Ask HN: What do you know almost nobody else does?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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)

- 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)

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

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.

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

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.

This questions seems a little too ask-redditty imo

I've seen fractals that nobody has seen.

(Not hard to do with fractals :D)

Reversibility is the key to further understanding in physics.

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

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

<troll>myself</troll>

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

Lol, nice try.

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

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