Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine • Hacker News Board

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#111

Post by shadowtree » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 12:30 AM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #88

xrd wrote: post #47

A "fun fact" my son loves: more people are killed by vending machines than sharks each year [1]. Perhaps it murdered someone and went into hiding? 1. https://medium.com/purple-theory/vending-machines-vs-sharks-...

Another bit of trivia I always found interesting... approximately zero people per year die in elevator crashes. That basically isn't a real thing that happens. Of the very small number of people who are killed by elevators, they are almost all elevator technicians / maintenance people who are in the shaft doing repairs and have some kind of accident.

I don't think that is true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elevator_accidents

https://www.elcosh.org/document/1232/d000397/Deaths+and+Inju...

here is a tragic death of a child in the US, 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/14/elevator-...

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#112

Post by nabakin » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 12:31 AM UTC

kingrazor wrote: post #92

kypro wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how many people will get the reference, but I was thinking this just yesterday about the Pokémon red and blue games. Back in the nineties many rumours spread about hidden secret in those games, but we didn’t have the internet to verify or debunk them. Like many kids back then me and my friends spent hours trying to move that truck to get a mew, but it was impossible, it was just a rumour that spread because…

I think about this every once in a while. I've grown up playing those games and others like them. I remember how cool the world seemed in World of Warcraft when it first came out, but once I realized players had mapped out the entire game and knew where everything was it really took away from the mystery of it all. This is part of why procedurally generated content interests me. No one else has played through the exa…

You've got it basically right. It's unlikely to get the same Minecraft seed twice but it's still possible. If you want the same natural map as another person, you are free to copy their seed, provided that they give it out.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#113

Post by TheFreim » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 12:34 AM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #39

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #6

> dispensed drinks were rare cans that were either ordinarily unavailable in the United States or have not been in circulation since the 1980s > In June 2018, the machine mysteriously disappeared I don't think it's mysterious. The owner likely ran out of full, rare cans of soda and could not / did not want to source them anymore.

> I don't think it's mysterious. The owner likely ran out of full, rare cans of soda and could not / did not want to source them anymore. For folks who aren't aware your local distributor cans / bottles a much wider variety of product than what you find on typical grocery store shelves. If you have a commercial account with them you can get the list. Sometimes they make special runs for a promotion, special event, or…

> Depending on the circumstances and if you have a good relationship with your sales rep you may be able to get notified and grab a case or two.

Works this way for tons of things. People would be surprised the kind of things you can get by being generous to sales reps.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#114

Post by chihuahua » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 12:37 AM UTC

jeramey wrote: post #104

chickenbane wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the neighborhood and have bought a few sodas from the machine. I always assumed it was locksmith, they are powering the machine and I've never seen nor heard a reason to believe it was anyone else. It was a cute novelty, and if you're not picky it's a fast soda, but honestly it was just stocked with cheap, off-brand gross soda. Would have been genius if occasionally it gave you something interesting (or at…

It certainly used to! That machine introduced me to a weird variety of things when I lived near it almost 20 years ago. Cheap thrills as a broke young 'un. Thanks to it, I still have to try strange sodas when I am traveling--especially abroad. It's not always good, but it's always fun.

Have you visited the Coca Cola museum in Las Vegas? Not sure if it still exists, but I went in 2000. They had about 100 different sodas from around the world.

These days, I haven't had any soda in years. 35+ grams of sugar per can is a terrible idea.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#115

Post by userbinator » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 12:39 AM UTC

shadowtree wrote: post #111

mindcrime wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another bit of trivia I always found interesting... approximately zero people per year die in elevator crashes. That basically isn't a real thing that happens. Of the very small number of people who are killed by elevators, they are almost all elevator technicians / maintenance people who are in the shaft doing repairs and have some kind of accident.

I don't think that is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elevator_accidents https://www.elcosh.org/document/1232/d000397/Deaths+and+Inju... here is a tragic death of a child in the US, 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/14/elevator-...

here is a tragic death of a child in the US, 2021

That's a very different type of injury to what the parent comment was referring to: "elevator crashes", where the car falls to the bottom of the shaft.

The list of elevator accidents is mostly composed of ones involving construction, freight, and mine-shaft elevators.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#116

Post by autoexec » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 12:45 AM UTC

kypro wrote: post #52

ComputerGuru wrote: post #2

I feel like we live in a world where it is becoming increasingly impossible for things like this to exist. I don’t have much commentary on the matter other than to say it makes me sad.

Not sure how many people will get the reference, but I was thinking this just yesterday about the Pokémon red and blue games. Back in the nineties many rumours spread about hidden secret in those games, but we didn’t have the internet to verify or debunk them. Like many kids back then me and my friends spent hours trying to move that truck to get a mew, but it was impossible, it was just a rumour that spread because…

> Like many kids back then me and my friends spent hours trying to move that truck to get a mew, but it was impossible, it was just a rumour that spread because back then no one knew for sure if it was possible or not.

I found the myth that holding "B" would increase the catch rate the be worse since it would take a lot more work to figure out if it made any difference or not. Sadly, no lie is immune from being spread, internet or no internet. Very easily disproved lies like "It wasn't raining" or "This vaccine will transform you into an animal" are spread online and sadly believed by far too many people who have no problems ignoring reality whenever it's convenient for them.

Hell, there are plenty of sites online right now which will tell you that Spirit Orbs are real.

We have less mystery in the world, but we often have to wade through piles of lies to find the truth and a lot of people don't have the tools to tell what they can trust. It fills people with even more confidence about the lies they hold as truth. At least in the past most people were a bit uncertain and could only say they heard something from someone who heard it from something else. Now when we hear a rumor we use google, find something that confirms our view, and them claim the truth is the result of "research".

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#117

Post by ianhanschen » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 12:47 AM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #36

It's funny, I probably walked by that thing a few hundred times, but I don't drink soda so I ignored it entirely. But once the locksmith was mentioned, its location clicked in my head, a dim rectangular outline of a hole in my spatial memory. Brains are so weird.

I use operating system memory paging as an analogy for this: you paged it back in.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#118

Post by ianhanschen » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 12:49 AM UTC

abeppu wrote: post #64

ComputerGuru wrote: post #2

I feel like we live in a world where it is becoming increasingly impossible for things like this to exist. I don’t have much commentary on the matter other than to say it makes me sad.

What are "things like this"? Is it things that exist in public but which don't have clear attribution? B/c in 2020 there were the "monoliths", which were pretty cool. Or, you know, Banksy still exists. Or @fog_karla / @karlthefog for that matter. Is it playful, non-scalable experiences? There's Improv Everywhere. My city has a number of curb-side bird-house sized "libraries". There's a guy who keeps doing extremely l…

The amount of effort put into this rebuttal is why I try hard to avoid reading the comments here.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#119

Post by Psychedelicly » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 12:56 AM UTC

soneca wrote: post #94

mastazi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate you putting out an alternative link. Unfortunately I cannot access archive.is (shows a Cloudflare page with Google reCaptcha). Why not using the more well known archive.org instead? Also IIRC archive.is is hard to access for some users depending on the DNS server they're using.

I get those from time to time. Isn’t just solving the captcha enough to reach the page?

This is dependent on a host of things, such as OP using a VPN lol.

A lot of people are opting away from Google as a standard, to add to that, American websites are a real pain when it comes to harvesting personal information and as such when you see a horrific anti-user gdpr notification you just ... Leave. Same with constant captcha.

I'd like to see stats on websites using OneChoice or whatever its bs name is. For a site called hackernews there sure is a large lack of care regarding personal information.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#120

Post by filoeleven » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 1:12 AM UTC

kypro wrote: post #52

ComputerGuru wrote: post #2

I feel like we live in a world where it is becoming increasingly impossible for things like this to exist. I don’t have much commentary on the matter other than to say it makes me sad.

Not sure how many people will get the reference, but I was thinking this just yesterday about the Pokémon red and blue games. Back in the nineties many rumours spread about hidden secret in those games, but we didn’t have the internet to verify or debunk them. Like many kids back then me and my friends spent hours trying to move that truck to get a mew, but it was impossible, it was just a rumour that spread because…

The greater loss is that the genuine mysteries which remain are assumed to be explained away by someone, somewhere. The assumption that it is already solved leads most people away from exploring further.