5 ms·
Ask HN: What do you know almost nobody else does?
Do you have a niche interest in which you have knowledge almost nobody else does?
Some secret insider information concerning whatever?
- villgax 6y agoLol, nice try.
- erqerqewtqe 6y agohow loud my roommates can be when i'm trying to fall asleep
- danbmil99 6y agoReversibility is the key to further understanding in physics.
- transfire 6y agoCare to explain?
- danbmil99 6y agoThe laws of physics are time-symmetrical. This is true for both classical dynamics and quantum mechanics. Various attempts have been made over the decades to try to come up with a deeper understanding. Examples include String Theory, Loop quantum gravity, and computational models such as those espoused by Stephen Wolfram. What they all seem to lack however is a recognition of the intrinsic reversibility of the universe we live in. In my opinion, the most promising research in this realm is actually around Quantum computation. By necessity, it accepts the reversibility at the heart of things, otherwise you couldn't have the sorts of logic gates you need to do Quantum computation. By way of an entrance into this rabbit hole, look up the Ffredkin gate.
- arthurcolle 6y agoshhh don't tell them
- transfire 6y agoBone meal can be applied topically to your teeth to help soothe aches.
- arthurcolle 6y agoEconomics and related industrial, business, and commercial activities are designed to systematically control and subjugate individuals by imposing a way and manner of thinking that effectively short-circuits individual thought and responsibility - one feels obligated to deliver arbitrary end-goals because of a misplaced sense of "responsibility" despite having limited (in some cases, zero) real/effective ownership in the created output, while still feeling the brunt of "production support" and sometimes even the product decisions in and of themselves. In spite of this, the owners of capital still reap all the reward, in spite of their distance from the actual decision making that actually shapes and molds the end-result.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- starpilot 6y agoSo there was a whole book about this, Power Elite by C.W. Mills. I suspect quite a few people know this.
- arthurcolle 6y agoI think capitalism can work but we don't have pure capitalism - corporatocratic bailouts have been normalized since the 1990s, and as a result, all systemically important losses are socialized, while the gains are always split across a handful of criminals that exploit a system they partially mold to their own liking in order to propagate the toxicity that enables them to further their own interests. I predict that the Federal Reserve will gain new powers within the next quarter that will enable them to indefinitely prop up equity markets through large-scale asset purchases in the equity markets through some novel facility (I'm sure it'll have some super cool new vernacular as well) that changes all the rules and allows for unilateral action without any covenants - awesome! For any speculators out there - just buy calls, nothing can go down anymore. Easiest outlook EVER.
- KaiserPro 6y agoagain, this isn't new, Just look at the collapse of the east india company. basically a few people treated it as a way to live like a king, and it collapsed. The state stepped in and took it over, because it was too big to fail.
- arthurcolle 6y agoIf you are ugly, then your life will be harder. The converse is also true.
- CompanionCuuube 6y agoIf your life is hard, you will be uglier? Or did you mean the inverse "If you are not ugly, your life will not be harder"?
- arthurcolle 6y agoWe should clone attractive people to enhance the population genetics present on the planet right now.
- ranguna 6y agoIs this quora now? I'd prefer if we don't have this kind of question here. How can anyone even know that they are the only people that know a piece of information, it's not like they're going around asking people if they know it or not.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoI believe I have played for at least a few minutes every single game ever commercially released for the BBC Micro, a British 8-bit home computer. I got slightly obsessed with playing all of them, a few years ago. About 10-20% of them are pretty good. A small percentage are genuinely shockingly good, for such an old system. The vast majority are pretty awful, with many of them being horrible BBC BASIC “conversions” of at the time current popular arcade games, with names and icons changed to avoid copyright problems. I don’t feel particularly enlightened by my short-lived obsession.
- LaundroMat 6y agoDid you publish your findings somewhere?
- LeoPanthera 6y agoI started making YouTube videos of them, but gave up pretty fast after realizing the enormity of the project!
- danielrpa 6y agoWould you be able to share your Top 10?
- LeoPanthera 6y agoDifficult question, I think. The "famous" ones are indeed very good - Elite, Exile. SimCity works amazingly well considering it's running on a 6502 with less than 32K of RAM. Chuckie Egg is famous in the UK but I found it to be overrated. Plan B and Starship Command take good advantage of the high-res 1-bit screen modes and look great. Thrust has amazingly realistic feeling physics, very satisfying to play. Revs is a very dry simulation of car racing, but well produced if that's your thing. Firetrack has probably the smoothest vertical scolling on the system, which until that game came out was thought to be impossible. Those are the ones I can think of right now!
- macawfish 6y agoI've seen fractals that nobody has seen. (Not hard to do with fractals :D)
- regera 6y ago- Brushing your teeth during a long ultra-endurance event (100 miles or longer) can make you feel fresh and energetic.
- ojciecczas 6y agoIn any windows system this happens: - show your desktop - move your mouse over an icon - keep pressing 'home' on your keyboard (home key brings the focus to top left icon) and then left mouse button (changes the focus to the icon you're over) - do it faster and faster (home, lmb, home, lmb, ...), focus will jump between top icon and the icon under the mouse pointer - when you reach the double-click speed, the icon will be launched but it will not be the icon under the mouse pointer, but the top left corner icon.
- starpilot 6y agoOk, this is legit. Blew my mind.
