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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

This concept of "more interesting than explosions" confuses me greatly.

It's like trying to make somebody enthusiastic about computer science by having a long monologue about the wonders of the "rm -rf" command.

A lot of my enthusiasm came from things like Core Wars and abusing C to crash my computer by overwriting code (hooray for old systems with no memory protection), so, yeah.

It sometimes depresses me a little that on the best ways I know to 'impress' (but only barely) friends of mine with my line of work is to do a 3D css transform/transition on whatever website they're currently looking at...

Thankfully there's been the occasional friend who got really excited at the thought of being able to use their browser's devtools to change things on the page through css or javascript.

Maybe you could impress them by showing how you can use devtools to forge a tweet or bank balance or boarding pass.

That's actually a good point. I should probably find some 'party tricks' to reel in all the people around me who are vaguely interested in or curious about programming.

Edit: because 'hey look how I just told react to re-render the ENTIRE page and it only updated that one div' impresses nobody.

That's also a great way of teaching people how websites/servers/browsers work. They're not looking at "the actual" webpage on their computer, just an instance of it that their browser downloaded onto their own computer.

They can mess with it all they want, they're not really changing anything.

Teaching people this is also a great lesson in "screenshots of a webpage do not prove anything was actually written". More than once, I've found myself explaining that yes, that picture looks very convincing and has the right background image, but it's still totally fake text.

This is what I show kids at the youth centre I work. A more innocent version obviously, like changing the text below the Google logo. They can figure out the potential nefarious uses themselves :p

This is for the ones that did't really came to learn but thought they could fire up a gaming website or facebook. Something to keep their attention instead of just saying "no, not allowed".

I really like that CSS transition/rotation trick, made a note of it, because it seems like a perfect step up after you've gotten the concept of being able to change text.

If anyone knows more of these simple "party tricks", please do post them here :-)

Another one I like, surprisingly popular among the younger kids (7-9 or thereabouts), are the two linux command line tools "sl" and "cowsay". Two characters to display an ASCII steam locomotive in that weird black hackers rectangle? Yeah! Those two are actually super-educational, because they're not installed by default on most systems so you quickly explain/show them you need to "sudo apt install" them first (tell them "apt is kind of like the app-store and sudo means you want to do it as the super-user", not entirely correct but good enough for now). The more clever kids actually remember this and next time they want to show another kid, they partially remember they needed to do something with that apt install line (and then ask me what it was again, exactly).

If you're even vaguely musically inclined, having some form of livecoding environment set up that you can play with might be interesting to people.

Why do you add "long monologue" to your counter example? I don't think adding that modifier is a fair equivalence.

And I'll add a counter-point: rm -rf stories, things like piping /dev/random to speakers or the first time I accidentally did the equivalent of whiel(1) fork(); were an integral part of my early appreciation and enjoyment of computers. I'd argue they are fairly analogous to things blowing up in chemistry.

I always found piping other devices into the speakers a bit more interesting. Mostly noise, but just enough order to occasionally give interesting bits and pieces for your brain to catch on and try to parse.

There are people who will run rm -rf / on a box they're in the process of decommissioning it to see what stuff breaks when. Was a bit more fun in the good ol' days when more stuff was statically linked, but it's always bound to give a few surprises, like when running it on certain UEFI systems [1].

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UEFI-rm-r...

My pick for the most interesting chemical that he's described does not explode, but rather convinces things to light on fire.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/san...

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