Comment by cactusplant7374
19 hours ago
What Aaron Swartz did to himself was tragic, but he did decide to break the law. Something that is glossed over here.
19 hours ago
What Aaron Swartz did to himself was tragic, but he did decide to break the law. Something that is glossed over here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46066132 and marked it offtopic.
You would do that. You're so unethical. Remember when you covered up uBiome?
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=ubiome
Of course we didn't:
YC-backed uBiome is basically Theranos-lite - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The interesting thing is why this (false) accusation appears now, years later. I don't recall people saying it at the time, which makes sense because it was obviously untrue.
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I consider it to be part of the hacker's spirit to bend or break unjust laws when the situation calls for it.
So I wouldn't gloss over the specific law(s) he broke, so much as I would outright celebrate that he did so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerilla_Open_Access_Manifesto
I think anyone can be a hacker. Anyone can break any laws. But to kill yourself over it? It's in the extreme. I don't believe law enforcement has to take the blame for that.
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The only reference to Swartz that I see in the parent comment is:
> Through good times and rough ones, including the loss of Aaron Swartz (who I only knew of through HN), this has stayed a place for real conversation.
And the rest was just upbeat talk in general.
Unless the parent comment was edited, I don't understand why you responded:
> What Aaron Swartz did to himself was tragic, but he did decide to break the law. Something that is glossed over here.
By "here", I assume you mean "HN in general", but your comment comes off as loaded (e.g., "did to himself" sounds like a conscious attempt at asserting a framing), and the timing seems poor (i.e., that particular innocuous comment, on this particular day).
I hope you hold the same contempt for every tech company and their "rules only apply to the poor" attitude about copyright.
I'm going to break the law right now and watch some illegally downloaded movies. MPAA RIAA FBI CIA NSA come at me
If we had a thousand more people like him, maybe this world wouldn't be such a shitty place.
Take heart: there are a lot of people like Aaron Swartz. Of course you'll find them in proportionally fewer numbers, when you look somewhere that attracts with money/power.
Laws are necessary evils. Zealotry in the application of law helps absolutely no one and is one of the evils the necessity of laws creates.
Aaron Swartz deserved, at worst, a slap on the wrist, not the kind of severe harassment in the name of the law which he got.