skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately the SSL cert expired and I just couldn't justify renewing it. I know they're not expensive but I have other priorities. It is still secured over https and I mainly keep it running to demo to anyone interested now and then.
It's hard to reply to the OP. Mostly because I, like many here probably, can relate quite well.

I'd wager a guess that he's in his early twenties, struggled with depression through puberty and has currently found stable ground with a nihilistic perspective that helps him get through the day.

If that's the case then (hence the ~25 year comment) most likely he'll learn to build a perfectly healthy life on top of this stability.
This is extremely tragic. The world is a horrible place when some of its best people loose all hope and choose to leave it early. It is quite crazy that that downloading scientific papers can incur sentences longer than the maximum for crimes such as rape, manslaughter, etc.
Cool. What's the stack?
Undistract-me Notifies You When Terminal Commands Are Completed
Some people commit suicide after breakups --the other person often times feels guilt, yet they are not really guilty in any sense. There is at times a perception, though.
Kinda creepy.

Since he wrote that awesome online will, I wonder if he prepared the passwords so people can execute his will.
On the contrary, Google Reader has barely any G+ in it. The major complaint of the redesign is that it stripped Reader of its social features without replacing it with anything. If G+ integration existed which provided the same use cases, people would be happy with it.
This is an interesting question that I'd love to hear other opinions on.

My idea that I haven't gotten to implement yet: Make it possible for the user to get started without logging in, then force them to create an account after they've started playing around.

The particular application that I specifically want to try this on is going to be a document-oriented application. I'll let the user jump in and start creating something without creating an account, but then make the user create an account (or log into an existing account) to be able to save their work. If you've already spent even two minutes creating something, having to type in an email address and password seems trivial compared to having to start over again if they want to come back later. (That's the theory, at least.)

The key in my mind is to get the customer invested in the application (even slightly) before forcing them to make an account.
RIP Aaron Swartz, Hacker News will remember you
Thanks for posting this, Pitaroua. It is really well put and important stuff for people to know.

== Ross ==
This is the freedom from risk argument for regulation? There are plenty of horrible legal hotels in the world. I personally think cheap hotels are an important part of the ecosystem.

> The whole point of hotel regulations is to protect the guests, not the hotelier.

I wish this were true.
Yeah basically its a cluster of apps that I want to link together in the future. But thanks for the feedback. I do need to work on the website.
Not requiring signup makes development massively harder but I think it's worth it.

All of the websites competing in my space require a signup except mine. Their products may be way better but I don't bother to check and neither do my users.

In fact I think you can make a viable business just by taking popular websites and working out how to implement them without user accounts.
For those who have experience with dealing with depression, what are your thoughts on how suicides like Aaron's can be prevented? He seems like a particularly unusual case, just because he had so many outlets and was so well accomplished. I know that depression is very much related to physiological factors, but some of those factors can be mitigated by behavior, and Aaron had all the opportunities to at least distract his mind. Even the DOJ case can't be considered a direct factor...such David vs Goliath cases spark people and give them purpose, or at least a schedule of milestones to reach, which are at least given meaning when activism is involved.

Beyond the tragedy of Aaron's death, it strikes me how difficult it must be to treat such depression if it wasn't effectively treated in his case...
This reminds me of an episode in Medium(Patricia Arquette) where people regretted jumping from buildings but only after they had jumped. i cant recall the exact plot(google effect?).
Wonderfully written article. Thank you.
Hi fraiserman, I would be honored to have the privilege of splitting the costs with you in perpetuity.

Aaron had an uncanny physical resemblance to my younger brother, and because of that, I couldn't help but feel a stronger connection to Aaron beyond his courageous activism, original thoughts, and entrepreneurship.

I can be reached on twitter at @hkmurakami. Thanks for considering.
Did he write that when he was 16? Makes me sad that he had already accomplished so much at that age, and is not there anymore.
>"Oh, and BTW, I'll miss you all."

We miss you too, Aaron.
I wonder if the DOJ will charge Google with scraping the whole Internet.
Looks cool, it would be nice to have some kind of voting system for pledges and maybe reminders to achieve the pledge every few months.

Also, the design works on mobile but isn't really that aesthetically pleasing with normal screen resolutions.

Getting some errors too: http://i.imgur.com/iLRRG.png
It's simple really:

For production code, test everything. anything less than 100% test coverage (outside of a one man team) is a disaster looking for a place to happen.

In my personal projects, I write no tests. And then I get to some point where _as I'm implementing_, I need to check it's working. Then I write my first test.

