Sure, as long as it's gentle. I just don't want a discussion on why it is wrong to not make the bar black or what not. And as I said, I see this in a long tradition of making people do stuff because somebody died, which I don't like. It's all peachy as long as people comply, but if they don't, suddenly they might be labeled as cold hearted, sociopathic or whatever. Why not just let it be an individual thing?
As somebody else pointed out, PG is probably still asleep and will probably black the bar anyway. I don't think he needs a reminder. Also, I know nothing about his personal feelings towards Aaron.
1) It pretty obviously is gentle. In the most extreme scenario pg is bullied into briefly making a minor change to the CSS.
2) HN is a community site, which exists and thrives largely because of the community. I can't see anything wrong with members of said community making suggestions on occasion, particularly on occasions like this.
3) People are far too quick to take offence these days, particularly on the internet. IMHO the world would be a better place if these people were instructed to get over it rather than pandered to.
4) Finally PG is free to say no and I for one will not judge him ill for it.
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 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
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.
Mourning the loss of someone is a personal thing, yes. Friends, parents, teachers will mourn his absence in a deeply personal way, fondly holding on to fading memories.
The encouragement to black out HN is an acknowledgement of a communal loss. This is not "everyone change their desktops to his face." This is "let's unobtrusively black out the top bar of a site frequented by people just like him." This is someone who made contributions to the software community and fought for open access to information. People of similar calibre fought and continue to fight to keep the internet free and open.
It is not just for him, but to demonstrate as a community that we're here for anyone else facing similar issues. It shouldn't be "offensive" as a group to recognize our like-minded allegiance to the ideas and vision he passionately pursued.
I wouldn't be offended by a black bar. I just don't like calling on other people to do stuff. Likewise you could ask of a widow to wear black for a year, and if she wouldn't, you could start gossiping and badmouthing her.
Also, there are more and more people who go through HN. Perhaps eventually the bar has to be black all the time because somebody always dies.
Do you come across a kind, thoughtful suggestion and think "what's the most controversial comment I can write to score some karma" or something? Because honestly, there's no rational universe where your comment remotely makes sense.
And yes, it is Hacker News against you now, as you victimize yourself below. I sure as shit think this comment is disgusting, I hate that you left it, and I'd certainly hope that people would call you out for it (or I'd lose faith in the community). It's comments like this that make Hacker News look terrible to people that don't contribute, and it's one of those comments that's better left thought in your head.
Aaron was involved in this community in multiple ways, God forbid people express themselves at your displeasure.
It's really sad because Aaron's death hit me pretty hard last night, and I wake up this morning and see this suggestion and think "boy, I bet someone's going to piss in the Cheerios in that thread," and it almost hurts that I'm right. What a terrible place this is becoming.
See you are already blind with rage. Somebody died, and you want to leash out and find somebody to blame.
I feel sad about his death, too. I have nothing against black bars or mourning. Just against telling other people how to feel, which incidentally you do again with your post. You are sad, so you are entitled to hate me. You are welcome.
Actually that's not the most amazing part. They didn't want to let him onto the RDF working group, so Aaron hacked the W3C process at the age of 14.
> The rules said that while they could reject any requests to join from an individual, if an organization that was an official member of the W3C asked to put someone on the working group, they couldn't say no. So I looked down the list of W3C member organizations, found the one that seemed friendliest, and asked them to put me on the Working Group. They did.
meh. That's just circumventing bureaucracy. Actually having the technical chops to be involved in such a notable standards process is far more impressive. Especially at 14.
While I agree, most teens who are rebellious do things like stay out way too late or get involved with that bad person that their parents warned them about, rather than not taking "no" for an answer and going on to create great things. It's still pretty commendable.
This is a pretty intelligent bunch so I hope there is rationale in discussing it honestly, but do you really think so? What had Aaron done lately?
I only raise the question because you say the opposite, and in such situations the absolutely worst thing the community can do is canonize someone, exaggerating their accomplishments and raising their words above actual merit (the front-page is full of his old entries now. Why?)
I suspect that Aaron's curse -- the thing that made a very privileged Western existence "too painful" as others have said -- is that he peaked so early. He did the right things at the right times with the right people, and while he was clearly a very bright individual, I think that ended up becoming baggage that dragged him down, every future effort unlikely to ever shine as bright.
