skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Carmen M. Ortiz, a United States attorney, pressed on,
saying that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a
computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take
documents, data or dollars.”

...or whether you steal using your prosecutorial power to take the life of a fellow human. Ortiz should be ashamed. She stole from all of us and humanity by driving a brilliant young man who has contributed more to society than she ever will to take his own life. Think about all that he would have contributed over his lifetime. He had decades left and that is all gone. She is the biggest thief in this story.
Who decides whether this was a mistake or not? For all we know, the "blood" may be completely unrelated to the case.
So is this safe to dl? Newbie here. I don't even know what these papers are.
I doubt it if we'll ever know. Where I'm from such influence is exercised discreetly in back rooms over bottles of blue label, and I have a feeling that the US isn't too different. It is not my intention to sound conspiratorial or expound conspiracy theories, I'm simply try to state the underlying truism that this world isn't as neat, fair or rational as we would like it to be. It feels very uncomfortable to admit this, but the harsh truth is that it isn't just about who you are, it's also about who you know.

In a just, rational world, Aaron would have been lauded as a hero, but our world isn't that world. Our world is one where influence carries more weight than the power of ideas and even though ideas may win in the long term, the effect of power wielded by certain individuals is more immediate and almost always more corrosive.
"The easy way would be to just keep a list of the other party's available hours in UTC."

Alternatively, I can just use TimeZones which does it for me, In every country of the world that I've worked with. This even accommodates daylight savings, when people come into work earlier/later at certain times of the year. And my algorithm takes all of 5 seconds per meeting - I wouldn't call it inefficient.

UTC is great for a lot of things (I was one of the people who introduced it to our NOC, ensured that on all servers, /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/GMT so our log files could be easily correlated.) - but for figuring out when people around the world are available to work with you - local Time Zones do a much better job.

Also - as noted elsewhere, when I'm traveling from country to country - Having a local timezone to tell me if I'm landing in the morning/afternoon/night is invaluable. Once again - only possible with Local Timezones if you want to represent the time with a single number.
This destructive person needs to be removed from office. Her illegal prosecution and harassment of Aaron Swartz is disgusting. She and the goons at the Justice Department bear the guilt for his demise. Despite this, his memory and mission live on.
Get Chatty with Node.js and HTML5
Fisher-Price Synesthesia
These types of responses always reek of the need to be right (thus claiming very important Internet Points). Or, closer to home: "I've given up looking, and so should you."

Purpose is essential. You can cut it out, claiming you're somehow above it all, but you're cheating yourself, ultimately.
>Huh. So, I can choose my thoughts and get out of this mess? Not sure if you really believe that or trolling.

Well, not trying to troll anyway. The best metaphor I can think of is this. You have a desktop, and a bunch of malware keeps popping up, blocking the screen, steeling, well, focus from keyboard and mouse. The work that you want to be doing is obscured. It's frustrating, angering, even depressing, because even your terminal session is obscured, preventing you from finding and deleting the malware. Note that within this metaphor, you cannot turn off the machine, or ssh in from a known good computer (that would be telepathy, heh). What do you do? You have to be patient. An vigilant. And not get mad. You have to close each window as it comes up. New ones keep coming. It seems never ending. But as long as the rate of closure > rate of new windows, eventually you catch a glimpse of your terminal window! Eventually you get to type a character in there. Still they pop up, but you handle them. They steal focus for an instant, but by now you've grown adept at closing them.

Another remarkable thing is that as you get better at closing the malware windows (the negative thoughts) the rate of intrusion decreases, which actually makes your job easier. Eventually you may go for long periods without a single unwanted popup.

Of course, the actual experience of a thought is far more organic. It's more like the popups fade (or ooze) in from the edges. You may not notice it. But when you do, you close it, and carry on.

The Buddhists have all kinds of explanations for what the malware actually is - they all mind malware is written in a scripting language called "karma". I'm not sure about that, but it doesn't matter, really. Your job is to keep clicking close, hitting CMD+W, until you've got a clear desktop.

Oh, what is the desktop in this metaphor? Actual, physical reality. The experience of breath, for example. Or sitting in a chair, or walking, or typing. All experiences which, devoid of unwanted popups, are actually intrinsically pleasant.

It's hard to get started, though, because you've probably lived for many years with nothing but popups, and the desktop seems like a fiction. I suppose that's where a little bit of faith (and not a little bit of moxy) comes in handy. Good luck, my friend.
> she was just doing her job

> didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing

These are quite entirely contradictory. How can you charge someone for a so-called crime you do not even understand?
The response, "We don't comment on anything that matters to people."
I don't know how much more clearly I can state this:

Most criminal defendants do not kill themselves. It was Aaron's choice to take his life, not hers. Her professional and personal contacts will never agree with you that she hounded someone to suicide. Telling them "she did wrong" when it is not clear that she did anything out of the ordinary in this case will have zero effect on getting her "shamed" and will have no effect on ending her career.

