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Penn and Teller's Lab Scam [video] (1990)
- cs702 3y agoAwesome. Thank you for sharing this. I love the fact that Penn & Teller, along with Rob Pike & Dennis Ritchie (!), knew that Arno Penzias (!!) would choose to watch clips of Penn & Teller over clips of some soap opera star and some daytime show host. At all times, Penzo thought he had made a choice, but he actually hadn't!
- irrational 3y agoIf I had to make this choice in front of another person, I’d always choose the one that came with higher social standing than whatever I really wanted to watch. In other words, I think he did make a choice, but it wasn’t between what he wanted to watch and didn’t want to watch, but between what would look better in front of another person and what wouldn’t.
- sumtechguy 3y agoIn magic if there really is a free choice then the choice does not mater and something is marked/tagged in some way. Also many times there is a forced choice but it looks fair.
- bombcar 3y agoWhat gets really fun is when you have a magician who's good enough that which trick you're going to see depends on your choice. It's a free choice, but each option is a force.
- RationalDino 3y agoA fun version of the forced choice is that your patter makes it come out the same. "By your choice this animal is doomed!" versus "By your choice this animal is spared!" The person still feels that they made a choice, even though they didn't..
- dfxm12 3y agoDid they know what he would pick, or did they know they could have feigned some computer error in case Arno made the wrong choice and made it seem like he picked Penn & Teller straight away in post? The "magician's choice" wasn't a psychological trick like what you're suggesting. Penn & Teller were the only real people of the choices given.
- irrational 3y agoWhat would have been a better test of choice would be between Penn and Teller and a science show (I'm not sure what was on TV back then, maybe Carl Sagan and an episode of Cosmos?)
- jbombadil 3y agoIn highschool, some friends and I came up with a prank that I'm still amazed how simple, yet hilarious it was. We wrote a small piece of software. Bare in mind that this was early 2000s and all we knew was some rudimentary Turbo Pascal 7. We would sit in front of the keyboard and have the pranked person next to us. We would tell them to ask a question to the program. So we would run the program and the first prompt would have you type something along the lines of: "oh magic program, please answer this question for us". The program would say "Ask away...". You would type your question, hit enter and oh and behold! a reasonable answer to your question. Needless to say, when we were "typing" the "oh magic program" quote, we were actually typing the answer to the question, but had rigged the output so that no matter what character we typed, it would always be that string. Thus the program "knew" the answer. Funny thing is, this worked because of it's timing. This was an era where a lot of kids had grown up with a computer around the house, but many hadn't (third world country). So while it wasn't uncommon that some of us could type quickly and without looking at the keyboard, it wasn't the norm either. I'm sure kids nowadays would immediately catch up to the trick in no time. A handful of our classmates did.
- Waterluvian 3y agoThat’s hilarious and clever.
- mosselman 3y agoThanks for this funny memory! I can instantly imagine it working very well.
- mbork_pl 3y agoThis is brilliant! I'm stealing it, and my only problem now is that I have no idea who to prank with this...
- habitue 3y agoAlso LLMs have kind of made this prank moot, lol
- 3y ago
- jetrink 3y agoAccording to the copyright at the end, this is from 1990. (Speaking of pranks, I was completely fooled by the poster's username and thought that was a broken timestamp.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- noman-land 3y agoIt's funny because if you live west of UTC, broken timestamps always say December 31, 1969 because of the timezone offset.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI think that happens for anyone in UTC and to the west, because of leap seconds. I've seen 1969 more often, and I'm in a timezone synced with UTC. (as well as having that as the timezone on all my servers)
- hn92726819 3y agoNot because of leap seconds, but because of timezones. Us eastern is UTC-4:00 and 1 Jan 1970 - 4 hours (or more) would be 31 Dec 1969
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI meant leap seconds cause it if you're exactly on UTC.
- js2 3y agoHere's Dennis Ritchie's recounting of it[1]: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/labscam.html https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/labscam.html [1]: Which it turns out I submitted to HN a long time ago[2], but neither that nor any of the re-submissions over the years have had much discussion[3]. [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404615 [3]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=labscam https://hn.algolia.com/?q=labscam
- AdmiralAsshat 3y ago> This video was digitized (2002) by Gerard Holzmann, and is available as a big (88MB: caution!) MPEG here. 88mb! It'll take my dial-up all day to download that!
