Now I Know

Nice and succinct. It has "new tab" vibes about it and might be something you could offer as an extension. I am subscribed to a newsletter that does a similar thing in longer form each day that I enjoy and tend to mention whenever I can: https://nowiknow.com/ (it's nothing to do with me, I just enjoy it)

Hi! This is from my email newsletter of interesting facts, Now I Know. If you want to give it a try, http://nowiknow.com is the signup page. It's free, I don't give out email addresses, etc., and have 100,000 subscribers so it can't be all bad.

This was done by the UW-Green Bay years ago (among many, many others, I'm sure) and was featured in Dan Lewis' "Now I Know" newsletter about a week ago. ( http://nowiknow.com/ ) Still a worthwhile thing to report, I guess, but somehow manages to still be very "the media is clueless"

Check out Dan Lewis's great newsletter "Now I Know," for ideas on content, advertising, and list-growing. Dan is here in HN as @DanLivesHere. He probably has ~100k subscribers now, and monetizes with ads and Amazon affiliate links. Here is the newsletter: http://nowiknow.com/ Here is a good interview with him: http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/now-i-know-real-person-e-newslet…

Kind of like that "4 out of 5 dentists" claim from back in the day - it involved some very heavy editorializing: https://nowiknow.com/who-was-the-fifth-dentist-that-didnt-recommend-tr…

“From 1991 through 1994, Sergey Bubka topped his own mark nine times, each time besting his previous mark by only 0.01 meters.” https://nowiknow.com/the-man-who-inched-away-at-history/

Seconded, with a footnote that its articles regularly appear on HN. There is also now I know, a daily light digestible easy read that bring a lot of interesting lesser known stories. https://nowiknow.com/

Even if you salt the hashes. The problem is that the number of inputs is limited and it's trivial to enumerate over the input values. Let's take a contrived example: We have the data of a small, entirely made-up island where only two families live, so we have two surnames. Let's name them Foo and Bar. Now, they have an entirely funny tradition, they all get first names based on the order in which they were born (1). So we have Firstborn, Secondborn. Let's also, for simplicity assume that each couple gets exactly two children. That gives us the following 4 possible combinations of names: Firstborn Foo Firstborn Bar Secondborn Foo Secondborn Bar Let's assume that there are 10 million of those people and we hash their names with a salt, that gives us 10 million unique hashes. But to break each hash, we only need to try at most 4 times, that's 40 million tries. Hashing speed varies from hash to hash and the hardware, but good old md5 easily achieved a few million hashes per second on a stock CPU in 2012. GPUs are usually around two orders of magnitude faster (2). So in the worst case, your desktop PC could break all those 40 million hashes in a few seconds without breaking a sweat. Better hashes are slower, but with such a limited input space, even the best hashes are breakable. So no, salt's won't save you here. (1) This is not entirely fictitious: https://nowiknow.com/wayan-balik/ (2) See for example the hashcat benchmarks…

What's the third shaker for?! https://nowiknow.com/the-mystery-of-the-third-shaker/ TL;DR: There's a unknown 3rd shaker in many 19th century table settings and no one really knows what went in it as far as I can tell. There's some indication it might have been for dried mustard powder but that's the only guess anyone has and it wasn't that popular as a condiment as far as anyone can tell outside of the tiny references in late 19th century catalogs for the 3 shaker sets including a 'mustard bottle'.

Though none of the Brutalist IM Pei buildings at MIT were as bad, my understanding that they had to retrofit a revolving door in one of them because the wind tunnel effect could make it really hard to open the doors. https://nowiknow.com/the-curious-problem-with-mits-tallest-building/

This sounds like what Charles Hinton did with jungle gyms for children. They were originally made to teach children "monkey instinct" to be able to navigate better through 3-dimensional space, hopefully increasing their capacity to visualize and understand 4-dimensional space. It didn't work, but it's very interesting! https://nowiknow.com/mathletes/

For sure, there are a lot of examples like that, including women’s buttons being backwards (for an assistant to button them, the theory goes) and a knight needing a page to help put armor on. Most clothing today can be put on without any help, which might be a reflection of an individualist culture. https://nowiknow.com/why-womens-shirts-button-backward/

Is it still there? I might go down there today to grab a soda! EDIT: Noo, it's gone :( https://nowiknow.com/seattles-mystery-soda-machine/

This was recently covered in depth in "Now I Know" [0] - a random corner of Internet with quirky collection of articles. I have been a happy reader these past many weeks. [0] https://nowiknow.com/the-marketing-stunt-that-vacuumed-up-a-whole-comp…

I’m on my phone so I can’t find a better source, but Mercedes plays a sound to prevent hearing loss during a car crash. https://nowiknow.com/the-special-sound-a-mercedes-benz-makes-before-a-…

The Starfish Prime story is much bigger than the Wikipedia entry suggests. If you search the web you can find out quite a bit more about how it affected infrastructure across more than half the planet. Then you can read up about the "space needles", when they exploded a package og 480 million small copper needles in orbit to see what would happen: https://nowiknow.com/space-needles/

The submitted article was http://nowiknow.com/the-one-thing-you-cant-do-in-ikea/ which was cribbed from a bunch of old news articles. We've replaced the URL above with one of those. The others, in case anybody cares: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-16/ikea-stamps-out-hid… https://www.fastcompany.com/90399077/ikea-politely-asks-that-you-stop-… https://nypost.com/2019/09/11/cops-shut-down-massive-3000-person-game-…

iPhones on China have interesting "hacks" to comply with laws (GPS has some restrictions: http://nowiknow.com/the-problem-with-chinese-gps/), and they're not allowed to have the Taiwan flag emoji. I also noticed the other day that Google Maps shows static images for S. Korea (not the fancy WebGL stuff). Also due to laws.

> There is no sharp dividing line between lemons and limes, either There is, if you care about scurvy: http://nowiknow.com/dont-forget-the-lime/

I think you should take a gander at this: http://nowiknow.com/shuffled/

Regarding your nonsensical aside: try the recipe for Swedish Lemon Angels. http://nowiknow.com/swedish-lemon-angels/

I understand, but why not just offer the domain for a million or two? He did [0], Nissan Motors didn't want to pay. [0] http://nowiknow.com/why-you-cant-buy-a-car-on-nissan-com/

Here's an eclectic list to get started: Company intel: http://mattermark.com Hacker Newsletter: http://www.hackernewsletter.com Curated design links: http://sidebar.io Minimalism: http://nosidebar.com Daily news and culture: http://nextdraft.com Random pub trivia: http://nowiknow.com Curated design and dev: http://mergelinks.com Metal trivia: http://www.skulltoaster.com Music mixes: http://noonpacific.com Front end dev: http://hackingui.com

Previously considered by the University of Wisconsin Green Bay: http://nowiknow.com/an-inkling-for-ink/

What an interesting coincidence, the Now I Know newsletter this morning was about a neat Bezos story and contained a link to this talk: http://nowiknow.com/the-lichen-loophole/

http://boingboing.net http://digg.com http://news.ycombinator.com http://slashdot.org http://www.drudgereport.com http://www.engadget.com http://www.nytimes.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://engineeringblogs.xyz https://gizmodo.com/latest https://kk.org/cooltools https://kottke.org https://lobste.rs https://nowiknow.com/archives https://old.reddit.com https://pluralistic.net https://www.bogleheads.org https://www.darkroastedblend.com https://www.garbageday.email/archive https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends https://www.metafilter.com https://www.neatorama.com https://www.newsbreak.com https://www.openculture.com https://www.recomendo.com https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending