skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the Swartz case, I have to say that JSTOR acted professionally and did the right thing. They saw someone stealing their data. They reached out to the authorities to help stop the theft. Swartz returned the data, and JSTOR agreed not to pursue (civil) legal action against him. It's unfortunate that the US government couldn't match JSTOR's level of reasonableness. Yes, Swartz did something illegal, but the time (~35 year prison term and $1m fine) did not fit the crime.

I can't help but be reminded of the MPAA/RIAA vs. John Doe lawsuits that were commonplace just a couple years ago. It's sad that our legal system lacks a sense of proportionality for crimes. 35 years is what someone would get for murder, rape, or dealing drugs - not for stealing property, and then giving it back. I hope that the US government takes time to reflect on how they mishandled the case. At least then something good will come of his death.
How I would drive off with the ADN Ferrari by @spacekatgal
> she's actually very good at her job as a prosecutor, precisely because she is overzealous.

While we're on the topic of things HN participants have trouble understanding, you may have a perspective on the legal system to add to the discussion, but you've apparently got something of a blind spot toward what the case you're building looks like outside that perspective.

At least, insofar as you're arguing that the legal system respects and the political system advances the careers of prosecutors who are overzealous (which, by definition, is disproportionate zeal).

> Jack Dorsey, or Steve Jobs, or all those other techheads who are revered for their overzealous and overbearing behavior.

This is like arguing that because some drug addicts are great artists, people should respect drug addicts.

I think it's pretty rare that you find people revered for overbearing and overzealous behavior itself -- when you find that behavior alone, in fact, you find people generally recognized as "assholes."

It's the other stuff that people like Jobs and Dorsey bring to the table that earns them respect and gets people lining up to work with them.

So if you want to make a comparison here that's going to hold up to any real scrutiny, you'd better be able to hold up to the world what Ortiz and her fellow overzealous prosecutors are contributing to the world besides their inordinate zeal -- what their singular gifts and rare qualities are.

Particularly in the moment when the most high profile product of that zeal is that seems to have contributed to someone's death.

You spent most of your comment defending that zeal instead, though. I don't know what that says about the strength of the case you hinted could be made about the details of a prosecutor's job and the legal and ethical obligations that come with it.
Seriously, people should start voting at 13? So the next president would be Justin Bieber?
You do realize, that you are suggesting we do "eye for an eye" right? She decided to drive a tack with a sledge hammer, and you are calling for us to do the same? I do think she is wrong, but attempting to do the same to her makes us no better than them.
The real WTF is that local law enforcement thought that they might have the right to shoot down the glider. The guys that give you tickets for speeding shooting their guns in the air over a nuclear power plant? What could go wrong with that?
how do you define "talent"? what is that "talent" thing you mention? where does it come from?

I'm asking because I don't believe in talent, I believe in practice (and everything you need to practice a lot – stuff like dedication and perseverance).

That being said, sometimes I'd love to believe in that concept called "talent", because "I've got no talent for music" would be such a comfortable excuse.
As I understand openphoto you still have to store your private photos on public cloud-services?
But if I have my own server I like to store them there. I feel better if I control who can access my photos.
"Acceptance, as well as delivery, of a pardon is essential to its validity; if rejected by the person to whom it is tendered, the court has no power to force it on him. [...]

There are substantial differences between legislative immunity and a pardon; the latter carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it [...].

The facts, which involve the effect of a pardon of the President of the United States tendered to one who has not been convicted of a crime nor admitted the commission thereof, and also the necessity of acceptance of a pardon in order to make it effective are stated in the opinion."

- Burduck v. United States, 236 US 79 (1915), Supreme Court of the United States, internal citations and quotes omitted.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/236/79/case.html
You seem to be a lawyer, and I'm not, so thanks for your information. I know a lot more about computer security theory and practice than the US federal laws; there are pretty clear lines way before "crime" which I try to stay within, myself.

As far as I can tell, CFAA was not violated, at least under the narrow (i.e. correct) interpretation of the 9th circuit. There is a circuit split right now. 1st hasn't ruled at all, so she could easily have looked to the 9th for guidance on this and not included CFAA charges.

There was no "protection" at MIT or at JSTOR, so I don't see how fraud or unauthorized access, etc. applied. He scraped a website. He may have trespassed at MIT. If net-18 restriction is considered "protection", wtf (certainly a server on a secure LAN is protected by being only on the secure LAN, but a server limited to US-only access and accessed via a proxy is not. IMO Net-18 is a lot closer to national restrictions at YouTube than a security policy, since any guest could walk in and have access.

I don't see "recklessly damaging a computer" as applying at all. Wire Fraud is essentially free always.