Yes, I think he probably didn't go that much in the past few months, relative to the previous decade.
Which would be profoundly depressing. If you were already somewhat unstable, it could lead to a bad outcome.
It's probably more rare that someone at the top of his game kills himself suddenly and for no particular reason. I imagine if you talked to Steve Jobs between Apple and NeXT, he was probably a bit down compared to before or after. The thing is, it seems likely someone like Aaron who spent a decade doing interesting and awesome stuff would be likely to do more stuff like that in the future, particularly after a federal case was resolved, or he either got help with depression or figured out how to deal with it (early 20s is statistically the worst time; even with no other treatment, as lot of people are better off later in life).
So yes, I feel comfortable saying he was likely to have done a lot more awesome stuff over the rest of his life.
Well there's some nice 10 cent psychology, but I'd have to guess that the stress of dealing with government persecution for the last few years probably had a strong effect on his mental state. However, I sure as hell don't know that and you don't either. I see most of what you said as judgemental pop psych bullshit, but maybe I'm misinterpreting your intention so I don't want to turn this into a flame. It doesn't take a lifetime of anguish to commit suicide, you just need to back yourself into that mental corner where you become convinced your problems are overwhelming. I think you should be more compassionate.
How is my response in any way not compassionate? Is this the period where we all go under the cloud of delusion to show "compassion"? HN is FAR above that: this is not people.com.
> I suspect that Aaron's curse -- the thing that made a very privileged Western existence "too painful" as others have said -- is that he peaked so early. He did the right things at the right times with the right people, and while he was clearly a very bright individual, I think that ended up becoming baggage that dragged him down, every future effort unlikely to ever shine as bright.
Yes, that and the impending worry of a 30+year federal prison sentence for carrying out an ideal that most of us respect, even if we disagree on whether the execution was right.
Aaron intentionally did something that would draw him a lot of attention to him, and then fanned the fires again and again. It exactly loops back to what I said.
> 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.
This is going to be dead for the vast majority of HN, but if you ever wondered how HN tends to decline to a monotone, note that the above post got me, at a minimum, IP banned on HN.
I wonder if it's worse to be awake when first news of something like this hits, watching it in "realtime", vs. waking up to hours of discussion about it. I was asleep during 9/11 and woke up about a minute after the second plane hit.
I imagine it'll get black barred in the morning (california time). Apart from everything else Aaron Schwartz was also a YC alumni from YC's very first class in summer 2005.
Does anyone know the full background story on this? Every time I hear the story, it was mostly Alexis and Steve including the retelling of how they pitched PG. Where did Aaron fit in and how does that story go?
He founded Infogami. The company was very ambitious but sadly went nowhere. He also authored web.py, a python web framework. Meanwhile Reddit switched from using Lisp to web.py. PG wanted to help Aaron out, so he suggested having him join Reddit. Reddit sold for a few million dollars shortly after. Aaron cashed in along with the founders for an undisclosed, but substantial, amount of money.
It would be nice if an online site existed where we could dump all a persons writings, images and video for anyone to view at a later date. Really get a feel for what the guy was all about.
His tweets don't seem suicidal. In other words no sign of stress, isolation, fatigue, burn-out. Mentally unfit people on the edge aren't usually writing about re-booting democracy and the importance of future peer-to-peer research. Concern for the future, holding politicians accountable, even warning politicians about their replacement! That is bold. So the bold activist kills himself. Something seems odd about this, but I guess it was suicide if they say it was. Meanwhile I'll keep reading his stuff.
The news and eulogies are all over the net, so I don't see how denying him a black bar would prevent possible copycat suicides.
The stigmatization against suicides as something dishonorable has to end. He was a great hacker and distinguished activist, and through I don't know him personally, I'm pretty sure he was a great guy overall. He deserves a black bar.
He died from depression. Others die from other diseases, car accidents, smoking, drugs, heart attacks, strokes and what not.
We have to be careful with the way we talk about people who died by suicide.
We have to be careful because copycat suicide is real, and we do not want to cause it. Yes, other sites are being irresponsible with their reportage. HN is not other sites.
This has nothing to do with continuing the stigma against suicide or suicidal thinking.
I agree that we should be careful about glorifying suicide, but if you want to minimize suicides, you have to raise awareness about depression among those affected by it and the people close to them, not tabooing it.
