Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 994 posts

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#481

Post by blacksmith_tb »

tomswartz07 wrote: post #363
ohitsdom wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd think administrators would have a very different approach to disciplining a "bad office-supply purchasing" decision versus a well-thought out choice to use school equipment & electricity for non-work related causes.

> electricity for non-work related causes I wish we could fire teachers for using their computers for Facebook and Amazon shopping during the day.

And should private sector employers fire their employees for using their computers to do the same? Obviously I don't want to see teachers goofing off on social media instead of teaching kids, but if they aren't actively teaching, why not? The idea that every second of your time on the job needs to be spent furiously working is an attitude from the industrial revolution - I would have thought these days we were more interested in results.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#482

Post by ScottBev »

ams6110 wrote: post #320
dopamean wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always find the "more funding" idea to be somewhat dubious. Don't we already spend a ton of money on education? Perhaps even more per pupil than other developed countries?

Yes, and on an inflation-adjusted basis we spend more on K-12 education than ever before. It isn't a funding problem. It's a problem with how we spend that money.

So true. We allocate lots of money to education. Just it goes to administrative, consulting and testing expenses, rather than to improving the education provided.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#483

Post by Ao7bei3s »

venomsnake wrote: post #203
mikeash wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make three boxes. Label them BOMB 1, BOMB 2, and BOMB 4. Put them in various places around the school. Grab some popcorn and a comfy chair.

This is an actual bomb threat. Fun, but probably a felony.

Only in the USA would this pass as an actual bomb threat. Seriously...

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#484

Post by eastbayjake »

This seems like a great opportunity for us to show our support for kids who build things. Would anyone be interested in a GoFundMe to get Ahmed some Arduino gear or send him to an electronics camp? (I would just create one but I'm not sure what people would most readily donate toward -- gear or scholarship funds.)

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#485

Post by nsxwolf »

cholantesh wrote: post #457
nsxwolf wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That either meant "Yup. The kid that's always building electronics", or "Yup, the Muslim." When in doubt, always assume the worst.

What part of his appearance gives the former away?

The cop may already know the kid or have heard about his hobbies? We have no idea, we just have a short bit of hearsay.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#486

Post by electic »

Frankly, if someone showed up with a clock and a circuit board with wires leading to a box on the board, what would people think? Keep in mind, there have been multiple mass shootings at schools already this year. They have to investigate it.

What if someone showed up to the mall with a gun in an open-carry setting? People panic.[2] The setting matters. Especially if the setting in question, a school, has been a victim of mass violence numerous times. This is not a HP lab. They were right to take a look at the device with police. However, this is where things went terribly wrong:

> When Ahmed was called out of class, he said he was brought into a room with four police officers, one of whom said, "Yup. That's who I thought it was." [1]

Frankly, the school and police should have been more professional. They weren't. What is more disturbing, is the police have inadvertently admitted they are profiling people in this community. There is far more details in the CNN article:

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/16/us/texas-student-ahmed-muslim-...

[2] http://www.fayobserver.com/news/local/fort-bragg-soldier-arm...

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#487

Post by eldude »

boomlinde wrote: post #402
eldude wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you focus on attacking my point with insinuation and equivocation, yet ignore the exploitative anti-intellectual (fact-less) position of the TechCrunch author, whose sole contribution to the story was to inject race? Conveniently, you ignored the facts and in doing so implicitly mischaractered me as equally lacking in factual basis for my "narrative", which, of course, is absurdly wrong, since my first word, "Exa…

Perhaps surprisingly, to a small amount of people, "Exactly" isn't the source of the irony that I pointed out, but the fact that you are referring to the real issue , by which you dismiss that there are any other real issues involved. You did so without making a factual argument and without sharing any of the reasoning that had you arrive at that conclusion. The mystical real issue for which no other explanation is o…

The only irony here is your complete failure to understand my original comment and your own failure to provide reasoning for your own false conclusion.

Based on the facts in the OP and parent comment, I was disassembling the race-baiting rhetoric as anti-intellectual and fact-less (which, since you missed it, is itself a fact), to refocus on the original issue.

Meanwhile, double-ironically, you again ignore context and facts, equivocate ("real issue"), and wildly mischaracterize me to make an increasingly invalid point based on a fundamental misunderstanding of my comment.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#488

Post by balls187 »

austenallred wrote: post #143

This hits way too close to home. Not because I have brown skin, or because I've ever been arrested for making "a bomb" that is not a bomb, but because when you're that age you're constantly surrounded and disciplined by people who don't understand you. Or what you're doing. Or why it's cool. I'd be willing to bet part of the reasoning around his arrest is, "Why would a student need to make his own clock?" I wish I co…

> I wish I could reach out to the boy and say

He's on twitter.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#489

Post by leoc »

jerf wrote: post #198
leoc wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not the whole story in this case. It seems improbable that little Johnny McFreckles III would have encountered as much trouble over his clock project.

I realize it may seem like fun to try to bring "discrimination" into this, but plenty of white kids have gotten in plenty of trouble for stupid reasons too. Yes, including handcuffs and arrests, and at times, even court convinctions and orders for things like staying off computers entirely for some period of time. I see no reason to believe it would have gone any differently for any ethnicity, gender, age, sexual ori…

> but plenty of white kids have gotten in plenty of trouble for stupid reasons too.

Of course they have. However, the authorities everywhere don't consistently flip their wigs—certainly not as badly as this—every time a student does something like bringing in this project. So the fact that they wigged out badly in this particular case probably—not certainly, but really pretty likely—does have some relation to the fact that the student just happened to be Ahmed Mohamed.

(OTOH there pretty certainly is a selection bias in the fact that this particular case is getting so much publicity. It's the social-media catnip of the perceived (and again, let's be serious here, probably partly real) discrimination that has pushed this one up the charts while others go mostly unremarked.)

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#490

Post by rebootthesystem »

chejazi wrote: post #235
nadams wrote: post #121

If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence - I should remind you of 3 events: - A teacher confiscates Linux CDs claiming that the student was essentially distributing illegal copyrighted software - because no software is free [1] - A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. There is a lot of controversy about this case - but I read one news article…

If public schools are going to succeed, then many states need to "catch up" when it comes to funding. More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool. If you look at the average funding per student by state, Texas isn't doing so hot [1], especially for being the second largest state [2]. There's definitely more to it than just funding, but I think that would be a good starting point. [1] h…

> More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool

Without the ability to get rid of bad teachers as quickly and easily as one can fire bad engineers in the private sector money isn't going to fix a damn thing. It might even make it worst.

Fix that part first.

Post reply on HN