Move to New York. I was smoking on my fire escape, and saw a dude break a car window and steal a shopping bag out of the back seat. I called the police, they got the description from me over the phone, and the cops showed up in a car in around 90 seconds. They then asked me to get in the car and we drove around looking for the guy, found him, and they arrested him, and returned the car owners stuff. The whole process took less than 10 minutes.

Is anybody else slightly disturbed by all of the 'attaboy!' comments here on a post exposing unscrupulous and probably illegal business tactics?

Think the response here would be the same if it was MicroSoft or the RIAA caught in something like this and not a YC alum?

Anyway, great investigation and great analysis here, I think.

Wow. The entire premise of the article aside, for me the idea that medical treatments can be made with physics and not medicine was an incredible, incredible revelation.

This man (not a doctor!) has invented a method to neutralize sperm in a way that would never have occurred to me. He uses the most basic principles of physics (magnetic charge) to neutralize sperm!

Realizing that sperm is negatively charging, he simply coats a short section of the inside of the vas (tiny tube going from testes to the penis, located in the scrotum) with a positively-charged polymer. As sperm travels in this coated tube, the ionic attraction causes damage on a cellular level in the sperm, the pull effect effectively destroying the sperm "tail" and preventing it from fertilizing a female but without hormonal/medical methods!

For me, as an engineer, this was a true revelation.

There's something very very wrong with the city of Oakland. I lived there for one year, before moving to SF and while everybody told me I should constantly be watching my back, I mostly ignored it and was fine. But after I moved to SF, I found myself in Oakland for a party and sure enough, with a couple friends, I got myself mugged at gunpoint by three scary-looking local gangsters.

The scary part, though, is the cops' handling of the situation. Luckily for me, I was quick enough to react and hide away my most important item, my iPhone 4. As soon as they were gone (within 30s) I called the cops, and soon thereafter we had 5 squad cars show up. They interrogated us and made us write statements, but would not send a car after the suspects, who had fled in a direction we had indicated to them. After telling us there's no chance they'd recover our stolen stuff, they took off. We asked for a ride back to the bart station, to the police station, anywhere (it was night in a shady part of Oakland. We had nothing… no money for a cab, and we sure as hell didn't want to walk alone around Oakland.) They just refused, saying they had "other shit to do" and left.

The fact that I got mugged at gunpoint in Oakland comes as no surprise to me—I shouldn't have been there in the first place. However, the police's blatant incompetence came as a terrifying shock.

I'm the GitHub employee that fixed the bug. I usually try not to get involved with stuff like this but I feel like I'm in a unique situation to correct the record here.

"They purposefully allow this glaringly obvious mechanism for insulting and annoying their members and are actually involved in the joke."

I've never heard of the joke. I've never heard of anyone at GitHub being involved in one of these jokes.

There has been one case that I'm aware of where someone mass added people to a repository in order to fill up activity feeds. That person was banned. It's an issue we'd like to address more generally.

"Until I broke their server they were all laughing at my 'testing' then they were pissed when they had to fix the bug I found."

I fixed the bug without being aware of any of this. I check our exception monitor every day. It was there. It was obvious. I fixed it.

It was a simple bug triggered by branch names that look like commit SHA1s. Here's the commit:

https://gist.github.com/88bc774d0c97e6c955c0

It affected only branch list pages with branch names matching [0-9a-f]{40}.

"If you don't believe me, look at the HackerNewsTips twitter account, which I know is astroturfed by a github employee."

That is not a GitHub employee. We don't hire anyone that witty as a rule.