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Comment by adekok | Hacker News Reader

If you want to catch a stationary fly, it's pretty easy to do so with your bare hands. The key thing to know is that they jump backward before taking flight.

Aim for a spot about 1-2" behind the fly, and about 1-2" above the fly. Try to catch it there, and your success percentage will be high.

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What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen fly?

You have to learn the kind of fly though. Take-off differs between species :)

I love HN.

The perspective of cathing a fly that walked on crap five minutes ago disgusts me. I know they cleanse their paws more often than I do mine, but faugh.

1) catch a fly and wash your hands

2) see the fly walk over your food, your face, your kids food...

Do you want to touch a "dirty" fly, or eat what the fly has walked on?

I'll take #1 any day.

3) Do not care at all, and consider that our bodies are pretty well tuned to handle such thing as a few particles of foreign excrement (or other dirty things).

Seriously, we have become irrational animals afraid of everything. (I would wash my hand after splashing a fly if there was a rotten corpse around, though, and would have done even without the fly because my nose would have alerted me of a chemical danger.)

i always found it easy catching flies, especially in air, but squishing their guyts all over my hands is what bothers me most.

an easy way to catch flies is to put rubbing alcohol in a squirt gun. even less than direct hits takes them out of the sky, and the alcohol cleans stuff in collateral damage.

Keep it trapped and walk to the sink, turn on faucet and throw it in.

i dont have the coordination to grab them out of mid air carefully without squishing them. for me its sort of an all in event.

The real disgusting thing here are wasps.. who will go for dead rodents- and then move on to grab food from your plate.

I was about to post the same. Last time I used this technique, I hit 3/3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otqcVG-nJGI apparently they plan their escape

Also depends on the fly species. Some are just uber slow I could play tennis with them.

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