
Ask HN: What do you know almost nobody else does? - lainon
Do you have a niche interest in which you have knowledge almost nobody else does?<p>Some secret insider information concerning whatever?
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LeoPanthera
I 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
Did you publish your findings somewhere?

~~~
LeoPanthera
I started making YouTube videos of them, but gave up pretty fast after
realizing the enormity of the project!

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ojciecczas
In 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
Ok, this is legit. Blew my mind.

~~~
ojciecczas
I've discovered it in like 1998, but I waited for a good moment to reveal it
:)

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silves89
Bicarbonate 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
Sodium 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
> short-term doping... Wait, what?

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ranguna
Is 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.

~~~
tmaly
I still enjoy these types of questions.

I read HN more than other sites, and I have learned quite a few things over
the years from these types of open ended discussions.

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saagarjha
My 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
Thanks! I remember discovering this in my college graphics class and showing
everyone. We thought Apple were so cool :D

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arthurcolle
Economics 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.

~~~
starpilot
So there was a whole book about this, Power Elite by C.W. Mills. I suspect
quite a few people know this.

~~~
arthurcolle
I 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
again, 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.

------
xem
\- 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)

------
regera
\- Brushing your teeth during a long ultra-endurance event (100 miles or
longer) can make you feel fresh and energetic.

------
dave333
QM 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.

------
jacknews
OK 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
"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?

------
akvadrako
We'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.

------
hckr_news
This questions seems a little too ask-redditty imo

------
macawfish
I've seen fractals that nobody has seen.

(Not hard to do with fractals :D)

------
danbmil99
Reversibility is the key to further understanding in physics.

~~~
transfire
Care to explain?

~~~
danbmil99
The 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.

------
transfire
Bone meal can be applied topically to your teeth to help soothe aches.

------
smitty1e
I know where there is a U.S.-made 18" naval gun projectile.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Whoa. Did the US ever have a naval gun capable of firing that? If so, on what?
Or was it just experimental?

~~~
detaro
just in testing. E.g. _Iowa_ class originally was planned to maybe have 18"
guns.

~~~
smitty1e
Nevertheless, it persists there on the firing line in Dahlgren, VA.

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ochronus
<troll>myself</troll>

------
erqerqewtqe
how loud my roommates can be when i'm trying to fall asleep

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villgax
Lol, nice try.

------
arthurcolle
If you are ugly, then your life will be harder. The converse is also true.

~~~
CompanionCuuube
If 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
We should clone attractive people to enhance the population genetics present
on the planet right now.

