

Aaron Swartz Used this - nimeshneema
http://aaron.swartz.usesthis.com/

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corresation
Perhaps it isn't the place (and I fully anticipate the knee-jerk flagging and
the subsequent IP ban. Bravery Level:10), but is the idolization of Aaron
Swartz perhaps a bit much?

He seems like he was a smart guy. He did several interesting things.

But did he do great things? Is his greatest accomplishment, bizarrely and
destructively, that he killed himself?

I've been pondering this lately given the various posts asking why the
"greatest minds" are focused on improving ad clicks, etc. Yet they aren't: I'm
in awe of so much in our society, so many products we use, so many profoundly
society-changing technologies and innovations of enormous complexity that we
enjoy each day. Most created by nameless, faceless people just doing their
part.

Which again makes me wonder why the tech world has been a week of adulation of
Aaron Swartz, whose two greatest accomplishments (if you follow the lede of
every story about him) were that he was pushed on the Reddit founders by PG
after his own project failed (then exiting before them), and that he was one
of a dozen plus people who authored a revision to a brutishly simplistic RSS
1.0 spec, his single celebrated attribute being his age.

I hesitate hitting add comment because I know the above is effectively
sacrilegious, but I don't buy it. I will not celebrate someone because they
committed suicide.

~~~
kragen
Aaron did a huge number of small things, a few moderately important things
(the ones you mention), and one important thing: he organized the opposition
to COICA/SOPA/PIPA. Without Aaron, you'd be typing your comment on a COICA-
encumbered internet, which means, practically speaking, an internet without
Wikipedia.

Tim Berners-Lee doesn't go around calling 26-year-olds his "mentor" or his
"wise elder" just because they killed themselves.

~~~
corresation
_he organized the opposition to COICA/SOPA/PIPA. Without Aaron, you'd be
typing your comment on a COICA-encumbered internet, which means, practically
speaking, an internet without Wikipedia._

Citation required. Just about everyone in the tech industry, including most of
the titan organizations of tech and everyone with a voice that could be heard
spoke and acted against SOPA. Now it was all Aaron?

This is exactly the sort of thing that makes this whole thing bizarre (and to
steal a word another poster used, ghoulish). His legacy grew ten fold the day
he died, and his influence and contribution pushes back through time.

~~~
kragen
Watch Aaron's F2C speech. COICA was voted on three days after it was
introduced, long before the titan organizations heard about it. If it had
passed into law before the quick-reaction movement Aaron and his buddies put
together were able to get Ron Wyden to put the brakes on it — which very
nearly happened — the months-long effort to organize the tech titans would
never have had a chance.

I admit I didn't know this until after he died, despite our friendship.

------
bensw
>I wish that everyone had perfectionist levels of attention to detail.

------
grannyg00se
>I wish that I could lift up the screen on my laptop so that it would be
closer to eye-level

I thought this the first time I opened my Lenovo T530. It has very solid
hinges that look like they could telescope up at least a few inches. But no.
The monitor is stuck in place strictly limited to swivel action only. After a
while I decided that what I really wanted was a pair of HDMI input sunglasses.
Unfortunately that's a no as well.

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Apocryphon
With the amount of personalized sites there are on the internet, and the
number a hacker like Aaron was on, one could write a digital biography with
that data.

------
jason_slack
MPW 9? Is he referring to the Macintosh Programmers Workshop?

~~~
soypunk
No, he's referring to a font. [A version of Monaco][1] that shipped with the
Macintosh Programmers Workshop editor for a time. The paragraph above the MPW
reference notes that he was using TextMate (which he'd be using since the 1.0
release)

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaco_(typeface)>

