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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Steve Wozniak (the Apple cofounder) famously bought sheets of $2 bills, and had a printer perforate and gum them into pads.

So he could literally tear off $2 bills, in front of people who might not even know it was real currency, to pay them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180311084811/http://archive.wo...

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I once found a pad of tear off $2 on the ground of the departures drop off at O’hare airport. I thought it was a novelty initially but after closer inspection found the bills to be real. It’s been a 20 year mystery to me how that came to be since I’ve never seen anything like it since. Now I’m wondering if I found Woz’s pad.

That would be quite interesting because when I was very young I crank called him after finding his number online. He collects phone numbers with repeating digits and mine has 6 repeated numbers. I guess he found my number peculiar and picked up! In my young and starstruck state I panicked and hung up. How coincidental to have potentially two obscure path crossings with the Woz.

Chances seem small that it was his, but chances also seem small of another quirky guy making tear-off $2 pads.

6 repeating digits is quite impressive: maybe you could call again and ask if he was in Chicago around a certain date.

Make your own with padding cement. Put the stack of bills in a vice and coat one edge a few times with the cement. I did this for a nephew as a unique gift. Some people being paid with these are suspicious.

Nowhere near as suspicious as the tire shop in east LA late at night on Sunday when I needed a flat patched, and I only had credit cards on me - and a uncut roll of $2s in the trunk.

I pulled that out to cut some off and pay and they all started screaming about feds and told me to get the hell out of there, no need to pay.

The video where he is showcasing it..

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DDHTkowSkUM/

reading the comments gave me a headache...

It's instagram.

Slight tangent: the YouTube comments used to be famous for being a vile cesspit. Then Google changed something, and now they are full of positivity. Often too full.

And for songs, often (fake?) testimonies to people's emotional attachments to the song.

It's not just me / the music videos I look up then, is it? I can't help but wonder if it's some kind of YT hive mind, bots, or Google's own algorithms pushing those comments to the top.

Seems like they just put the comments with the most likes at the top... stands to reason that more likes = nicer comment.

I'm not sure. I would have assumed that this naive algorithm is what they had at first, and what gave us the cesspool?

I'm not convinced that the current trend of positivity is not caused by bots, but I wouldn't be surprised if the old system was just based on engagement. Meaning that upvotes and downvotes would both push the comment up. This is not intuitive, but would fit with what we've been seeing for the last decade or so.

Oh, some of the positivity is surely caused by bots.

And lots of the cesspool was not caused by bots.

First part of your comment is right, but your reasoning is wrong. A couple years ago, YouTube changed the visibility of negative comments, such that positive comments are prioritized (can’t like a comment if you don’t even see it).

This was also around the time they removed the thumbs up/down count.

This was to prevent creator burnout; imagine if every video you put out had some snarky diss against you in the comments.

My favorite ones are the comment threads for sentimental songs from the 80’s—you just get a flood of heartbreaking stories from older folks talking about their first loves, now passed on.

moji moji moji who still bangin this in 2022? moji moji

The explanation I've heard for these is it's a low-effort bot comment that builds activity on the commenting account.

Whether that actually increases the value of an account or not, I'm not sure. But it's enough that spammers seem to think that having comments & replies on an account.

It may also be purchased comments to improve "engagement" metrics on videos for the creator.

Idk YouTube comments are still a cesspit, but now there are lobotomized bots saying nice things.

>Often too full.

Eh. Yeah. I posted a comment on a urban design video questioning the cost they gave for car ownership and the fact that they did not value the extra time it takes to use transit. Bam. Comment removed. Apparently the channel is able to moderate comments that don't fit their mentality

It may have been the channel owner, or more likely it may have been YouTube itself.

There have been a few discussions over at level1techs where people thought they thought the channel was moderating them for some strange reason, only to turn out it’s YouTube: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/l1t-youtube-shadowban-shadow...

More than once I’ve made a comment, went to edit a spelling mistake, and got an error on save because my completely unobjectionable comment was removed 10 seconds after posting.

YouTube has a horrible comment automation wordfilter/AI that will silently steamroll comments in a way that makes Reddit and 4chan mods seem rational. The channel owners don’t even see the comments (and last I checked, they don’t show up in your comment history either)

YouTube comments are vapid, in part because anything high effort/quality is likely to get deleted.

Yes, you can confirm if this is the case by going to "Your data in Youtube" and seeing if your comment still shows up there. If you click the direct link there it'll even take you to the video and highlight your comment. But if you reload the video without the querystring part that identifies your comment, you won't see it. It's happened to a bunch of mine too on and off over the years, and it's not because of negativity or anything.

You can even see it happening to other people - if you see a comment tree that says it has N replies, but then you expand it and it shows less than N replies, the same thing happened to the people who posted those missing replies too.

The same thing happens with my Google Maps reviews too. Google is too lazy and high on their farts about letting automation do their moderation to care.

I prefer it so much more. If you told me I would be a proponent of censorship in my 20s I would have laughed at you.

Because they're doing what people do here so often - responding to the headline, not the 'article.' The headline and first sentence are outright lies. "...known for printing his own unique currency—$2 bills that he personally designs." Uh ... no? He doesn't print it, he didn't design it.

"He doesn’t actually print official U.S. currency, which would be illegal. Instead, [he] purchases uncut sheets of $2 bills from the U.S. Treasury..."

Well, yeah - that's why it makes sense. But you have to read past the outright fabrications to get to the truth of the matter.

You don't have to. You could be a sane, intelligent person and not look at Instagram at all.

I didn't say it had to be done on instagram.

"Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak prints his own money" -- closed the window. Dunno what I expected, clicking an Instagram link. Turns out there's no way to report content for misinformation, as I've just discovered, so that's cool. Definitely reaffirms my aversion to the platform.

The original guy who famously did that was the publicity director for Palisades Park Amusement Park in New Jersey, some time in the 1950s and 1960s. He had a checkbook cover with a pad of bills he could tear off.

In the video interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ1TIYxm1vM he never demonstrates how he tears them apart after mentioning that they're perforated. To me, it all looks like a 4x1 sheet of $2 bills that you can buy off the US mint. The video interview all sounds like a joke, and he says at some point "No, no it's all a joke". Unless it's a deposition, it's all based on trusting his character and given his latest speaker appearances, I have doubts about his character.

Wait, what? You have doubts about Steve Wozniak's character?

Anyone who knows Woz can assure you that he is quite a character!

and a laser safety officer

https://www.geekculture.com/mt2/archives/2018/02/wozs_laser_...

The eyepatch in his photo is a nice touch.

The sheet on the mints site looks very flat, it doesn't look like it would fold in this manner, this looks like it's been perforated: https://www.instagram.com/starworldlab/p/C-vzStay1yx/?img_in...

Curious though, what speaking appearance are you talking about? He always just seems like a jolly old man to me who is a bit out of touch but quite sweet.

The one that irked me the most was his cameo for a dubious crypto startup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38855645

He does a lot of public speaking the quality can be gauged by searching "Steve Wozniak conference", and his attendance can be bought https://www.aurumbureau.com/speaker/steve-wozniak/ What kind of message a person who is getting paid by the platform is going to have?

I'm overall not very trusting of his opinion on the current tech. Yes, he had cofounded Apple, and created the first machines but I don't see anything significant that he created after that. He did start a company in 2020 that was backed by the WOZX token (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/04/apple-co-founder-steve-wozni...).

Fair enough, I agree he's super out of touch, just wanted to make sure he wasn't speaking at something really really bad.

To save anyone else a google: he is indeed behind a crypto project properly it seems, and the token looks very much like a rug[1], and the cameo thing is real and it seems odd he's not savvy enough to do some background on it/know not to shill NFTs[2]. Speaking fee thing doesn't bother me personally, even I'm on one of those stupid things, they give pretty huge retainers and the money is great. Saw Woz is charging 100k an event, ha!

[1]https://www.coinbase.com/price/efforce [2]https://behindmlm.com/companies/hyperfund/steve-wozniak-2nd-...

Good for him—don’t think he got the big money aapl generated as he got out quite early.

Took me a while to connect your username to the IRC nick. Cheers!

You remember that from... 25 years ago? Impressive. Hi varjag, Cheers! <3

> Yes, he had cofounded Apple, and created the first machines but I don't see anything significant that he created after that.

That's kind of like saying "God made the world, but he hasn't really done anything else lately so he's overrated". Woz's big achievements might be in the past, but they are so big that he certainly commands respect even still.

My reaction to that video: Teasing restaurant employees like that, and letting it escalate, isn't my personal style, but... Not only is he a more accomplished hacker than I am, he's even a better talk show guest.

Per influencer rules, if you screws around neither someone's head for lolz, you should pay them combat wages for their time afterward.

"if you screws around neither someone's head for lolz" ... are you having a stroke right now? What is that supposed to mean?

Maybe someone screwsed around neither his head for lolz?

The talk show host demonstrates that you can tear them.

I replicated this 5-6 years back: got a sheet of $2 bills and perforated it myself.

Then I separated the large sheet into strips and gave them out as souvenirs to friends.

This is what a complete sheet folded up looked like: https://imgur.com/a/uCS5930

The "Monopoly money" was a nice touch to the photo.

Some banks also do this. I’ve gotten a wad of $2 bills from a local branch of a major bank before.

In today's stupefied America, it wouldn't be safe because the police will be called and the police escalate things into unnecessary violence. In the 60's through 80's it would've been fine, but not now.

Steve Wozniak is white and soft looking.

There wasn't any standardized data on police violence in the US in the 60s through 80s, but I doubt that it was any less significant.

Come on people, there was a civil rights movement in swing in the 60s in the US.

Richard Pryor in 1979 on policing:

https://youtu.be/ZWulvchFpYs

> RP: Police got chokehold on you out here though, they choke n--- to death! I mean you be dead when they through! Did you know that?

> [Audience indistinctly yelling back "Yeah!"]

> RP: The n--- going "Yeah we know!," white people going "no, I had no idea!"

I have too many family stories of the things police used to do to believe that it was better back then. My gut tells me things are better now but maybe I am just not in the know.

Wait, you think police are tougher now then in the past?

Dude he gave a fake ID to a Secret Service agent? Dang.

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