Turning these into multiple counts for the same offense is also BS.
>"As lovely of an idea as that is, someone has to write the backend, design the front-end, scan tens of thousands of documents and provide full-text search for them."

No problem - as all the open-access publications and archives in the world will attest (PLoS, arxiv). Give us the access and get out of our way. You will be amazed at the ingenuity of free people.

>"How often do you read JSTOR articles? Personally, I don't power through a math paper in a single day, but maybe you're brilliant."

When I was in grad school, I would skim dozens of articles to find a few that I wanted to read deeply. The way that we use open information is qualitatively different than rate-limited information. It's just not the same.
Ruby is a good language to learn. There are a massive amount of resources out there for people trying to learn. Check out codecademy or codeschool for their tutorials. They can really help you learn the basics.

Another tip is try to actually build some basic programs. You can learn so much more from building something than reading about it.
Hacking systems to their advantage is a pretty strong trait in the best entrepreneurs and PG recognized this pattern earlier than most and built a business out of it, it's called YC :).

What saddens me the most is not so much that he died but more that he didn't live to accomplish all the great things a fearless visionary like him could have done for all of us...
You think matters can't be worse, but they can. But the idea of disenfranchising part of the nation because you disagree with political views of significant part of it is really what is appalling. The goal justifies the means, right? So when I say matters can be worse, I mean, for example, if people like you gain majority and it would be OK to deny people rights because they think wrong thoughts - it would be much worse. At least now everybody has a chance to vote.

And if it doesn't work to disenfranchise those old stupid bastards, should we maybe put some arsenic in their food, so they leave us alone faster? If they don't deserve to have a vote, maybe there are other things they don't deserve too... Just kick the bucket already and free the road for the fresh 13-year-olds, eh?

>>>> The only real issue I see with it is that it could allow conservative religious parents who pump out kids to add a multiplying factor to their own vote. Efforts would need to be taken to ensure parents could not influence the votes of their children (improved voter privacy, and improved education).

Yeah, so the elderly is not the end. Let's get rid of all that disagree with you. Let's make it so they can't have kids, of at the very least - so that they can't poison kid's brains with their incorrect opinions. The only opinions the kids should be having are the right ones - yours. And with improved education it is of course exactly the opinion they would be having - because any person educated enough agrees with you. Or he isn't educated enough. Brilliant!
Congratulations! It's always great to read about new programmers.
not an answer, but a comment here:

your question suggests that somebody who can learn to code can be a programmer; I don't think that's the case.
This is How Facebook Should Look [Design Concept]
>"As I said at the time of Swartz’s arrest, his actions were foolish and some punishment was probably appropriate. "

Bullshit. No punishment is appropriate. A system that punishes someone for standing up for justice does not deserve to continue its existence. Aaron deserved a medal, not a fine or a prison sentence. Here is my take on it:

http://jacobexmachina.blogspot.com/2013/01/aaron-swartz-free...
I was in the same boat nearly a year ago. I had knowledge of HTML and CSS and not much else. Since then, I've learned Ruby, Rails, and a little of Objective-C. I feel so much better now that I have the confidence to build anything I want.

I definitely recommend anyone that wants to learn programming to go all in and pick up a few languages.
Seconded - I tried to participate but wasn't willing to give access to my twitter account. It gave me a very verbose error page.
There are two kinds of addiction: physical and psychological.

Pure physical addiction is easy to fix. You just reduce the dose slowly enough to keep the withdrawal symptoms manageable.

Psychological addiction is much harder. Psychological addiction is a bit of your brain screaming, "I know how to solve this problem. Go out and get drunk / wired / naked right now!" And it works -- you feel good for a while. The habit becomes so ingrained you don't even notice the triggers -- just the compulsion.

On a deeper level, you have other habits of thought -- automatic assumptions and emotional responses baked in from childhood. These are the cause of the distress that led you down the path of addiction.

There comes a point when these coping reflexes cause more distress than they alleviate. You're reaching that point now, and you recognize that you're tipping into a crisis. So now you have a real choice: plunge forward, or step back from the brink.

Perhaps the best thing for you to do is to find an environment devoid of all the triggers for your compulsions (no vodka bottles or horny sugar daddies) and someone who can help you examine what's compelling you. Maybe some kind of spiritual retreat? I've mentioned this before, but Cognitive Behavioral Therapy really is effective.

Whatever you do, don't give up on yourself. And don't go to LA -- that town already has more than enough crazy bitches.
And, uhm, yes.

It's not just that hackers may have the disposition of "going to war" but "we the people" that pernicious rubbish, is turning those who are incapable of hacking, it's turning them into a new form of clientele. It's already happening in Houston.

You can look at my Website. You can see I am a designer. But because I use vim/Terminal, over night my community re-defined me as a "hacker."
I think it is actually not a good thing that a suicide leads to this much attention. it might encourage others to choose death to be turned into martyrs. same as the coverage from school homicides.
RamNode.
Thank you. The only thing I disagree with is, "Most experience it in mild states." That is simply false.

RIP Aaron.
Well, the whole point of the Google Books lawsuit is that they didn't ask first:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyrigh...

The Association of American Publishers and Google’s
agreement last week to settle the publishers’ long-running
litigation over Google’s library scanning program put an
end to the lengthy and expensive suit, but without
resolving any of the underlying copyright and fair use
issues. The main component of the deal: copyright owners
with books scanned by Google under its library program can
choose to “opt out” of the program and have their books
removed. Of course, that settlement condition is something
Google has offered copyright owners with books in the
program all along.

In other words, Google scanned and posted to the web first, and authors could opt-out if they so chose. So they didn't get consent first. Their rationale was good - there was no machine readable contact information and many of the authors were dead or had moved - but in this respect the situations are reasonably analogous.

Had Aaron scraped say 10-100k rather than 4M articles and done some innovative NLP/data mining on the text (like Google N-grams), then showed that to JSTOR, despite the lack of up-front consent he might well have been able to get more or convince them to open up, especially if this 10-100k experiment showed monetization potential and could allow JSTOR to move to an open access model. Sadly, we'll never know.
Everything you need to start a startup
Yes, but it hardly ever makes things better for the depressed. You think logically and correct in a logical way, but depression is illogical. No offense meant.
Securing top-secret facility after a beak-in (where we know keyloggers and such were installed) is a bit more expensive than popping the hood of the car. At minimum, whole OS and all software packages have to be reinstalled from known clean media, and whole software stack needs to be recreated from scratch, without using backups (which could be compromised too). If you're properly paranoid, add new hardware too (most of the current hardware is programmable at some level, i.e. needs to be replaced after a breakin). And then you need to invalidate all passwords on all the systems and have everybody to reset their passwords. And not only user login passwords - all router passwords, domain passwords, service logins, everything.

I can easily see how such work can take, for multiple systems, several weeks and 41K is not an outrageous sum for completely recreating the system. Especially when something controlling life-preserving equipment is involved - which means additional testing, etc. - it's not a website that you can just push into production and if some page glitches the user would tell you.
Yeah, cannibalism is totally the sort of thing that I am suggesting.
How about boycotting MIT - the institution.
Because I disagree with their views? No, not just that. Because they don't have a proper stake in the outcome.

What hyperbolic strawman bullshit.
How do we stop America from being afraid of hackers?
Why is America so willing to use the technology hackers build but so fearful of its creators?

How do we stop the persecution of this generations greatest inventors when those inventors try to pursue a utopia through technology?
Probably unlikely in near term given the possibility that Aaron's family may sue the USA.
It's actions like these (the deletion) which have gradually but surely eroded my goodwill towards Wikipedia. Heavens knows what the impact of the delete debate was on Aaron, or whether deletion occurred before or after he passed. But it's another straw on the back of the camel of progress.

It seems Aaron's own research showed that Wikipedia content is created by a large number of generally quiet contributors, while a few very active editors edit. It's over-zealous editors who are blackening the soul of Wikipedia. They need to be tamed, and the quiet contributors granted more power, somehow.
> It would be awesome if a magic pill existed

I'm pretty sure that's prozac (and it's relatives). It has it's own set of side effects that you may prefer the depression over, but it essentially is a "magic pill". (Depends of course on the severity of your depression).

Meditation, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Exercise, and Drugs are pretty much the corner stones for treating depression.
Not possible for another 17 years.

I am sure your average 13 year old could tell you that.
Personally I've been opening all the submissions that point to the big news sites. It's a small impact, but my click is a vote I want more mainstream coverage of the issues behind this.
I'm really glad your meds worked for you.

In my case, the meds did very little for me. Prozac did nothing. Seroxat made me worse. Venlafaxine moved the needle a little but not enough to make me functional.

And I quite agree that there's no such thing as a blog post epiphany. "Epiphanies" only happen after a whole lot of other preparation behind the scenes.
Tell that to Mozart (and other child prodigy as well). He was just practicing for first 3 years of his life and composed some music when he was 4.

Right, there is no such thing of talent :)

Let's just say some people are more inclined to do some things than others.
Assume nobody else has any idea what they're doing either. A lot of people refuse to try something because they feel they don't know enough about it or they assume other people must have already tried everything they could have thought of. Well, few people really have any idea how to do things right and even fewer are to try new things, so usually if you give your best shot at something you'll do pretty well.

What a fantastic insight, not to mention a real motivational boost.
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Why is federally funded research not in the public domain?
Google App Engine (GAE) Gotchas and How To Avoid Them
Cooking with Lean Startup
Simple meals cooked & blogged by a busy start up founder as a way to take a break in the evenings.

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I just realized he's only 13 when he wrote that email, and 13 years later the same brilliant kid with a bright future would be dead for some pretty messed up reasons. Such a tragic loss.
Things are far from being as simple as you make them sound. In a two-party system with extreme gerrymandering and extensive lobbying by the rich, politicians are no longer beholden to the people. People don't blindly support new laws like you say they do. In fact, Congress's approval rating has been in the shitter for a long time. People nowadays vote by figuring out who they dislike the least. But when it comes to referendums, we're seeing real change - marijuana was legalized in 2 states this time around. And you say voters want more people in jail?

The book I mentioned debunks your theory of the ultrawealthy not being responsible for these problems. The statistics are quite clear regarding the increase in lobbying efforts by the wealthy and by large corporations during the 70s.
getting one prosecutor fired won't change anything, changing the system will. However, firing the prosecutor will be a start in changing the system.
The non-profit status doesn't automagically make an organization "good". The executives of the institution still get paid and have an interest in perpetuating and growing the organization, even if it goes against public interest

I don't know much about JSTOR, but I know the IEEE (for example) can be a good bunch of sharks. In the past, they forced you to hand them your copyright for the privilege of publishing your work in their journals, and proceeded to go after you if you committed the cardinal sin of distributing your own papers through your research website. They also put your work behind a 30$ paywall without, of course, giving you a dime.
Not to demean you and I understand that you may dislike the idea of charity, but while I don't have much money, I could spare $7.50 to your paypal account to help short term with food, no pay back required. Consider me seeing this message the universes way of telling me it's time to give back.
am serious looking for hacker
Aaron Swartz, Internet freedom activist, dies aged 26
You really think the average 13 year old knows the constitutional age limit to be President?
Unfortunately I think this is spot on, and that makes it harder to figure to what to do.

People have probably seen it a dozen times, but a fairly famous Steve Jobs quote:

“When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

I think that's largely true with the proliferation of felonies also. It's not a handful of elites who want absurdly long sentences for "computer hackers" and shoplifting; a huge proportion of middle-class "regular" people have absurdly retributive views on throwing people in jail for long sentences.

I think there are other things, especially in the economic sphere, where the concentration of wealth is a likely factor explaining our current situation. But when it comes to "tough on crime", that's middle-class suburban America voting its fears.
> is living half a life of misery worth living half an enjoyable life?

Yes, it is. Like I said in the original post: I swear that life is worth more than you can possibly understand when you're depressed.
I agree, been saying that for a long time. You can't have "business people" running companies that run on software.
Way to go to miss the point completely.
Stupidity is also breathtaking, reading comprehension might help.
Why Having an Idea Isn't Good Enough To Be an Entrepreneur
He may be a lawyer, but he is completely wrong in this and most of his other assertions.

Justice.gov. Verbatim quote "The USA is invested by statute and delegation from the Attorney General with the broadest discretion in the exercise of such authority."

http://www.justice.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/tit...

The United States Attorney, within his/her district, has
plenary authority with regard to federal criminal matters.
This authority is exercised under the supervision and
direction of the Attorney General and his/her delegates.

The statutory duty to prosecute for all offenses against
the United States (28 U.S.C. § 547) carries with it the
authority necessary to perform this duty. The USA is
invested by statute and delegation from the Attorney
General with the broadest discretion in the exercise of
such authority.
I've been trying to get a handle on my own feelings of outrage all day. Lots of people are given what amounts to life in prison for a few ounces of weed thanks to ridiculous "three strikes" laws, and while I'm outraged, its orders of magnitude less than what I feel in this case.

It could just be that Aaron was a "kindred spirit" but what I think at last is that it comes down to the fact that someone who was so valuable to us was taken from us by the actions of someone who offered us so very little with their own life, for nothing more than a small amount of personal gain for themseleves.

Its the same feeling I get when I learn an NFL star or a merit scholar was killed in a mugging over a few hundred bucks by some worthless thug.

And so I'm outraged.
Excellent work.

Never did any research worth publishing in a journal. Working a 9 to 5 job now and no longer have the opportunity to research. But I would have done it your way if I could have. An alternative now for me would be to help build open journals. The authors do the research, the publishers are simply a medium. Doesn't make sense for mediums to bite the hands of authors.