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This quote is fantastic:

> In 1992, Roy Hall, a 46-year-old minister, bought a royal blue Hickey-Freeman jacket at Unclaimed Baggage. When he took it home, he noticed the name “Whitey Ford” — a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Yankees — written inside of it. Informed of the find, Ford asked for his jacket back; Hall decided to keep it.

Who cares if it’s true; the minister is like, “return a lost article to its rightful owner? Nah.”


“Possession is 9/10th the law” has a lot of truth to it. The liability here should rest with the airline as bailee, but they disclaim liability beyond some trivial amount, so the bailor (traveller) is taking a risk by failing to “manifest the desire to exclude others” without adequate protection.


What? The airline may not be liable, but the minister certainly is. Retaining property clearly owned by someone else (by label and by spoken affirmation) is theft pure and simple.


Unfortunately this is not correct. It isn’t legally theft (though morally it surely isn’t the right thing to do). Theft implies someone was “manifesting the desire to exclude others” and someone else took it anyways. Once you hand over your luggage, you have a contract with the airline whereby you’ve waived many of your rights and limited the few that remain. Once the luggage goes missing, you are entitled only to those limited rights under your contract with the airline. The newly found luggage can be sold as unowned goods.

There’s centuries of common law that back this up. It sucks, yes.


> Theft implies someone was “manifesting the desire to exclude others”.

That can't be the whole story though. You can't keep stolen property, even if you bought it from a 3rd party and were under the impression that the transaction was legal. Lost&found might not be stolen, but if the airline 'finds it' without the intention to return it, it's not that far off.


Surely an urban legend. I'm expected to believe Mr Hall wrote to Mr Ford (1992 was pre-email, pre-internet, pre-social media) to inform him that he'd found his jacket, but then refused to return it? I mean, who else but Mr Hall himself could have "informed" Ford? And how did the luggage store become aware of any of this, who told them?

In fact, given the improvements in luggage tracking, in recent years, I'd bet "Unclaimed Luggage" is mostly a lie as well. My guess is that a very small percentage of the store's inventory comes from lost airline luggage these days. Most likely, it's stuff left behind at hotels, abandoned storage units, "imperfect" textiles and goods, pawn store inventories, police confiscations, bankruptcy auctions, even lost/overboard shipping containers.


To be fair, if the airline has already recompensed you for your lost luggage, then you no longer have a right to it. Once you take the money, you're no longer the rightful owner. :)


To be honest, if I paid for a jacket, I'd probably ask that person to pay me for the money I spent...


Then you become a link in the reselling of stolen goods (actual wording and consequences may vary depending on where you live).

edit: I'd appreciate some explaining regarding the downvotes, is someone expecting me to cite the law ?


Yes, if you claim it was ‘stolen’, the burden of proof is you to provide proof that the law considers the property stolen rather than forfeited (if you want to avoid downvotes, that is) FWIW, I didn’t downvote you.

There’s an entirely separate moral/ethical argument aside from the legal one where one may decide they should return it based on their own morals/ethics.


I don't get it. The owner of the jacket is a jacket short, he finds out someone has it and that person doesn't give it back ? Not the first time to happen, laws have already dealt with things like that.

What I wrote is not up to debate, it's common in the law in the US and in most of Europe (AFAICT).

You can debate the finer points (that's why I wrote “actual wording and consequences may vary depending on where you live”) but the idea is still the same. Don't mess with stolen stuff.

Eg: In Scotland, when goods are stolen, the person who originally owned them is still the legal owner. If you discover you've bought stolen goods you should stop using them immediately. If you know who the legal owner of the goods is you should inform them that you have their goods and let them take them away. If you don’t give them back and the owner finds out you have them, the owner can apply for a court order to make you return the goods.

Verbatim: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/scotland/consumer/somethin...

We could debate the moral/ethical argument but I purposely didn't take that approach.

edit: ah, I see, I didn't understand why you used the phrasing “Yes, if you claim it was ‘stolen’,” and thought it was a universal “you” but you were talking about the very specifics of that case. I don't know why, I got on the macro level too soon.

Of course, I see, we now have to check what the law says or allows for that company about unclaimed luggage and the best efforts the company made to find the rightful owner before being granted ownership of the jacket.


I think people are down voting because they disagree in this instance.

IMO, your comment contributes to the topic of discussion.


HN needs to repair its flag mechanism


I've been told that without religion we'd have no morals.


Yes it’s ironic, that as an atheist, I wouldn’t have done what that minister did.


Ditto; the statement falls apart RAPIDLY upon about 12 seconds examination.

Easiest entries are:

1. The extremely diverse morals, frameworks, ethics, and actions different people draw from same source materials.

2. The multitude of ethical frameworks and moral people without religious roots


Even though a direct competitor with DBC I just wanted to say: solid team and leadership; we respect everyone there, especially in pioneering the market in the early years.

It was in DBC's NYC campus that I did my first LGBT advocacy event. Still remember the passion of the students and instructors two years later.

I know I speak for everyone here when I say I’m sorry to see a leader and organization leave the community.