If the affected accepts professional help, it's curable. Too many don't, because they are completely oblivious of their medical nature of their condition, because of the fear of being stigmatized, or because they are literally not able to muster the strength to go to the nearest clinic. It's of utter importance that the they, or the people close to them recognize the situation and take the necessary steps, instead of berating them for being lazy, restless or whiny and giving them lectures about how good they have it.
Has it been established that black barring HN would cause copycat suicides? Maybe the amount of attention Aaron is getting on HN (top stories all about him) is sufficient cause for copycat suicides. Should we all stop upvoting stories for fear that it might cause copycat suicides? Should we stop discussing the subject altogether? I think discussing it is very healthy for the community since we might be able to draw conclusions about what we could do better to help those in the same boat.
> The stigmatization against suicides as something dishonorable has to end.
I agree completely. Someone who has hope does not commit suicide, black bar or not. Perhaps we, as a society, should work towards a world that will not leave anyone without hope.
Is Aaron's death any less regrettable because it was a suicide rather than a car accident? I don't think so. The black bar signifies sadness for the loss of someone, it's not a political statement. I, for one, would like HN to be black barred for Aaron simply because the world is a worse place without him in it.
In that vain of thought, one could argue that many actions should not be done because of possible, unintended, consequences. Perhaps some software should not be written? Perhaps even code you wrote will have unintended consequences? Where does this line of thought stop?
Very sad to see someone so young end their own life. To me it does not sound like his current legal situation was the reason so, but it was his overall mental state.
But I must admit, I never heard of this guy. Not once. I have never used reddit and skip over all the non-technical/startupy articles here on HN.
It's up to the HN owners what colour scheme they put on their website and why. I don't mean to sound callous at all, but if HN black barred every deserving death, it would be a permanent black bar. I had never heard of Aaron Swartz until he is now dead. Why can't we honour the living?
Goddamnit, have some sensitivity, he only just died and many people on here know him personally.
If this is a troll then why don't you go reevaluate your priorities in life? Take some magic mushrooms and think about how your actions alter the world.
> It was his personal decision to end it this way.
I'm not one for flaming people and calling them a dumbass, but I can't let this one go. Your attitude shows you don't know shit about what really goes on when people kill themselves.
It's most likely that Swartz killed himself because he was severely depressed. You can't really call a depression-induced-suicide a decision, because severe depression robs people of their ability to make decisions. It massively distorts perceptions, and literally shuts down the parts of the brain involved in decision making. If Swartz had survived and recovered, I'm pretty sure he'd have told you himself that he wasn't in his right mind at the time.
> And I'd like to know how many of you will think of his 'legacy' on a daily basis in 6 months time.
So what? We show our sorrow now because that is when we feel the loss the most keenly. This is the normal human response. Are you any different?
That's a very narrow minded way to look at it. It's difficult to comprehend what he was going through to take such a drastic step. I understand that he was facing a unreasonably long prison sentence for downloading academic papers. As someone points out in another thread, that basically meant he didn't have the freedom to really move forward with his life, even before being sentenced he had lost his freedom. Thats a horrible life to lead. Perhaps he finally lost hope...
His legacy will live on as long as people use Reddit or RSS (or perhaps even anything derived from it), you don't necessarily need to "think" of him. I'm sure a lot of people will be using RSS and Reddit in 6 months.
I don't know whether I'll be thinking of his legacy or not in 6 months time. For me his legacy is not technical, it's personal. His series "Raw Nerve" gave me courage and hope. For this, I do care and feel sadness.
Just because it was his own personal decision while depressed doesn't mean it was the right thing to happen. I don't believe in removing people's personal agency but don't dismiss something (the irreversible decisions made under vast psychological duress) that you don't understand as a given.
They may not 'think' about it as you refer, but will likely be using RSS in some form, or reading a link via reddit or some other interesting achievement.
In HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=aaronsw
Pinboard: https://pinboard.in/u:aaronsw
His last tweet was on Jan 9th, https://twitter.com/aaronsw
In reddit: https://aaronsw.jottit.com/reddit
Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PGTlB14AAAAJ
Writings: https://aaronsw.jottit.com/writings
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Things he has made
https://www.jottit.com/
http://openlibrary.org/
http://watchdog.net/
http://reddit.com/
http://webpy.org/
HN will miss your contributions. Rest in Peace. Love.