- BtM909 3y agoAt least you can play that fun game while downloading, by moving your mouse exactly against the last block in the progress bar and be delighted when a new progress block appears....
- marginalia_nu 3y agoI think the name is alluding to ABSCAM? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscam
- serverlessmom 3y agoCame here to say the same. It is funny that a term that felt so universal is forgotten today. Probably only memorable now due to the movie 'American Hustle'
- pests 3y agoHuh, TIL.
- jeron 3y agoAnyone else see this post as posted on Unix start time?
- noman-land 3y agoIt was posted by Unix start time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- EMM_386 3y agoVery clever given the computer capabilities of the time. I am a fan of Penn and Teller. Despite not being into magic in any way, and not someone who generally cares about what's on TV, I watch their current show when I can. They are about as "real deal" as you can get, despite the schtick. Street magicians from the start to their own theatre in Vegas, and still consistent and creative. At this point it is likely they don't do it because they have to, they do it because they still want to. With the new show being trying to have them unravel someone's trick, with the odds stacked greatly against the magician, it's pretty obvious they've almost "seen it all". It also gave me a glimpse on how secretive the magician community is. Since people earn a living selling required gimmicks or instructions on how to perform specific tricks, it is completely unacceptable to discuss how things are done. For the really puzzling ones on the show, if you go online to try to find the answers, you'll often find others asking the same thing, and the accompanying wall of silence. Even more so on forums dedicated specifically to magicians. You're likely to find a large discussion, usually with links to the official store for the trick, and zero answers. To do that would be breaking the magician's code, and apparently, you don't break the code.
- justinsaccount 3y agoVery relevant to your last paragraph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8osRaFTtgHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8osRaFTtgHo
- gspencley 3y ago> It also gave me a glimpse on how secretive the magician community is. My wife and I are performing magicians. The topic of "exposure" can get downright stupid. Something you hinted at is intellectual property rights. Like you said, a lot of magicians market their inventions. And so if a "peer" of theirs were to explain the method to someone who didn't purchase it then it would be viewed as a dick move since it is affecting the livelihood of a fellow performer. For what it is worth, this is a position that I agree with. I don't market or publish my work but if I did I would be seriously pissed off from an intellectual property point of view if other people were giving it away for free and undercutting my ability to sell a "license" to perform my artistic creation. Where it gets stupid is when it comes to stuff that anyone can find in a book on Amazon or in a kid's magic kit. This is a mentality that I just cannot wrap my head around. Knowing what a thumb tip is, or how it can be used, has not ruined magic for people ... if it did, no one would pay to see a show. You go see a show to be entertained and surprised. The reason we don't "reveal" is purely artistic. When you go a see a movie, you go in willingly suspending your disbelief. But magic is more of an intellectual challenge. The entire point is to cause a jaw-dropping "that can't be possible" moment. To achieve that you go in kind of wanting to have your disbelief suspended for you. A revelation in the moment destroys that[1]. But life is way too short for the average person to give the slightest crap about how something works when they go home and have to worry about getting up in the morning to go to work or getting their kids from the babysitter. And the genuinely curious are often the future generation of magicians. So yeah, the magic community can be utterly illogical when it comes to this. [1] - Unless it doesn't. To bring this back to Penn & Teller, something Penn once said is (paraphrasing) "A trick that has a method that is more interesting than the effect is not a good trick." P&T do more than one routine where they show the effect and then the method. They do this because, artistically, these are cases where knowing the method makes it even more spectacular and amazing because the method itself is genuinely interesting. Their cups & balls routine is probably the most famous example.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoMy favorite penn and teller trick of all time is this one, which is kind of an anti-trick: https://youtu.be/3m8DsQisjXQ?si=4x0Dhrf_2Byg_Bzh&t=958 https://youtu.be/3m8DsQisjXQ?si=4x0Dhrf_2Byg_Bzh&t=958 (16 minutes in). It breaks a fundamental rule about magic tricks that you probably never even realized was a rule until they fade to black.
- BtM909 3y agoAnd that rule is?
