At 1:13 in this interview, Ahmed shows a product page for the case that he put his clock in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mW4w0Y1OXE

It's a "Vaultz Tiger Pencil Box". Here's a video review of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e40YqLF1Rs

#3 could be that the engineering teacher knows some of the other teachers and administrators are a bunch of panicky idiots and will freak out when "the brown arab kid" brings in something they don't immediately recognize.

You're assuming that it actually looked like a bomb.

It clearly did not. (There are pictures linked elsewhere in this comment thread, so you can see.) What happened is that a bunch of complete idiots thought it looked like a bomb, only because they have no idea what a bomb looks like, and they are additionally ignorant of their own ignorance.

To have a bomb you need explosives. Did this "looks like a bomb" have anything that looked like explosives? No. Therefore it did not actually look like a bomb.

I assume that you meant to google image search IED. Doing so, I see one image with an exposed PCB. I see several images with cell phones. One shows a Coke can. Are we to believe that an exposed Coke can also "looks like a bomb"? Or should we maybe believe that showing up in a Google Image search for a particular term is not sufficient to "look like" something?

The claim is that the device looked like a bomb. That he's being charged with "creating a hoax bomb" makes no difference to this. Either a hoax bomb still looks like a bomb, or we're giving control over to idiots to declare that a hoax bomb is anything that looks like their crazy and inaccurate ideas of what a bomb looks like.

Certainly IEDs can have exposed PCBs. So do hard drives. It's irrelevant.

What do explosives look like? I don't know. But I know that they look like something, and they probably don't look like electronics. So when you have a device that is a bunch of electronics and nothing else, I can pretty safely say that it does not look like a bomb, because there are no explosives.

You may want to check comment history of the account you're replying to.

Why? I don't see anything particularly remarkable there.

multiple flagged dead comments for the same kind of race trolling that you're feeding?

This comment (about a muslim conference where the speakers were saying it's never acceptable to beat your wife) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228134

Or this comment abut how SJWs love victim culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228134

Or this comment saying African Americans have an average IQ of 80: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223344

Or this flagged comment, that got a reply from dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9991230

That's quite a lot in a 45 day old account.

(Do you have "ShowDead" turned on?)

No, I don't have ShowDead turned on. I guess that enables showing flagged comments as well? That certainly would explain it.

Ah, yes, sorry. ShowDead allows you to see flagged comments.

That's OK, I learned something new. I thought it was just for shadowbanned accounts.

re: #2, the device was confiscated. it's in the hands of the police now, presumably.

Sad that you're being downvoted (and probably flagged) for expressing a reasonable opinion.

Hacker News has been a left-wing echo chamber ever since the crazies started flowing in during that period when every story on the front page was NSA related.

Now it's nearly impossible to have a reasoned discussion on any non-technical issue without SJWs using the voting system here to silence dissent.

Maybe he's being downvoted because the so-called facts he's basing his suspicion on can be easily disproven, as demonstrated by the other replies?

I don't get how this can possibly be about left vs right. Common sense hopefully doesn't depend on which side of the political spectrum you fall into.

> Maybe he's being downvoted because the so-called facts he's basing his suspicion on can be easily disproven

Which of the 3 points have been dis-proven?

Also take into concideration that -

1. The kid had a metal box containing PCBs and probably large components, all tide together around with a wire, and it was making beeping noises in class.

2. The school body and school district is almost 90% non-white, with the majority being "brown".

re. 1: His claim that it is "highly unlikely" that a home-made clock would look like a bomb needs some citation. Unless your definition of "looks like a bomb" is "anything with PCBs and wires, stuck in some kind of box", at which point I would argue that any home-made clock will look like a bomb.

re. 2: He's asking the father to provide an image of something that was confiscated by the police or school administration. Furthermore, the first video with the boy contained a fairly detailed description of the clock, and the second video even contains an image of the box (or at least a similar box).

re. 3: Well, he provided an alternative explanation for that himself.