Aaron Swartz's personal pages collect his writings, including his account of Reddit and his talk on how to get a job like his.
After his death, HN commenters shared it for his Reddit story and talk, and cited how he got into the W3C RDF working group as a teenager.
Aaron suffered from a brain disorder. He had documented periods of extreme withdrawn depression and others of mild manic productivity.
Because of that brain disorder, perhaps because it was not attacked with the requisite treatment, he is dead.
If you or a loved one are ever feeling suicidal, depressed, or are acting abnormally erratic, contact an expert. It's nothing to be ashamed about. It's just a lottery of genetic expression.
There are others going through the same thing. There are excellent treatments available, and they get better each year. You might save someone's life.
http://www.reddit.com/r/suicidewatch
http://www.reddit.com/r/depression
http://www.reddit.com/r/bipolarreddit
I find it bizarre how quickly our minds jump to impossibly unlikely reasons when tragic events like this happen. Troubles with the justice department don't alone cause a bright young man to kill himself.
> I was miserable. I couldn't stand San Francisco. I couldn't stand office life. I couldn't stand Wired. I took a long Christmas vacation. I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign.
> I followed these rules. And here I am today, with a dozen projects on my plate and my stress level through the roof once again.
https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dying
> I have a lot of illnesses. I don’t talk about it much, for a variety of reasons. I feel ashamed to have an illness. (It sounds…
Agreed. But do want to say being a HN community its good to observe/"hack" his life and learn from this. As one big question arises: Was his death to make a statement, give up, or escape this life. Food for thought:
Reddit life:
"I was miserable. I couldn't stand San Francisco. I couldn't stand office life. I couldn't stand Wired. I took a long Christmas vacation. I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign."
"I followed these rules. And here I am today, with a dozen projects on my plate and my stress level through the roof once again." "Every morning I wake up and check my email to see which one of my projects has imploded today, which deadlines I'm behind on, which talks I need to write, and which articles I need to edit."
-https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget
Post Reddit Era:
"The post-Reddit era in Aaron's life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he'd be on the pointy end of…
For a while I've been thinking about how to provide job seekers with the type of information one usually acquires AFTER working in a position for a certain amount of time. A sort of "if I knew then what I know now" collection of employee data. It wasn't going to be company specific, rather position specific.
After thinking about what people actually WANT, I figured they wouldn't want to wade through thousands (more?) job descriptions. Don't tell me what's out there, just tell me what I would be good at and would like.
So I started to think about a tool that would categorize available jobs based on what people REALLY look for in a job. Users could identify what they (thought) they wanted and the tool would show them jobs that fit.
After many months I was losing interest. Then I recently discovered Aaron Swartz was working on something similar. "...we did agree on another good idea: a wiki to tell students what different jobs are like. That site should be launching soon."[1]
I'm not sure how far Aaron got with the project, but I think the idea is still viable. I often find myself doing a lot of research and job description comparisons to get past the cookie cutter information to attempt to answer the question, "what exactly will I be doing for you?"
Maybe I'm alone, but the majority of job interviews I've had were more about seeking information about the work I was going to be doing. Information I should have had well before I ever…
Better eulogies will follow, to be sure, but in the mean time, much of what can be said about him is captured in a touching talk he gave called "How to Get a Job Like Mine" [1]. What I think is especially touching about this is how he gently deconstructs his success, demystifying his own legend by pulling back the curtain on what would have otherwise appeared to be a string of miraculous accomplishments. In the process, he reveals himself to be a sensitive, seemingly grateful, and thoughtful person.
May he be remembered well; he seems to deserve it.
[1] https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget
Aaron Swartz's presence in various networks:
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.
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.
- https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget