Why would that stop it being voted up? Things don't stop being interesting just because they are illegal.

Also, he advocates stealing it or buying it.

The stuff you need to know to hack osx on your own isn't something you can read on a forum randomly. Buying -> hacking isn't an option for many people.

Where do you find that knowledge?

If you actually want to do the hacking on your own: Learn x86 or x86_64 (be prepared for Snow Leopard) asm in depth for the kernel. Lots of C/IOKit knowledge for writing your own kext's (drivers for osx). Examine memory dumps and to figure out what gets loaded when (not to mention how. There's a few cryptographically signed things that had to be dumped; Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext is a good example). Look at tons of device and vendor id's and find the corresponding plists within apple-provided kext's. Find where and what to modify in them.

Talk to people on IRC (there's some very talented people around there still, and even more talented folks that have quit the scene already). If you can, find old forum posts from osx86project - or concretesurf/win2osx (I'm talking stuff 2.5-3 years old, before they were big and worth indexing)

In short: Explore the system at as low of a level as possible. Don't leave a stone unturned.

If you just want to copy others work, you can stick with the "Talk to people on IRC.." part and you should manage, assuming you have an idea of what you're doing.

All that being said, I'd recommending spending the time working on something more worthwhile.

Oh no... not... software piracy!

Also, stealing/not-stealing blah blah blah.

Consider HN is a hacker + entrepreneurial site you could see why people would not welcome Reddit/Digg support for piracy.

Being a hacker and a sometime entrepreneur doesn't mean that I have to think copyright makes sense. These are quite orthogonal to each other, and I would lose respect for someone if I found that they'd believed copyright invalid until they wanted to make a living off of it.

...I'm unclear why you are conflating support for piracy and Digg/Reddit.

I understand the attitudes of those so grossly offended by copyright and DMCA violations. But suggesting copyright infringement doesn't automatically disqualify an article from Hacker News.

Voting up does not necessarily mean you agree with the article. It means that the subject is interesting and you would like more people to see it and share their thoughts. Apple employees read HN and now they are aware of it and can take the necessary steps if they want to stop this (maybe by hiring the guy/gal).