- ojciecczas 6y agoI've discovered it in like 1998, but I waited for a good moment to reveal it :)
- BlindHedgehog 6y agoKeyboard driver's usually more responsive. Hence why this makes sense.
- cK9RCDgXxXghWT 6y agoI found a crazy exploitable logical bug in a network app running on MANY systems, can't sell it or expose it because legal/personal reasons. Not using it or anything.
- taw3taw35344 6y agoMasturbation destroys the dopamine system. There's actually a lot of studies about this in animal models, but the topic is insanely taboo. Shills come out in minutes to downplay it. I can reliably trigger rls by doing so. And it's the major player in every dopamine-related illness like parkinson and adhd.
- saagarjha 6y agoMy private key :) On a more serious note, and not revealing anything that I really shouldn’t be telling people: I’m sure many people know that there used to be a feature on macOS where you could hold down the shift key while minimizing windows (among other things) and it would slow down the animation comically. This feature seems like it was removed a couple of years ago, but it wasn’t: I was poking around the Dock binary one day and discovered that it’s still secretly there, hidden behind a preference key. You can reenable it with $ defaults write com.apple.dock slow-motion-allowed -bool YES && killall Dock Enjoy.
- jamespetercook 6y agoThanks! I remember discovering this in my college graphics class and showing everyone. We thought Apple were so cool :D
- silves89 6y agoBicarbonate of soda works as a deodorant. I have a small pot by my bathroom sink. Dab in two damp fingers, under the arms, no smell. It's more effective than any deodorant I've tried, doesn't give me an allergic reaction, is better for the environment, and is very cheap.
- bestouff 6y agoSodium bicarbonate is a magic substance which has so many uses, it almost looks like it's a cheat in the matrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_bicarbonate#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_bicarbonate#Uses From the list: - cooking (leavenant, baking powder, etc.) - fungicide and pest control - pH increase - pyrotechnics - disinfectant - fire extinguisher - medical (addon for laxatives, antidepressant, anesthetics, anti-tear gas) - hygiene (addon for toothpaste, mouthwash) - short-term doping - cleaning agent ... and now deodorant !
- zigzaggy 6y ago> short-term doping... Wait, what?
- thiht 6y agoIt can be irritating though. I tried it and stopped because of this. Also it doesn't last as long as an alcohol or aluminum salt based deodorant. It's very worth trying though, if it works fine for you it's very advantageous!
- silves89 6y agoI actually found it a bit rough at first but it seems OK now. That took maybe four weeks. But perhaps I was motivated to persevere because many regular deodorants give me a painful rash. It might not be quite as effective as commercially sold deodorants. Obviously I'm only one data point but if I use it once a day I'm odor free for at least 24 hours.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ochronus 6y ago<troll>myself</troll>
- akvadrako 6y agoWe're all immortal from our own perspective because we're living in a multiverse. Although the knowledge to see this is all out there, I'm not aware of anyone else alive who says it's true.
- smitty1e 6y agoI know where there is a U.S.-made 18" naval gun projectile.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoWhoa. Did the US ever have a naval gun capable of firing that? If so, on what? Or was it just experimental?
- jacknews 6y agoOK I'll risk it by saying things I think I know about quantum mechanics that have proved useful in dispelling/illuminating/clarifying popular accounts, that lots of people probably don't get. Bear in mind that someone quite famous and rather clever once said "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics", and I think he surely wasn't joking! - There's no such thing as an independent 'observation'. To observe quantum particles you must interact with them. 'You' might be just a particle. - All the things you've interacted with look different to the things you haven't. - Noone really understands quantum mechanics
- JohnDeHope 6y ago"There's no such thing as an independent 'observation'." It's not as if you can see macro objects without bouncing photons off them, either. Does this point have to do with QM specifically? At large enough scales the amount of interaction needed to observe something is incidental to the thing itself. At small enough QM scales the interaction needed for observation is non-trivial. But is this a difference of kind, or just a difference of quantity?
- dave333 6y agoIt's because QM math is WRONG :-) See brilliantlightpower.com
- hckr_news 6y agoThis questions seems a little too ask-redditty imo
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dave333 6y agoQM math is bunk! Randall Mills of brilliantlightpower.com has figured out a classical model of the atom that works far better than the Schroedinger electron is everywhere at once model. Theory has many astonishing consequences - oscillating universe, unlimited energy (working prototypes exist) from atomic hydrogen transition to smaller hydrinos, dark matter is hydrogen in form of hydrinos, etc. Wikipedia says it is nonsense, but Wikipedia is policed by uber skeptics that won't even allow pro-hydrino rebuttal to be added to the page so is not an unbiased source. Proof is in the experimental videos and accompanying verification paper by independent scientists.
- xem 6y ago- CSS3D, a fun and easy way to make 3D scenes / games in the browser without WebGL. To my knowledge, we are about 5 people to use it (https://xem.github.io/articles/css3dgames.html https://xem.github.io/articles/css3dgames.html) - JS code-golfing... I'm not alone but we're a small community, who enjoy making JS programs / art / games with the smallest possible amount of code (js1k.com, js13kgames.com, dwitter.net, ...) - Unicode, its quirks, its updates (not only emoji), its encodings and its predecessors charsets - Regexes (everyone hates them but I enjoy using them) - Browsers hacks and polyfills (remember IE6? Firefox 3? Chrome 1? With enough effort, you could make them do almost everything that modern browsers can do today. My job has been to do exactly that for many years, and it was actually pretty fun)