Aaron Swartz

Though Aaron and I have been in different circles for the past few years, he was a huge help to me in the early days of NetNewsWire. He hosted the beta testers mailing list at notabug.com (love the domain name). He wrote the code that NetNewsWire uses to show differences between two versions of the same post. (If you look inside the Mac package, you’ll find htmldiff.py inside the Resources folder.)

But all that was little stuff, though a big help to me, and we haven’t talked in a while.

He’d gone on to do cool things — and make some mistakes, and get in trouble for them. But I knew he was extraordinary, and I expected him to grow up to become an American hero. I was happy to watch that happen.

Now I won’t get to. This world is poorer.

My condolences to all his family and friends.

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Here’s Cory Doctorow writing about his friend Aaron. And Lawrence Lessig. And Mark Bernstein.