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Friday, January 25, 2013

Remembering Aaron Swartz - Raw Thought

Be curious; Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
 - Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz (1986 - 2013)
Last week, I was saddened to hear the news about the death of Aaron Swartz. I have never met Aaron in person but I was a regular follower of his blog and work for many years. Both of these led me to deeply admire and respect him. His tireless work against the passing of the SOPA bill was of significant interest to me because of the serious implications of the bill. As a programmer his talents were legendary and as an activist his tireless efforts admirable. His passing is indeed a great loss. The Economist has a nice obituary here that perfectly reflects this sentiment. 

As an avid reader of his blog, I am deeply saddened to know that there will not be anymore updates to the site. So I decided to collect all of his blog posts over the years and compile it into a PDF/Ebook. So this past week, I wrote a simple Python script that crawled Aaron's weblog and retrieved all of the posts one by one and complied them into a single file.