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Comment by evanwise | Hacker News Reader

Please, for the love of God, don't follow any of the recipes in here. Many are dangerously wrong (as in blow yourself and your neighbors up dangerous).

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FWIW, I am living testament to the fact that they weren't that wrong, at least not to a "blow yourself up" extreme.

While it's true that some of the simpler recipes will work, a lot of the others just won't work or are dangerous. From memory, the TNT and mercury fulminate recipes are wildly dangerous and omit key steps. Messing with stuff like this in any capacity is dangerous, even with proper PPE and good procedures, but if you must, there are much better resources available freely online these days.

Meh. Follow them at your own risk. The best way to learn is to make mistakes and blow your neighbours garage, not being prevented from doing so by someone else.

I hope this is sarcasm.

There's just some lessons everyone's gotta relearn in life. Touching the stove, accidentally committing manslaughter of your childhood friends, etc

Your comment I replied to is overbearing, overprotective advice about something titled the Anarchist Cookbook, for God's sake.

I tried to restore a bit of that reckless spirit with a cheeky comment, but I am very sad to see the nanny state is out in force today. Gah, so boring.

The Army's Improvised Munitions Handbook is more reliable, safer, and contains instructions that have actually been tested by the authors (unlike, say, 'bananadine'), but I guess you can't act like an anti-establishment edgelord recommending that one.

I'm all for people pursuing amateur chemistry if they want to, but they should be doing so with accurate resources. The Anarchist Cookbook is not reckless. It's just straight up wrong in a lot of places in ways that very well could get you killed. Making homemade explosives is reckless, doing it poorly is just stupid. If you want to make explosives there are better guides on YouTube of all places. There is no reason at all to use this dated book full of inaccuracies.

Absolutely fucking don't. In high school, my, uh, friends tried out many of the experiments in it, in ways we "thought were safe". I later got a degree in chemistry and learned actual lab hygiene, and looking back, hooo boy, it's terrifying all the ways in which things could have gone wrong.

Like nearly burning down my friend's garage, were it not for some quick thinking.

By all means, amateur chemistry is a great hobby, and I think the 2000s swung too hard into nanny state stuff post-9/11. But anarchist's cookbook is an exemplar of the wrong way to do things. Watch NileRed, NurdRage, That Chemist, etc.

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