- empath-nirvana 3y ago"Don't kill your volunteers"? edit: a more serious answer is that this is an escape trick, and generally when you do an escape trick: 1) The magician is doing the escaping 2) You _show the escape_ In this case, the volunteer is basically just shoved into the water and (presumably) drowns. The audience is left to _infer_ that there was an escape, if they choose to, or I guess they could infer that Penn and Teller are cold blooded murderers and got away with it. Either inference would be quite the good trick.
- kadoban 3y agoI'm not OP, but there's a few rules being broken there that I can think of: - At the end of the trick, there's a reveal that wraps things up. In the case of escapes, it would be showing the magician safe and not actually drowned or eaten by sharks, etc. - The "volunteer" is just there to be a surrogate for the audience, to verify some things, they're not _really_ involved in the trick - You must hide that the volunteer is a plant when they are (they're not always). They couldn't do a lot of that stuff to some random person, so this rule is broken. - The magician would generally not talk about eg how Houdini would have done that trick (even if I think they're intentionally mis-stating how Houdini would have done it, for most tricks there'd be absolutely no reason to use picks, you'd use a key or a faked lock or a faked locking mechanism, because why not). It's an anti-trick because they're doing everything the wrong way around. The volunteer is the one that does the dangerous part, the magician isn't doing anything, the volunteer is obviously not a volunteer, the "trick" doesn't actually visibly show anything magical happening (visually, you just watched a murder essentially, no escape ... you only know it's an escape because they _probably_ didn't really just murder somebody for a show), and they "told" you how the trick was being done. All against the basic rules of magic. Perfect for Penn and Teller, they love playing meta games and having fun with the rules of magic.
- YoumuChan 3y agoIt reminds me of the "Hello Computer" scene from IT Crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyV0IVItlM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyV0IVItlM4
- Jun8 3y agoThis is hilarious! I saw that "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" is included in the initial training phrases, pure genius! Do people still remember this meme? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Rather#%22Kenneth,_what_is_the_frequency?%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Rather#%22Kenneth,_what_is...)
- partiallypro 3y agoI just saw Penn and Teller 2 weeks ago; it was a great show. They really try to involve guests and specifically children in the act. They also seem like pretty good people. Only downside is the Casino/Hotel they are in is run down at this point relative to the rest of Vegas, and the walk from the strip is questionable...Vegas isn't a very good walkable city, even on the strip, IMO.
- bentcorner 3y agoI did something similar (without their reveal) to my mom back in the 90's. Using the parrot program that shipped with my Sound Blaster Pro sound card, I rubber-banded a microphone to the earpiece of a telephone. I asked my mom to come in and talk to the computer, and my friend on the telephone would respond, and the parrot program would repeat what he said out of the computer speakers. It wasn't 100% perfect but for a few moments my mom was amazed at what our computer could do. A few years later I also pulled a similar prank on my uncle, who bought a new CD player. He asked me and my cousin to set it up and we found a remote in the box. We told him it was voice activated and we used the remote while he asked it to play/pause/skip. Again for a few moments he thought it was the coolest thing ever until our disappointing reveal. I think this goes to show that people have always wanted to talk to computers, and 30 years later we're still trying to get it right.
- saghm 3y ago> A few years later I also pulled a similar prank on my uncle, who bought a new CD player. He asked me and my cousin to set it up and we found a remote in the box. We told him it was voice activated and we used the remote while he asked it to play/pause/skip. Again for a few moments he thought it was the coolest thing ever until our disappointing reveal. When I first got a Pixel phone with the fingerprint sensor on the back, I told my father that the phone responded to voice commands to unlock, but it only would listen to my voice. I demonstrated by telling it "unlock" (and pressing the sensor on the back) and then locked it and handed it to him to try to unlock it, and it was amusing to watch him say "unlock!" in amazement a few times before I showed him how it actually worked. Ironically, a couple years later, I ended up getting a Google Home smart speaker and showed him it, and he was reluctant to use voice commands to try it out at first (possibly due to being wary of being tricked again). He ended up having fun seeing how it would respond to silly phrasings of questions though; I think his favorite was when he told it "Play that funky music, white cylinder!" and it obediently started playing "Play That Funky Music" by Wild Cherry.
