state of the human brain is no-thought. If you can experience that for even a moment, you will feel relief. Then you can see the old thoughts return, like an incoming tide, and you can choose to not focus on them. That's the key: those thoughts that resonate so negatively, so strongly, require your focus to have power. If you acquire control over your focus, then you have denied those thoughts power, and you are free.

Huh. So, I can choose my thoughts and get out of this mess? Not sure if you really believe that or trolling.
You're going to have to give some evidence on that one. How do you know it's admins and not moderators? Admins rarely intervene in these sorts of matters, even if they are close to the story.
Plugins I use to secure my WordPress install
Lessig's probably referring to one of the two assistant district attorneys who did all the day-to-day work - their names are mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Carmen Ortiz is their boss.
I keep seeing similar apps popping up on HN. Wish you guys the best!
Making an app is simple, but do you have a plan to continuously improve your app/bring more people to your app. Take startupresolution.com for example, how many startup resolutions does a person make per year? Do you expect people to use it once or few times per year?
Saying one thing is easy, but doing it is hard. One thing you guys might can try is that providing a feature to let people follow up the resolutions/iwant. Otherwise, it's not that useful.
Investors dish advice at DC Tech Meetup
What advantage to those in power is there from "fixing" this? To them it is not broken, it is working as designed and intended. Things didn't get this way by accident.
Here's another way for hackers to think of it:

- Depression is a failing test suite.

E.g. it's a signal that there are bugs, and they need fixin'. What do you do when this happens? Give up on the whole project? NO! You dig in, dig deeper, and figure it out. Yes, it is a matter of ego, at least at first.

That's what meditation is for. I like http://dhamma.org but there's others. It works.
Which just adds to the tragedy of all this. I think Aaron is someone the tech and non-tech community could have backed together, for any reasonable civic cause. His name is already attached to Reddit and all of his other accomplishments make him as much a non-consumer-facing media tech darling as you could hope for.
Do you really think your internet activism will cause her family and friends to "dump" her?
ون بيس 580
Arguably it makes the system less effective by adding a disincentive to enforcing the law in that specific fashion. There's also the risk that, to paraphrase kurt vonnegut, the moral will be to not go after people with friends.
It could be that he had an electronic monitoring bracelet attached, and the police would be able to see his location from GPS and intercept him before he got there.

According to Lessig, he was broke -- and even if he wasn't, his bank might have been under orders to refuse a large cash withdrawal.

The police catch defendants who run away from trials all the time; they're professionals. He's never done it before, presumably made no advance preparations before being investigated, and presumably didn't hang out with a crowd that had experience with law enforcement tactics and effective countermeasures; he's an amateur. He might have judged the probability of success sufficiently low that he didn't want to endanger family and friends for trying to hide him.

That being said, even if there was a very low probability of success, he might have been able to take a risk-free shot by running as best he could, then suiciding if it looked like the police were closing in. If there's a 1% chance he escapes the police and makes it, and a 99% chance he's forced to suicide, that's better than just staying at home and committing suicide -- a 1% chance of living is still infinitely better than a 0% chance.

He might have been taking nonzero risk in this scenario that he wouldn't have been able to suicide successfully. E.g. the police surprise and restrain him before he's able to suicide, or are able to revive him and now he has to live on wounded, permanently crippled and/or brain-damaged in addition to his other troubles. This risk may have been unacceptable to him. It's not unacceptable to me, but then again, I'm not suicidal.

The electronic monitoring bracelet scenario could be gotten around by chopping off his leg. Losing a leg would suck, but it would be better than losing your life. Then again, that scenario also has a pretty high risk of a botched attempt resulting in an even worse position.

For me, when my life is on the line and it's double-down and probably lose, or sit back and certainly lose, it's a no-brainer: raising the stakes is the only option of the two even worth considering. But I'm not suicidal.
Things you should know about The Internet of Things
So do thousands of others? I'm genuinely not getting it.
I wasn't personally familiar with Aaron, but from what I've read of him, I really don't think he was the type of person who would want everyone to go on a witch hunt the day it's announced he's committed suicide.