And so on, writing tests for anything that's awkward to verify as I'm authoring it, and also key points that I'm planning to refactor later (to ensure it still works afterwards).
> an offence against a person is really an offence against the Crown

This is also common sense. If not, it would be difficult to prosecute murderers, since the victim doesn't exist anymore. It would be next to impossible to prosecute murderers of people who have no family and no friends.
For me the word Lisp means the very simple abstract language that McCarthy designed (no implementation details etc). Common Lisp took those concepts, added many more of its own and became a standard. Scheme and Clojure took the same approach, take the very basic elements of Lisp and add their own concepts on top of it. So, calling Common Lisp the only Lisp just doesn't make any sense at all.
Aaron Swartz (and others)
The suicide of Aaron Swartz is a tragedy. There have been many others who have "chosen" to end their lives, e.g. Sam Roweis (http://www.cs.nyu.edu/csweb/People/samroweis.html and http://samroweis1972-2010.blogspot.ca).

I put "chosen" in quotes because one thing they have in common is Clinical Depression. This condition is not the sort of hipster malaise / ennuye that we like to attribute to "Genuises", or "Artists" as some kind of "Creativity" well. Clinical Depression is a biological cluster bomb to the brain, a paralysing, life-threatening condition that we should think of as the mental equivalent of a spinal cord injury ... not a "mid-life crisis" or emotional "funk".

Aaron's death highlights an issue that has been in the forefront of the US newsmedia in recent months, mental health care (or lack thereof) in our society. We have been focusing on tragedies like the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the theatre shooting, and now the shooting at a school in Connecticut, and many have been using these as salient examples of the high cost to society of mental health problems.

An equally salient discussion ought to take place around the tragedy that is suicide of people like Aaron, like Sam Roweis, and others. There is no doubt, for people with personal relationships with someone who commits suicide, the toll is unfathomable. For the rest of us, there is also a cost to society, what people in the business community call "opportunity cost". Aaron (and others) had untold opportunities for positively affecting the lives of millions of people around the world.

The problem is large and complex. Where to start? Aaron wrote about this (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity).

My own suggestion: learn some facts about Major Depression. It is not housewives of beverly hills going to their therapist to vent about their vapid lives. Major Depression is a biological cruise missile to the mind.

One place to start: Robert Sapolsky (Stanford) : http://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc
Unfortunately, China is not ruled by law.
I guess I can take other people's word on this argument, I live in New York (where AirBNB is illegal) and there's plenty of odd loud people running around my building any given day. Inside a building is different but I have no problem with individual building leases banning AirBNB (I'm sure some would and some wouldn't).
It still wouldn't make sense. The whole time system comenly in use is just a big ball of garbage. 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute??? Are you kidding me?! What inconsistent collection of rubbish ist that? 60 and 12? Why not 13 and 79? Why 12 month with an arbitrary number of days per month? Kids every day waste hours of their life learning this random system while they could be using that time to learn something else for no reason. We could at least fix the days/month situation by January to May having 31 days and all the other month having 30 days.
Why doesn't the day just have 10000 units and 5000 is noon? Ideally it's noon in one particular place, unrelated to the location of the user.

Of course this is sadly never gonna happen, like we never gonna get UTC, because the majority of people never have to deal with computers and/or people in other countries. As a expad and programmer I of course get annoyed by this almost every day...
I upvoted you because I think it is wrong to downvote something you don't agree with but which is otherwise
a) Not spam
b) Not offensive
c) Not useless
Its not really comparable though. As far as its been written up he was facing the potential of over 50 years in prison.

That would put anyone under a massive amount of pressure, and does seem pretty unpleasant given his "crime" was so small.
I appreciated the response. The reply was information I already know, thought about, and have concluded on but they are helpful nonetheless.

As for the downvotes, my best advice is to not stress about it. It means nothing and the community has grown over the years to downvote instead of just ignoring something and moving on.
What can we do to help carry forward, and continue Aaron's work?
I'm terribly sorry for your loss. I was reading about it when I saw his speech 'How we stopped SOPA'. We all owe a lot to him for what he has done.
This man is a true hero.
And a pdp11 and an i7 give you the same results given enough time.
Actually this doesn't really work. Mainly the problem is when the top page hasn't scrolled at all, for example if you're just using pagination, it creates a meaningless shadow.
There is actually tons of demand in silicon valley but development there is mostly illegal. Mountain View recently rejected Google's request for mixed use zoning in the Googleplex which IMO is just gratuitous nimbyism (it's not even in anyone's back yard!). This is probably related to so many silicon valley types living in SF instead of anywhere near their work.
So it's the rest of HN against me now? Anyway, I'm off, I said my opinion and that's it. It's not a thing to rationally argue about at this point in time.
How Humans Will Evolve on Multigenerational Space Exploration Missions
I'm wondering, why hasn't Firefox put the setting on as default. Of course it would be quite annoying with the Flash-plugin but I think it's worth the trouble.
I should have expected no less from someone with such clarity of thought and breadth of study.

Relevant link, a post of his: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/stepback
I don't. How do you know she isn't? Until I have evidence to the contrary I tend to believe what people say.
I didn't take offense in the sense of "if you do this I'll find you and beat you up". It was just my lack of English skills. What I mean is I don't like it. Obviously nobody will notice if I join in demonstrative mourning or not over the internet, so no real harm is done. I also don't mind a black bar on HN - I find this event very sad myself.
I like it tis pretty cool.

I'm not a Pythoner but I believe you have debug mode on, was revealing some errors to me.
Airbnb's JavaScript style guide
Nice app. Looks very similar to http://startupresolution.com that we launched on hn on 29th.
Yes. The main point of the comic is that everyone fancies themselves to be more worldly-wise than the next person.

You could accuse me of the same, but at least I'm not dripping with contempt.
Well, it depends on what you understand by the word. It is obvious that in most cases, when one says "I feel depressed", he is just saying "I feel low", like "I'd like the Earth to swallow me", nobody means "I'd like to die" literally.

However, I just wanted to point out that there are REAL depressions, as you acknowledge (my fear was that you were not acknowledging even this).

So I see we agree but I had my fears.
"If that didn't destroy its habitability for good, I'm not sure we'd be able to do it"

You have a pretty stunted imagination for what we are able to do to the planet.
Ahh, good. Thanks.
If you are unable to make the link between Swartz's absurd criminal indictment and his suicide in the light of this post, and/or if after reading it, you still view the possibility of his suicide being primarily linked to causes other than the indictment as on par with it being linked to the indictment, you should perhaps hear Jacob Appelbaum's recent C3 talk [1], where he details the state oppression he, his mentally ill mother, and his various acquaintances have been under due to his link with Wikileaks.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4977338
I find Aaron's responses on his own Wikipedia talk page quite a fascinating insight to his personality and humility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aaron_Swartz
Very appreciate a mention about china government's censorship
when many people outside only care about how lucrative regardless of whatever censorship compromise.
OH my goodness this is terrible, my condolences to his friends and family.
Biggest myths about managing geeks
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.
> Aaron intentionally did something that would draw him a lot of attention to him

When he was copying the JSTOR archive, he went through great trouble to conceal himself (not facing the camera, wearing a helmet, etc.) -- he was caught by the authorities for acting suspiciously. If he had not been caught, he more than likely would have released the archive anonymously.
3 Clean Tools to Eliminate Distractions & Improve Productivity in 2013
Li chiamano onorevoli… Barbareschi docet
It was incredibly unsettling to see this as the top link on Hacker News, then skim down the list to see 'Aaron Swartz', 'Aaron Swartz', 'Aaron Swartz', and feel my suspicions grow.

(Yes, I conveniently missed the details of the second link, "Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz commits suicide".)
Ask HN : How not to feel depressed, hearing Heroes committing suicide? :( 
Ilya Zhitomirskiy and now Aaron Swart :"(
Aaron Swartz's Y Combinator Interview
Why are British people so bothered by this? Why is anybody bothered by it?

I'm an American and have used plenty of (European) websites and product manuals where English is identified by a British flag. I have no problem with that. And plenty of (American) websites and product manuals where English is identified by an American flag. Which makes sense to me. Why is that such a problem to you?

It's true that languages are not countries, but languages almost always do exist in country-specific versions. British English is not American English. Brazilian Portuguese is not Portuguese from Portugal. Spanish in Mexico is different from Spanish in Argentina.

Is doesn't seem that unreasonable to use the flag of the country-specific version of the language being translated. If you're doing Spanish, you have to choose which Spanish in the first place anyways. The Portuguese can deal with a Brazilian flag if they hired a Brazilian translator. And for super-huge sites, you'll probably have different sections for USA and Britain anyways, since they'll have different pricing, different products, etc.
Maybe elasticsales.com ?
Stripe vs Balanced
I'm assisting in development of a backend for a painting service that works with many contractors across the US. We've been using Stripe, but the business has been paying the contractors using their bank's ACH service add-on which takes 3-5 days and has to be done manually.

Balanced seems like it's Stripe + next-day ACH payouts, which would automate everything. Is this an accurate description of the service? I'm confused why you'd ever use Stripe over Balanced in that case. This is assuming it's also a merchant account + payment gateway like Stripe if I'm reading correctly.

Still wrapping my head around how to best make this work.
Rest in peace, Mr. Swartz.