- coding123 3y agoThe scam part was the program seemed to be "scanning" and playing back bits from Letterman, when in reality they were just broadcasting funny stuff live as the joke/scam. What's crazy is that in a few years or even a year from now, it might be conceivable to have a program that you talk to, like you're talking to Penn and Teller, but then have it respond with Jokes that they would say - and video that matches. I guess the only part of that we won't be able to replicate, for a while, is Penn and Teller walking into your room and shaking your hand.
- CSMastermind 3y agoYeah that was what I was thinking as I was watching, it's pretty wild that we've advanced to the point where a working version of their fantasy technology would seem completely normal if a little cutting edge.
- ranting-moth 3y agoPeople might not be interested in P&T (I am though!) but this video involves Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie, which is highly relevant to the HN crowd.
- mirrorlake 3y agoWhen I was first learning Go last year, Penn mentioned on his podcast that he had a friend Rob who worked at Google. I realized that he was talking about Rob Pike who helped create Go. Truly felt like a "small world" moment.
- Orlan 3y agoPenn has mentioned a few times on his podcast that him and Rob Pike are good friends from way back, and has shared several anecdotes. One I remember and found funny was that one time Penn saw Rob talking to someone, and Rob asked for their phone number. From Penn’s vantage point he sees Rob pick a pen and paper and mimics writing the phone number, but doesn’t write anything at all. When he questions Rob about it he says something to the effect of “Oh, I can just memorize a phone number without a problem, but if I say that out loud they’ll think I’m blowing them off or I’m not really interested in the number, so it’s easier to just fake write it”.
- npilk 3y agoA friend fooled me in the ~late 2000s by pretending to have a program installed that could recognize hand gestures to control the screen's UI. So if you moved your hand in the air in front of the webcam, the mouse would follow it around (clunkily), and you could squeeze your hand into a fist to click. It was slow, but mindblowing given the capabilities of the time. I couldn't quite believe it was real, but also couldn't figure out how it was working. As it turned out, their cell phone had a feature where they could use the control pad to control the mouse on a computer. They were holding it under the table and using it to mirror the hand's movements. They kept 3 or 4 of us going for about 15 minutes before they finally showed us the secret!
- MarcoZavala 3y ago[dead]
- jacquesm 3y agoOn the SGI Indy there was a game called Eye Catcher that did that IRL much earlier than the late 2000's, that was more like the mid 90's.
- kmoser 3y agoIn the early 1980s, when people had just begun to hear about laser printers and they were huge and expensive, I fooled my classmates into thinking I owned one by Xeroxing some images from a magazine onto pin-fed printer paper. Never mind that laser printers don't use pin-fed paper: the fact that it was obviously printer paper of some sort, and yet contained a high-resolution image that was evidently produced by something laser-like, blew my friends' minds.
- verisimi 3y agoOne might consider magic tricks, why they are accepted by the audience, and conspiracies in the same breath, I think. Eg: How is it possible that the woman appears to be sawn in half? How is it possible that most people believed jfk was shot by a lone gunman from great distance? The same principles apply.
- Hyzer 3y agoIf I'm reading your comment correctly, you've got it backwards. Most people (around 60% in 2017, down from 80% in the 2000s) believe in a JFK assassination conspiracy, and it's never been a majority believing that Oswald acted alone. So the question is: how is it that most people believe in a conspiracy, when the evidence overwhelmingly points towards Oswald's sole guilt? The answer: by misdirection and lying about the evidence (compounded over decades). Oswald didn't shoot from a "great distance", it was 59 yards and 88 yards for each shot, whereas he had to shoot at distances of 200 to 500 yards when he qualified as a sharpshooter in the Marines. https://news.gallup.com/poll/165893/majority-believe-jfk-killed-conspiracy.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/165893/majority-believe-jfk-kil...
- jacquesm 3y agoOh, that's absolutely priceless, thank you for posting this. Those two... > `What do you do with rats and cockroaches?' > `That's the way we have sex.'
- THOMBERRG090 3y agoDo not be deceived into believing that you can't recover your loss, those information are planted online by the perpetrators of these scams. If you take the right steps you can get back your loss. I can't fit my story into one comment or post but if i had not filed a complaint on deftrecoup (.) c o m, i would have lost a lot of money. You could also file an email complaint to support @ deftrecoup . c om