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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

When I was around 5-6 I wanted to know what would happen if I put a hairpin into a light socket. It seemed a reasonable experiment beforehand; after I picked myself up after flying across the room I learned a valuable lesson. Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. Children are not very experienced at knowledge and thinking and often do things that confound adults. Giving them access to something they do not yet have the ability to understand or discern can be both useful (learning) and dangerous and it's up to parents and other adults to make sure it's not going to kill them, yet at the same time not completely stifle learning.

I could say I eventually became a programmer because I nearly fried myself doing a test...

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Around that same age I also tested whether Santa was in fact secretly my parents. I decided that Mall Santa would be the only person I told that I really wanted an RC car for Christmas, and I steadfastly refused my parents' attempts to get me to tell them what I'd asked for.

Lo and behold, Santa got me the RC car I so desperately wanted, solidifying my belief in him for a couple more years.

Turns out the real lesson, which I was too young to grasp, is that at the RC car display at Costco a 6-year-old cannot contain his obvious excitement in order to run a properly blinded experiment.

I initially thought the mall Santa snitched.

Last Christmas I got my partner a gift I happened to come across while searching for gift ideas - turned out it’s exactly what she wanted! I was confused - but it turned out I got shown the product (ad) because she had looked at it previously - lesson is shared Wi-Fi can snitch on you!

Or she's really good at faking it so you don't feel bad :)

Or really good at understanding how ad targeting works!

My daughter checked the existence of the tooth fairy by not telling us when she lost a tooth and putting it under her pillow. The pride on her face when she informed of of the results of her experiment the next morning made my heart sing.

This seems to be the most common method by which children determine that fantasy characters are in fact fantasy.

Was your answer "I expect a full scientitic report by tomorrow."?

Hypothesis : Parents are fat liars"

Methodology : Put teeth under pillow without telling parents.

Result : Where's my money?

Analysis : The results show that the tooth fairy is fake and my parents are liars."

Conclusion : The current results tend to show that parents are liars, but we need more experiments to know the extent. To expend on the results, I should also be as evil as possible for the incoming year and verify if Santa Claus indeed does give me coal.

I never had Santa or the tooth fairy growing up, and neither do my children for the same reason. Why deceive children with something so obviously fake and not let them enjoy the story along with you?

We still talk about the tooth fairy, but there’s never been a question that it’s mom or dad (which stinks when we screw up and forget).

For my parents, it's the social pressure caused by the fact you don't want all the other parents to be pissed at you for spoiling it for everyone.

It seems exactly like you’re NOT letting them enjoy the story, just because you didn’t.

This seems like an easy way to rob their childhood of fun memories, interest (watch how much more they care about Christmas movies when they think it’s real),curb creativity, and produce a child who’s overly skeptical.

Kid will also probably ruin Christmas for other children/parents, garnering a reputation as a know-it-all and possibly alienating themselves socially.

I was an ambitious optimist. I had extracted the motor out of my toy at age 5-6, and had learned to run it on batteries with some wire. Understood that one 1.5V battery made it go slow, and two made it fast. And the 9V even faster. Obviously, the wall socket would make it go even faster.

Well, besides the shock, I discovered that wire basically melts with large doses of electricity.

You literally flew across the room? I've been shocked a fair number of times -- the worst was when as an 11 year old I felt around in a bare light socket with my finger in Kenya, where they use 240 V -- and don't recall ever feeling pushed in any particular direction.

Indeed, that Kenya experience was terrifying precisely because I was paralyzed. I made an involuntary "aaauugh" sound and shook until the lamp fell over, which was fortunately pretty fast.

I’ve “flown across the room” from touching a fly back transformer in a CRT. I think what really happened was I backed up trying to get away, and fell over backwards.

Now you know why they call it a flyback transformer.

See, that's believable. I came close to that as a kid by discharging the capacitors in an old-school shoe-mount camera flash. But you don't fly back from 120VAC or even 220VAC socket. My first time as a child was accidentally electrocuting myself trying to replace the flood light on the porch and it either had an obscenely oversized bulb-screw or I was trying to remove a broken bulb screw from the socket (details are hazy). I just felt my heart suddenly racing and my body throbbing/pulsing until I managed to yank my hands away.

> I made an involuntary "aaauugh" sound

I was shocked with 300V DC and the main thing I remember (more than the sensation itself) was emitting a high-pitched ululation that I'm in no way capable of deliberately recreating. It was foreign and alien coming from my own throat; by far the most terrifying part of the experience. But I was sitting on a stool and didn't fall off.

> You literally flew across the room?

