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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

This is starting to sound like an adventure game puzzle.

You are a security guard at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. There are hundreds of dollars inside a six hundred pound block of ice. You cannot leave your station. How do you get at it?

Using an ice pick? Why would a security guard have an ice pick? Maybe if it were Chicago, but this is San Francisco.

Use another tool to chip away at it? I dunno, that's a lot of ice.

Melt the ice somehow? Nice idea, but how?

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Put a macbook on top of it for 10 minutes.

...playing HD flash video

> Melt the ice somehow? Nice idea, but how?

Wait.

Time passes.

Pee on ice block.

I successfully used this technique to unfreeze a shovel that was stuck in a mound of snow.

store it somewhere private and warm, then wait. This is why he needed the pallet mover.

Probably sensible, if you can obtain a pallet mover. Though there should be one of those in any large convention center for setting up displays and so forth... you'll have to split the loot with the guy in charge of it though.

It also requires the security guard to have access to a private place with a large door whose floor won't be damaged when six hundred pounds of water gushes onto it.

Push the brick over, let it shatter. Faster melting and free access to (some of) the money. Finally, find all the nearby salt shakers and pour their contents on it.

There are enough homeless people on that corner to pee the ice to ice-tea. For reals.

Cover it with black bed sheets. Attracts the sun, covers the statement. Problem solved.

Use your handy comm system to call several beefy buddies and take the "trash" that someone has left on the building property down to a safe location in the building, and then tell everyone that dinner is being paid by some dumb startup after a bit of ice melts...

Melting a chunk of ice that size will take a long long time.

according to our tests, about 3-4 days

I figured as much, that's not going to be in time for dinner. Unless you like your dinner cold. (pun somewhat intended).

When will you guys do international payments ?

international payments is our top requested feature. unfortunately, there are a ton of product & regulatory hurdles that stand between us and our goal.

we're steadily marching towards it, but we have a lot of work to do here at home in the U.S. before we can expend the resources necessary for international expansion. i don't have a date for you, unfortunately.

I hope you are this diligent about all your tests =)

Only if you decide not to increase the surface area through the judicious use of a hammer...

How many beefy buddies does it take to lift six hundred pounds? And remember that it's ice, so getting a good grip is a serious problem.

A water hose is all you need.

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