Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillyquiet | Hacker News Reader

Speaking anecdotally - here in central Texas, we have a few species of mosquito, and my reaction to a bite varies from a small bump that goes away in a day to intense swelling and itching. And it all seemingly depends on which type of mosquito bit me.

View on HN

Try heating it with a hair dryer until pain. I'm not sure for mosquitoes but it works for me with hornets and horse flies bites.

There are little infrared pens that you can get that do this without pain, just heating the area with IR to denature the proteins injected by the insect

I had a handful of marks/scars that lasted for several years on my legs after using one of these. I am sure it depends on the brand, but please be careful using these.

These are great. I find they are slightly uncomfortable/painful, but only mildly so and momentarily. Much more localized than something like a hairdryer or spoon though. Helps with wasp stings too.

Oh interesting. Any recommendations that you have?

BiteAway works well for me.

This stuff absolutely works, but I would call it the opposite of painless.

This seems to vary from person to person. I personally think that it hurts a little bit for a few seconds, as do most of my friends that have the same device, but other friends call it torture. I guess their pain threshold is different. I gladly trade the 3 seconds of mild stinging for days of itching.

I never thought my pain threshold was low until I tried that device lol.

I genuinely had to google reviews about it, and then still check if 50C temperature is safe for skin contact.

Torture comes quite close to it, still I hate mosquitoes even more.

Even now I only use the 3 second setting and sometimes I can't stand it.

I carry a Beurer BR 60. It uses a small ceramic plate that heats up. It's a short burning sensation but the itching is gone for most bites after that.

Please share the Amazon links!

Please don't act like Amazon is the only shop around. They are a terrible shop, actively adversarial to their merchants and customers. They are chock full of fake reviews, they comingle inventory, and practice many dark patterns.

Most people think that Amazon sells all the products on their site - because Amazon designs their site to look like it. Even young people who are technically literate are fooled. This results in a lot of harm..

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/amazons-plan-to-...

In actuality, eBay is more of a trustworthy marketplace than Amazon...

Thanks for promoting other options. When recommending books I use worldcat.org links rather than the more-exploitative for-profit vendors.

In the interest of making more art available to more people, independent of spending-money, I’d rather us collectively invest more in public libraries. To what degree do public libraries fund authors?

You're welcome. I am not sure but I agree, we need as much free information as possible. Libgen and scihub are invaluable! I don't know if libraries fund authors but that would certainly be a cool model to have.

But for the long tail, sometime they can't be beat.

Which sucks, because I otherwise have eliminated Amazon in my life.

Your effort is appreciated.

Thank you. It's difficult to oppose such a large behemoth.

I just bought something from amazon and it turns out it was coming from a seller in another country and i had to pay an extra £24 in import duties and carrier charges. Nowhere on the listing did it say it was coming from outside the UK.

I am sorry to hear that. Amazon's UI is purposely designed to make it difficult to notice this kind of information. Buyers are lulled into a false sense of assuredness.

Listings are often even hijacked!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27684807

(And Amazon couldn't care less!)

Quite and apparently everyone else thinks I deserved it for some reason! Fairly standard makita accessory, none of FFXtools, Axminster, Toolstop or even eBay had it in stock only place that came up in search was amazon. It was out of stock on amazon but was advertised in the side bar as available through a third party seller by the name of something like 'KAMAC Machine Tools' i.e. an english sounding name. If I'd investigated the company I would have found that they were in Italy, but the price was listed in Sterling and there was no text anywhere that led me to believe that this was an import. I know because I went back and screengrabbed the page after I got the bill from UPS. Its not worth my time to pursue it any further with Amazon, Startup Idea: an AI chatbot that I can deploy to argue with their AI chatbot about this.

HN downvotes 90% of my comments. I wouldn't take it to heart. It's not common for the herd mentality to do anything but pile on. Plus you have to keep in mind that many of the users here are employed by Amazon and are in perpetual self-denial of the unethical nature of their employer. The cognitive dissonance is necessary for them to avoid an actual understanding of how they enable it all, regardless of whatever division they may reside within ("I'm just an AWS dev. Pissing in bottles, what's that got to do with me?!!")

Then you factor in the astroturfing by contracted subsidiaries through shilled comments and votes/likes/dislikes all over the broader internet.

My advice is to get used to the downvotes. When there are few comments but many downvotes, it's pretty indicative of a poor attempt to suppress valid information. They have no counter arguments, just a supression button. Consider your task accomplished. ;-)

Didn't y'all vote for having extra tariffs a while back?