The internet does not determine whether these people get jobs. People in the legal industry and in the federal government determine that. And right now as a member of the legal industry, I can tell you that despite my extreme distaste for prosecutors, based on all publicly available facts about this case she did not do anything wrong. She did her job, pursuant to the laws as they are written. You don't like that? Change the laws.

Going after her without changing the laws will not work.
Fuck yes, make them bleed.

I can understand a US Attorney being reckless, but I cannot believe MIT would act so cowardly. If not even hacker-friendly institutions like MIT will side with people like Aaron, it's a sad state of affairs.
I'm not seeing any reference to PACER in any obit articles and in a lot of the stuff on reddit and elsewhere. This is a very important point. Essentially, Aaron had already defeated the feds for open access and was trying again. I imagine the petty bureaucrats burned by PACER really were out for blood this time.

Apparently, our government's mission is to destroy young people over petty grievances its employees have with American citizens. Christ, there are so many levels of wrong here its unbelievable. I just wish Aaron's case got more attention before he died. There was next to nothing about it, but jerks like Kim Dotcom seem to have articles and public sympathy locked, while real heros like Aaron were margalized because he was working on a level more much complex than "herp derp free moviez" and didn't have the crass marketing and bullshitting skills guys like Dotcom have.

We live in a very unfair world. Whatever American exceptionalism I believed in was steadying chipped away by the horrid Bush years and Obama's bizarre assault on medical marijuana, patent violators, and now 20 somethings downloading lots of PDFs.

I was just thinking how well a young Bill Gates or a young Bill Joy or whoever would fare in 2013 America? These guys have all admitted to doing stuff like stealing mainframe time, ripping off code, causal hacking, pushing around the old guard, violating all manner of rules, etc. Its just back then you didn't go to jail for it. I imagine most of them would have gotten crushed somehow, just like Aaron.

I know I am being dramatic, but this whole thing is very upsetting. The worst is, there is no reform over the horizon. Whatever reformist potential Lessig and the EFF and others had in the late 90s and early 2000s is long dead. If anything, things have somehow gotten worse for those who believe in open information and sensible prosecution of computer crimes since the Bush years. How did we get here? Why is Aaron dead? Why is my side always losing? This is too fucking much.
"There are no words to can contain love, to cloth it in words is to kill it, to mummify it and hope that somewhere in the heart of a reader, they have the strength and the magic to resurrect it."

This is perhaps the most profound statement about love I've ever come across.
There are massive downsides to having everyone on the same schedule, too. Most infrastructure has to be a lot bigger to accommodate the peak loads. Roads are plagued by "rush hour," call centers have "longer than expected hold times," and coffee shops have to decide whether to ask staff to work short shifts or pay them for periods when they are not needed very much. These things reduce productivity and even kill people.
The Death of Aaron Swartz
I volunteer as a crisis and suicide counselor for Didi Hirsch (a national suicide line branch) in Los Angeles. Thanks for posting these studies and validating the important work.
Which is a useless message to send. People make mistakes. Period. A system which is not robust to people making mistakes is disastrously broken.
Beautiful, sad story.
Whether Aaron is a "sympathetic" defendant depends strongly on your point of view. All the laws named after little white girls are named after dead little white girls who were the victims of brutal crimes.

Aaron is the alleged perpetrator of a potentially serious felony. Moreover, he is the perpetrator of a crime that most people cannot distinguish from hacking (because unlike the HN crowd, most people are not technology literate beyond knowing how to download apps). Aaron would not be a sympathetic defendant to most of America; he would be just another one of the same hackers who try to steal money from their bank accounts.
> I see no problem if someone requested you immediately copy all of your research.

Academia can be extremely competitive. Like, if a competing lab got ahold even of the title of your upcoming paper, they would and do rush to duplicate your results, and try to publish before you to get the scoop.

For that reason, I don't know if open access to everyone's hard drives would work.
It is good to see that those who loved him the most are direct without euphemism.
Sorting by "Top" instead of "Hot" makes a difference. "Hot", which I find less useful, is the default.

RIP Aaron Swartz.
I am removing MIT as a benefactor from my will and ceasing donations to the alumni association. I will not reconsider until the institution provides a full accounting and takes responsibility for the actions of its legal counsel in deciding to refer the matter to federal authorities.

If you are a current member of the student body or faculty you have a lot more power than me. Please read about this matter and learn what your institution chose to do on your behalf and take some action fully in the spirit of MIT to reclaim what it has lost.
In defence of obscure words
He was a man with a good heart who, in his attempt to make the world a more just place, made himself the enemy of the powerful and as a result was faced, unjustly, with the loss of his fortune, his freedom, and ultimately, his life.

In other words he fought the good fight--the fight that many of us wish we had the time, courage, or resources to fight--and lost.
Zero percent chance of this happening:

- She did her job, which is to enforce the laws as they are written.

- She is very good at doing that job.

- You will not get her fired on the basis of enforcing a law on the books where the law has not been found unconstitutional nor even had its constitutionality seriously questioned.

You want a petition that might have some value? Petition the white house to change the laws or to direct the DOJ not to enforce the law. Until either of those happens, federal prosecutors are ethically bound to continue prosecuting these cases.
It´s also blocked in my country! Not a titanic task to circumvent the blockade though.
Is this the reason why he committed suicide? As far as I understand, there really was no crime at all. Hell, by these standards, Mark Zuckerberg should get 70 years in prison for downloading some pictures. It's hard to believe he was persecuted for years because of that. Still, a part of me believes there had to be a stronger reason to commit suicide. I mean, we're not talking about a random stranger.. it's Aaron. He's fought all his life for things and menaces way bigger than that. This is odd.
Add app development

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20consulting...
Zero percent change of happening: you cannot pardon someone who was not adjudicated guilty of a crime (by conviction or by a guilty plea).

Aaron died before his case was finally adjudicated (i.e, until all appeals were exhausted), so like the Enron guy, in the eyes of the law, he is not and never can be guilty of the crimes he was charged with.

Again, for emphasis: you cannot pardon someone without a conviction.
This is clearly out of my purview, but why in the world would you have an institution as a beneficiary unless it's one you control? Are they really that accomplished at brainwashing people?
BTW, here's her position on the case (via the NYT)[1]:

Carmen M. Ortiz, a United States attorney, pressed on,
saying that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a
computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take
documents, data or dollars.”

i.e. she was in full support of the trial against Aaron.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/technology/aaron-swartz-in...
MIT, the state of Massachusetts, and Steve Heymann.
He was one of us, someone many of us have talked to or met so it hits close to home whereas Steve Jobs was an archetype a billionaire inventor who had lived his dreams.
You aren't going to control any institution after you are dead. The best you can do is pick one that you feel you can trust.
I'd be surprised if SalesForce doesn't either offer something to this effect or provide the tools such that an ISV makes it available. Seems like it would be easy enough.

That being said, I will say that I cocked my head at this statement: "He can login to our Help Desk..." Look - no one wants to log in to a help desk. No one. We log in to view our receipts, change preferences, download apps, but no one wants to have to log in multiple times (once to the main site and once to the help desk).

Best of luck.
I agree. I think it's because he's the quintessential hacker. Many many years ago, Aaron answered some of my questions on Khashmir, which was then used in the only bit torrent program. I don't recall much of it, but I do recall that he was patient with my questions.

I use a lot of his stuff: web.py, reddit, markdown. I read a lot of aaronsw.com. He was a quiet hacker, I think - someone who quietly influenced the world at large
So you're saying that in the UK they don't prosecute people who are depressed? As a Brit, that's news to me.

Come on. This prosecution may be unjust for other reasons, but it's just daft to claim that they should not have prosecuted him because he was depressed.
No conspiracy, guys.

The prosecutor was just doing her job. A simple case like Aaron's probably took up less than 1% of her week. It may have been a big case to Aaron, but compared to their normal cases, it was a relative vacation for the prosecutors working on it.

The problem was not that Aaron "upset someone deeply entranched." The problem is that Aaron's activities fall into the definition of a particular form of electronic crime which may be overbroad. Federal prosecutors don't get to decide if laws are overbroad or unconstitutional and choose not to enforce the law (because this discretion was historically used to excuse many white defendants accused of lynching black men in the South). They enforce all of the laws on the books unless someone with legal discretion (i.e. ,the head of the DOJ or the president) issues an order telling them not to enforce a particular (set of) law(s).
Starbucks torrenters generally don't cause a community of 20,000 scholars to lose access to a major journal archive for days at a time. And they generally don't require university staff to burn hours trying to hunt down hidden machines that are disrupting their network.
This hits the nail on the head. If the government can form legislation in a domain, and have the power to prosecute in a domain it should completely understand said domain. Ignorance on many levels is the reason for much of the discontent and injustice occurring where government and internet coalesce.
This is so incredibly sad. I did not know Aaron, but I will try to honour his memory. I've decided to stop hesitating and publish some of my research of the past couple years freely online. I hope others do too.
I'm confused, what does this have to do with Aaron Swartz?
Getting a prosecutor fired is orders of magnitude easier than meaningfully changing the system.
That Slate article doesn't say what you think it says.

A pre-emptive pardon can only be issued for someone in danger of being convicted of a crime; it is essentially a grant of immunity. A dead defendant who was merely charged with a crime can never be convicted of the crime, so a dead defendant cannot be pre-emptively pardoned.
Finding The First Ten Users For A Product - Week 1
That's besides the point. I'm asking if in which way is the crime, as described in the official charges, different than the Starbucks scenario. The denial-of-service to MIT may have helped spur the case, but wire fraud doesn't seem to depend on whether a DoS happened (or at least from what I can tell)
This library could use Composer support. I suppose I'll make a quick pull request.
I never heard of Balanced payment but next day ACH payout for $0.25 per account is not bad. If stripe does not have ACH then you should consider using Balanced.
Love the feedback that you guys gave last week. AMA as usual.
there is a particular connection or kinship of some sort.

He was in the first batch of Y combinator.
I take exception to Lessig's description of Aaron's behavior as "morally wrong". It was no more "morally wrong" than enabling a slave to escape his master's plantation. Property rights that have their basis in injustice are not valid.
For those unable to access their statement due to the traffic load:

------

Aaron Swartz

We are deeply saddened to hear the news about Aaron Swartz. We extend our heartfelt condolences to Aaron’s family, friends, and everyone who loved, knew, and admired him. He was a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the internet and the web from which we all benefit.

We have had inquiries about JSTOR’s view of this sad event given the charges against Aaron and the trial scheduled for April. The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge. At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service and a member of the internet community. We will continue to work to distribute the content under our care as widely as possible while balancing the interests of researchers, students, libraries, and publishers as we pursue our commitment to the long-term preservation of this important scholarly literature.

We join those who are mourning this tragic loss.
Does the US Federal Court count as 'someone deeply entrenched in the circles of power'? They tried to go after him for freeing documents from PACER and failed, so they had to find some other way to get at him. And then when he committed the same crime (freeing information) again, the government had the perfect opportunity.
Pardon = the defendant is forgiven his crime and released from prison, but the fact of being guilty of the crime remains, i.e., the defendant is forgiven for his bad acts.

Amnesty = the defendant is cleared of legal guilt for the crime and the fact of having committed the crime is also cleared, i.e., it is as if the defendant never committed a crime at all.

Pre-emptive amnesty is more simply referred to as "immunity."
There is no time like a tragic death to collect some karma for hating whitey.
Kopimism Hactivism Meetup Tomorrow (Sunday) in Oakland
For those who don't know, the origin of Kopimism is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism
Okay, poorly worded on my part. I was thinking more in line with Gates leaving everything to the Gates Foundation.

My brain can't reconcile why someone would want to donate to something that already takes money from people in return for services. Kinda like the onion half-headline: "Man Has Alarming Level Of Pride In Institution That Left Him $50,000 In Debt."
A young man is dead because Carmen M. Ortiz unambiguously railroaded him. Frankly the ignorance and tenor of her prosecution in this area makes me much less likely to believe that all those other people she fined and jailed were bad guys.

That is: in the one area we do know - computer science - we can see that she pursued trumped up charges. So maybe a forensic accountant would be able to explain that in her past rise to "Bostonian of the Year" she jailed some poor middle manager for making a mistake, or a legal aid guy could break down how she made some minority kid selling pot into a "mobster". Won't know till the Internet and the press does a thorough review:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5048632

Bottom line: she did not acknowledge any of Aaron's positive contributions when she decided to portray him as an evil hacker worthy of thirty five years in prison. Show her the same mercy she showed him by forcing her resignation. More, in fact, as I'm sure she'll be able to land on her feet as a high priced lobbyist. The RIAA/MPAA would love to have her.
I assume you are trying to make a joke. But it's not very funny.
"So while blogging is a lot about personal experience I think there should be some level of “evidence” that supports your standpoint. One way to support your standpoint is scientific-research"

good point! think so, too. lots of blaBla-argumentation in blogs out there.
Apparently, the MIT and/or JSTOR staff took down the service themselves when they detected the mass downloads. It was not Aaron's "attack" that brought down the access.
Family of Swartz Condemns MIT, State Attorney for Contributing to His Suicide
That doesn't seem to be the case. Here's Google's description of the scaling used:

Numbers represent search volume relative to the highest
point on the chart, which is always 100. Hover over any
point to see the search volume at that time.
Http://News.YCombinator.com/submitted?id=aaronsw
I finished downloading this last week.
I don't know MIT's specific financial situation, but my impression was that, while tuition covers a great many things such as salaries and programs, every academic institution is dependent on generous endowments in order to pursue large capital projects and initiatives. Hence, why many stadiums are named after their donors.