I imagine so, in the hyperbolic sense. I've definitely seen people being "moved" by an electric shock, whether it's the shock itself or their intense reaction to it.

Got knocked on my tail by an electric shock as a kid--tried to extract magnets from a broken circular saw. As a precautionary measure, I had plugged it in beforehand to ensure that it really didn't work.

I don't remember anything about the shock other than finding myself on the ground afterwards. It's not implausible that you might move some distance depending how your muscles react.

Never mentioned the experience to my parents, as it did not seem that could possibly lead to any further educational benefits.

Also went through a pretty traumatic shock that paralyzed me temporarily and had me stuck to 2 metal objects I had grasped with my hands where I ended up closing the circuit.

I was told I screamed at the top of my lungs, to the point where people thought I was joking and started laughing.

The rest is just fun details from this particular trip in 1998 to a developing country in the Balkans: Had it not been for a gentleman who realized I was literally dying and not joking, I'd be dead. He ran toward me and with difficulty and a lot of force removed one of my hands from the metal bar (in the process breaking my wrist). I have zero recollection of screaming, but I was aware and in complete shock and I do remember some kind of yelling or asking for help.

Utter horror is what I recall, but not a ton of detail. (14 years of age, for context - am now twice that)

I think it scared the hell out of me when it made a noise and smoked more than the jolt itself.

Can happen. When I was about 4 I managed to get my finger on the contacts of the plug as I inserted it. This was an old USSR plug... I next remember being in the middle of the room. I thought one of my parents sneaked up on me an grabbed me.. but there was no-one around. I had no idea what happened and kinda just ignored it. I then got electrocuted in shop class in my teens and had the AHA moment as I understood what happened to me as a kid.

My wild guess is that the “fly across the room” comes from a spasm in the leg muscles, so it’s more that you involuntarily jump across the room.

Your muscles can react when shocked in uncontrollable ways.

This is why if you ever touch a live wire (don't?) do it with the BACK of your fingers so that when your muscles contract, you don't grasp the wire (what happens next is left to imagination).

I'm glad I had this idea when I was into model railways as a kid

Shorting the rails did spark a bit (cool, obviously) but no muscle clamping or throwing of children!

I didn't learn from it though I guess, many years later I lightly burned a toe touching it to my PC's motherboard.. really weird feeling when your muscle does something faster and more violently than you could ever make it do on purpose! Don't work on a computer on the floor with the case off without footwear! Impressively the computer didn't suffer any ill effect, once I'd got the power back on it booted up fine

I've also given myself a dead arm trying to unscrew a fridge lightbulb.. that someone had already removed allowing my finger to pop in and complete the circuit for a moment. Whoops

Earlier in life (after model railway, before kicking motherboards) I got a school detention for joining (starting?) a wave of kids charging capacitors and throwing them to each other with a "think fast!". All fun and games till someone throws one to the teacher

I don't play with electricity much anymore, my tinkering is limited to battery powered things or less

I remember doing it with some rolled aluminium foil; but I knew that electricity could be dangerous, so I put a piece of scotch tape around the middle part by which I was holding it. So there was a nice flash and the power went off, but I felt nothing :)

I stuck a table knife into the outlet when I was little. I only did it because everyone kept telling me not to. I have this memory of it jumping out at me, I'm genuinely curious if I actually touched the hot side or it's just my imagination.

I accidentally inserted a screw driver into a switch without a cover plate, making contact between the hot and the grounding frame on the switch. I still have that screwdriver somewhere, about half the tip was melted. I don't remember getting shocked, but it blew the fuse on the circuit and scared the hell out of me.

When I was ten or so I tried shorting out a 20V barrel jack charger with a paperclip. It was not from lack of knowledge, though--I was quite familiar with Ohm's Law and just trusted that there would probably be some current limiting circuitry in there that would prevent anything too serious from happening. I guess I didn't think about the possibility of the charger being destroyed in the process at that age--it actually wasn't, but produced a nice burning smell and shower of sparks from the plug!

Your primary job is a parent is to make sure your kids don't die. The rest is kind of a wash.

FWIW, I blew up a power outlet with a paperclip when I was 17. You don't have to be a small child to be dangerously ignorant.

>Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake.

That doesn't seem like sound logic to me. Maybe he's just too busy to eat food that was put out at every house? You'd get pretty full by eating a cookie from every house in your neighborhood.

Easier to just inspect the chimney dust.

I wonder how many children have tried to poison Santa.

The 6-year-old in the story was presumably led to believe that Santa can visit every house in the world in one night. Logically, normal human limitations (like a finite capacity to eat cookies) do not apply to Santa.

It's logical to test the model that was presented to him by the adults.

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