Comment by blamazon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blamazon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I had a ratty bike in college that I never bothered to lock to the bike racks, because I had bought it very cheaply and I had insufficient money to repair it properly. Almost everything that could be broken while still remaining technically rideable, was broken.

One day - gone! I breathed a sigh of relief and went about my day. Two years pass. I'm walking to class one day on the same campus and I see a very similar looking bike on the rack. I walked up to inspect it and it was definitely the same bicycle, but entirely fixed up! All new components, nice tires, the works, with a nice lock.

I'll never know what happened in the interim but it was such a warm fuzzy feeling to think someone had cared for it and elevated it to a new level, even if it was technically the product of theft. In a ship of Theseus kind of way it wasn't even truly my bike anymore.

The whole situation has stuck in my brain a lot better than the classes I was attending....

At my old house, a renter across the street was part of a bike theft ring. Stolen bikes would come in and out, sometimes with different pieces.

I imagine your bike was stolen by someone, maybe fixed up, maybe sold as-is for cheap and then fixed up by the new possesor, who may not have known it was stolen, just cheap.

I choose to believe in an idealistic liberator of machine souls with a procrastinatory flair for bike restoration :)

That's fair. It's not theft when it was clearly abandoned and the intent is to help the machine satisfy its calling.

> In a ship of Theseus kind of way it wasn't even truly my bike anymore.

Behold, the bicycle of Theseus. If you stole it back could you say "arguably, this isn't theft!"? But I guess a judge would say you stole the parts of the bike that the new owner fitted.

This reminds me of my buddy’s RuneScape account that got hacked. Over five years later he managed to recover the account, and many of his skills has been botted (very against the rules) to max level, as well as being hugely wealthy.

That account recovery created some interesting ethical questions.

I guess if the parts were fitted and bolted to the bike you could argue that they were "aggresively gifted".

If it was left unlocked and in poor condition it’s possible someone thought it had simply been abandoned and took it to fix up themselves.

I was almost expecting this to end with "...I was so happy that day as I rode my now vastly improved bike home."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com