As life moves as the currents in the ocean, some of us find ourselves in tropical paradises, whilst others are gifted the horrible cold of the artic. There are some who manage to hang on to another current and make headway towards warmer climates, there are some who do not. The world is now saddened to learn that you were caught up in the harsh artic cold of life. We could ask questions as to why did you not swim harder or faster, but none of us were in your place.

Your short life was anything but worthy of such tragic end. You decided to leave too early, too soon. Still, your presence still lives through your work, the community you helped build, and the people you touched.

Farewell.
you can do it with a user stylesheet..
The state France is in (economic, cultural, etc).
Back in the early applet days a lot of people were complaining on Usenet's comp.lang.java.programmer that applets were both a toy and a disaster waiting to happen that would never bring anything good to Java.

Yet countless Java programmers fought teeth and nails to defend Applets, saying how great the techno was and how it was going to revolutionize the Web, etc.

They are the very programmers who, today, say that Java is good but that Java applets weren't maybe that great after all. It's a bit too easy.

Now I don't know what you call a "major security incident" but in 2011 you could DoS any Java webserver by crafting an URL (hashtable exploit). A single customer Internet connection was sufficient to take down entire Java server farms.

Granted a DoS is not remote-root but still...

Then, still in 2011, there was the 12-years old floating-point parsing bug where you could DoS any Java web server, again, by sending a thread into an infinite loop. All that was needed was one parameter set to a certain value on the client side and make your HTML GET and that's it: one thread into infinite loop.

Repeat a few times and you had DoS any Java webserver.

It's still not remote root but that's not exactly not major either...
Someone on Reddit explained this better than I can, but JSTOR is basically a scam. It pockets the money that it receives and doesn't pay anything back to the authors. As an author, you yourself have to pay for access to your own work (or your university does, via a subscription).

JSTOR has scholarly articles dating back centuries - when you consider that that information deserves to be free, and the societal cost of keeping that information and research hidden, JSTOR's mere existence is practically a crime.

CERN has been very clear in their opposition to JSTOR's practices, from what I know.
Thanks for posting this. I too am alarmed at the HN community's response. It is surprising how such strong talent can feel so powerless- you'd think hackers would be less susceptible to giving up given that we can change things with our bare hands. It's easy to give up, it's incrementally harder to say "this will pass", it's hardest of all to snap ourselves out- slap ourselves in the face and remind each other of the immense privilege we all were born into, and see problems in the world with a sense of duty and responsibility, not despair. Honestly- I'm a bit shocked at the sense of entitlement people have of life sometimes, expecting happiness to be delivered on a platter (or via API). Life is a startup, it is a fucking war: keep busy and fight the good fight. If we're on HN we're already in the top 1% - if we have problems we should get out there and do something about it.
Soulmate lost. RIP Aaron Swartz
Luckily his site works very well without javascript, so `wget --max-redirect 0 -mk http://www.aaronsw.com/` would give you something like this:

http://dl.nux.ro/aaronsw/www.aaronsw.com/

(~53 MB - http://dl.nux.ro/aaronsw/www.aaronsw.com.tar.bz2)
This won't work if your shell is, say, running in a tmux session on the other side of a ssh connection.

I think I want a pair of escape sequences that will cause a terminal to display a message à la growl (i) unconditionally; and (ii) when the receiving terminal is not being watched.
Ctrl+C the Simple Solution to Copying Text on Android
Just as a heads-up, his last name is spelled "Swartz".
No Mother should have to bury their own child regardless of the cause of death. My heart goes out to you and I hope you will rest with the knowledge that your son will be remembered as a true patriot, to whom we all owe a huge Thanks. If their were more people like Aaron this planet would surely be a better place to live. Stay strong and You are in my prayers.
Basically: if you feel strongly about JSTOR and it's ilk do the following in order of preference

1. Publish in an open access journal
2. Publish in a regular journal and make YOUR version available in http://arxiv.org/ or your website

It will get you more citations and you will do your part in disseminating science
It's a repeat of what others have said, but thanks again for posting this - much of the comments in the other thread seemed to be.. unhelpful, if not downright antagonistic.
Aaron Swartz keynote: "How we stopped SOPA"
> he probably wouldn't have wanted us to deal with the trivialities of copyright law at the expense of a good cause.

Unfortunately, the same might be said of Martin Luther King and his "I Have a Dream" speech, which still can't be reprinted or rebroadcast in full until 2038, thanks to the greed of his estate.

It's a shame that legal technicalities can end up being so important, but the fact is that it's true.
How does this work? Any search term I use returns no images.
I am quite sad today - I really am. :-(