How long after bite does it work?

Usually in the woods I don't have a hair dryer with me. So you are using it if you get bitten in the backyard or if you get back home from the hike?

Usually I also notice bites the next day when they start itching or when I get evening shower unless I really slap that mosquito in the act.

Depends what you take hiking with you...but I imagine at the minimum you have a fire method(matches? lighted? flint? etc) and metal object(pocket knife? belt knife? eating utensil?). Those will work well in a pinch, just don't heat it too much and have an impromptu branding session...

The first time I heard about this method I tried one or 2 days later after the bite and it worked, so if it's a day hike there won't be any problem.

I assume you need to do this right away after the bite? Does it work days later?

> I tried one or 2 days later after the bite and it worked

Did you actually read my message?

It does work on mosquito bite. Actually try putting anything (tolerably) hot at the place of mosquito bite. I don't have hair drier so I use just hot spoon. I guess this heat treatment somehow disintegrates the chemical released by mosquito.

Edit: posted this comment before reading other comments so didnt realize others have also suggested the same.

I just take a super hot shower. It works for all kinds of itching: bug bites, poison ivy, eczema...

Doesn’t hot water make skin conditions worse in the long run?

It depends on the condition and it's cause.

I just ignore it and wait.

That’s a great trick. I was always told to use a metal spoon and get it as hot as you can stand it and press it the bite as much as you can and as long as you can stand it. Never thought about the hair dryer.

The hair dryer is much more controllable, you might severely burn yourself with the spoon (and need another trick to relive the pain ;)

For what it's worth my hair is so short I never owned a hair drier until I heard about this trick. So I bought a cheap one and it's only used in summer.

A hot spoon works too. It should not burn you though, just hot enough to be somewhat uncomfortable. I just run hot tap water over the spoon.

This is my solution as well. I find that an intense heating session will keep the itch at bay for up to 8 hours.

I think the hot spoon that others have mentioned is also worth a try as the circumference of the bite and spoon could keep non bite areas from burning.

Good trick - I use hot water, at hot as I can stand for both bites and poison ivy rashes, trying to minimize exposure beyond the affected area. Really calms it all down for hours after the zing of the hot water.

Also rubbing with salt, vinegar, 70% alcohol. Apple vinegar helped me with a contact allergy I got after walking through some "grass".

I just use a blue gel ice pack on the bite for 2 minutes.

Tiger mosquitos gave my son a strong reaction https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3708019/

I visited my parents in the DC area, and there's been a bunch of people developing really nasty rashes from insect bites, I don't know if it's confirmed, but it seems to be attributed to an oak-mite[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyemotes_herfsi

There was an article on that topic in the Washington Post at the end of July:

WaPo link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/07/30/oak-mites...

Archive.is link (no paywall): https://archive.is/AEi6a

I suspect wrong hypothesis there.... the variable is probably what other allergen is on you skin (or finger nails) and whether and how much you scratch it! Temperature is probably also a factor.

Totally! I leave in BC, the few mosquitoes which make it into my house despite nets usually give me big bumps that last for a few days and scratch like hell. When I get into the deeper woods, I get eaten alive, but these bites' effect seems to last only a few hours. Might also be the blood pumping though, but I do think that natural selection, even over a short variation of geo, results in such differences

My wife has 'skeeter syndrome' and the bites vary from normal mosquito bites to 3-4" wide, weeping bumps depending on where we were at when she got bit. Hawaii was the worst. WA state wasn't too bad.

We have some in Georgia but I don’t think there are as many species as Texas.

A mosquito has never left a mark or made me itch in my life. Poison ivy on the other hand…I could look at it and get a rash but not the go to the doctor rash.

I've found that washing the bite wound right away and taking an antihistamine like Allegra has helped keep the bite from swelling for me. Also adding tiger balm has helped with the itching.

Seems like a plausible explanation but how do you have any idea which species bit you in order to be able to draw a conclusion that there's a correlation?

They're pretty visible/memorable due to their white stripes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus

But do you see the mosquito that bit you most of the time, unsmashed? Often enough to correlate?

Speaking personally - not always do I notice the mosquito.

But I have noticed often enough to note the difference. For me, the smaller, more stealthy mosquitos give me the small, temporary bump, but the larger more noticeable ones like the tiger mosquito or what we call zebra mosquitos (I think they are actually western encephalitis mosquitos (!)) have a more dramatic reaction.

I get those reactions with one bite. If I get a lot of them I'm fatigued for days.

Same thing in Europe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com