- Team Thinkful darrell@thinkful.com


Anyplace and bite-sized learning, even before personalizing it to a commute or using other data, seems totally green field. Most corporate training is just videos. Pretty exciting.


Hi Mohamed – what bootcamp are you joining?


Hi Darrell,

I am joining The Firehose Project on Sept. 21st, 2015.


Chris's point seems basically undisputable: tons of engineering talent but not enough vision to gain escape velocity from the massive gravitational pull of Google's wide-ranging needs across all its products.

Remember before you could be signed in with multiple accounts across all google services? Those were the (sucky) days.

I wish G+ were either exclusively focused on utilities (personalized search across services, unified privacy permissions, etc) OR useful/fun social features that could be developed outside the borg's massive scale expectations. Trying to do both seems impossible.


3 months from beginner to job ready ready is, basically, bullshit. There are people who do it, but they're the exception. The jobs they're getting typically rely on their using other skill sets on day one so they can continue learning software engineering for months in order to gain a useful level of proficiency.

This doesn't make the "3 month" claim worthless, but it does make it hard to fit into a sound bite.

I should know: I'm the co-founder and CEO of the Thinkful, Codecademy's other online partner in ReskillUSA.

Our company has hired many of our own students and helped hundreds of others successfully make the transition to truly job-ready engineer.

I've also spent the last decade as a professional software engineer, and another five years before that writing software. I'm 33 years old. After coding for half my life I feel I know less than half the craft.


Why do you think he chose to come out now?


Steal attention from Microsoft Band? :-)


And make the "Apple" brand away from PRISM, NSA and others not to mention that they want to keep the "cool" and "open" words attached to the "Apple" brand as well.

Of course with all due respect to Tim Cook which opened for the first time and will probably inspire other people.

But to me everything is connected.

EDIT: For those who downvoted please explain what's wrong in this comment.


We should start our own club, I feel your pain ... ;-)


Perhaps because everyone who cares/matters already knew, there isn't really a point in denying or hiding it anymore.

A month or two ago some journalist accidentally said it on air if I remember correctly.


Yes, it was a rather dramatic moment on CNBC, with a columnist discussing the fact that no CEO of a major company was willing to be mentioned as gay:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnbc-panel-goes-awkwardly-silent-...


Yep on CNBC i believe( I hate that channel,it's just ridiculous). What was stupid is that one journalist said T.Cook was gay,others insisted he wasnt.Like "noooooooooooo he's not!" multiple times.

That sums up the whole NBC network for me.

Frankly,nobody cared about Jobs sexual life,and he did a good job at shielding his family from the media frenzy.


I'm pretty sure the reporter said that Tim Cook was open about being guy, which led to everyone reminding him that he isn't, in fact, open about it.


> Frankly, nobody cared about Jobs sexual life

Uh, yeah they did. The Lisa Brennan-Jobs paternity thing was a serious black eye for Steve.

https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+paternity


It seems like a legit question, why down voted?


because it's explained in the article...


So the portrait painted by the article and it contents should always be taken at face value, without any nuances or context?Wouldn't that make the reader uncritical or even naive?


honestly I could care less. I really just don't care who is gay or not. I really don't give one whit to those who think its some special event when they do.

your personal life, keep it personal, its no one's business and it certainly is not something to exploit for personal gain or to guilt another with


You either didn't read the article or simply failed to understand from the article why he did it. He's not trying to exploit anything for himself or his company but instead of the betterment of minorities.


Swift was designed for beginners and in our experience it delivers. We (http://www.thinkful.com/) recommend Swift for beginners and the students in our Swift classes the last few months agree!


Announcing a $500/month price tag _after_ an email signup dripping with trackers is not so inspiring. Hopefully you teach better design practices in your lessons?


Hm. On the homepage the price is listed as part of the main description of the course. You're not the first to make this point – there's definitely something to it. We'll have to rethink appropriately. Surprises like this in funnels are not a winning strategy.


There is no $500/month price tag. The course is completely free.


OP's site is free. I was answering to the ad for the thinkful.com site posted above - which asks $500/m.


Thinkful based in NYC: We're looking for software engineers interested in helping us build the best online education platform, in AngularJS + Python / Flask.

http://www.thinkful.com/

For engineering, check out the full job listing here: https://jobs.lever.co/thinkful/8a737595-fb6a-407d-9723-04dc6...

We're also hiring a leader in design and UX: https://jobs.lever.co/thinkful/e1dd4a11-0f50-4607-9b9e-8e7da...

Thinkful has the industry's best experts across the US who mentor students 1:1 as they go through our curriculum. We've been growing revenue 25% each month since founding at the beginning of 2013.

Our team today is 18 (9 engineers) and growing to 35 in 2014. We took one round of seed funding from Peter Thiel, RRE, Quotidian Ventures in early 2013.

Contact me directly to talk: darrell@thinkful.com

For all our other positions check out: https://jobs.lever.co/thinkful


Our mentors & curriculum developers went bananas when they heard about Swift – so we announced the first course teaching Swift: https://www.thinkful.com/a/dlp/learn-blue/base/IOS-002


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