So how about you save your emotionally charged call for an internet brigade until everything has settled down, yes?
That's a good point... "The charges filed against Mr. Swartz include wire fraud, computer fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer and criminal forfeiture."

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-c...

I still like the idea of doing something bigger to help keep this situation from happening again.
No longer an academic, but as a student I always appreciated it when authors put their own work on their own websites as a form of common man's dissent. I have done the same with my own meagre two publications, for which IEEE and ACM (or probably Elsevier and friends) charge up to $31 each.

Ironically, due to the closed nature of their websites and the fact that the PDFs on my websites have since been indexed by various 3rd party research portals, they now far outrank the official (paywalled) versions on the ACM and IEEE websites.
The fact is, there are real people involved in a specific set of events that contributed to the tragedy today. Those people are members of our government. Holding government officials accountable to the people for their actions is a fundamental tenet of the United States' constitution.
>Of course this would make it difficult to jail alcapones perhaps.

I don't follow. Al Capone was convicted for tax evasion -- because he committed tax evasion. He also allegedly (and very likely actually) committed a whole list of other serious crimes they didn't prove. But tax evasion is an actual crime that should actually be prosecuted. If Al Capone had made all his money placing legal bets in Las Vegas and then failed to pay tax on the winnings, he could and should have been convicted just the same for failing to pay his taxes. He should also, if proved, be convicted of any murders or racketeering or other such things he participated in.

What he shouldn't be is charged with a law that you could just as easily be charged with, with multi-decade prison sentences attached, just because law enforcement is too corrupt or incompetent to prove the real crimes that he actually committed.
The academic publishing racket was but a catalyst. That a possibly-effective protest against the status quo will get you persecuted into oblivion is the meta issue. The system is set up to deflect and even feed upon endless amounts of verbal criticism. But step out of line and do something beyond mere talk, and you'll see how quick the cryptofascism shows itself from the government and even many of your "peers".

(RIP Aaron - All progress depends on the unreasonable man.)
Brush up on your data structures (Especially hash tables and linked lists) so that you could code one from scratch and also be sure you know their run-time complexity. While you might not be explicitly asked about them, it helps to be informed and be able to rationalize about your design decisions since you most likely will have to code or implement something.

Know your algorithms well, searching and sorting especially. Have a good handle on how to write a solid recursive algorithm. In my recent interviews I've encountered a lot of recursion and dynamic programming questions.

Hopefully you have some side projects that you can discuss for the 'softer' side of the interview. These are a great chance to show off both your technical chops as well as communication skills.

The number one advice is to be relaxed and don't stress too much. Keep in mind that when it comes to technical interviews, you don't necessarily have to do perfectly on all the questions and ace every code problem - you just have to outperform the other candidates. I used to get incredibly nervous about interviews and agonize for days over a simple problem that I might have goofed, but then I was pleasantly surprised when I was getting callbacks and offers.

Best of luck to you and be sure to reach out if you want any more info. I am on a tablet currently but I can send you some links to good review material if you'd like.
I had never even heard of Aaron Swartz before today. But hearing about his death hurts. The first I saw that that he was a confounder to Reddit. But what really got me was discovering that at the age of 14 he participated in writing RSS, and that he was an advocate for the freedom of information. If I look at his actions before this week, I see a string of things that I look up to, and a caliber of accomplishments that I would like to have myself.

It still seems unclear what all the details are behind his action, but I find it deeply troubling that enough pressure exists to drive someone as impressive as this to commit suicide at the young age of 26.

When I take a few steps back and look at the bigger picture of the world, I see many people in positions of power who either wield their power for themselves, or with apathy, and only a few people in positions of power who attack the problems of the world with the primary intention of humanitarianism.

Reading about Aaron, I feel like he was one of those people who cared more about the rest of the world than anything else. And what really hurts is seeing someone like this, only 26 and with enormous potential, decide to take their own life instead of continue in the world with whatever circumstances.

I have yet to shed tears but I've come close several times. RIP.
"The English rule provides that the party who loses in court pays the other party's attorney's fees.

Nearly every Western democracy, other than the United States, follows the English rule."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule