Smarter Every Day Challenge: Learn the Backwards Brain Bike
Why Hacker News recommends it
Used as a reference when discussing inverted-steering analogies and how hard it is to rewire a learned skill.
What it is
Mike Boyd takes up Smarter Every Day's challenge to learn to ride the Backwards Brain Bike, a bicycle whose steering is inverted, and rides 50 meters. It shows how hard it is to unlearn a motor skill.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2018 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Cites jesusth1 · 2018-08 · on “4D toys”
Yeap, [this video] this guy took a more serious attempt at learning to ride the backwards and it seems it didn't take him that much time.
Cites hamaluik · 2020-04 · on “Right-to-left-language-induced GUI bugs”
I had never really considered RTL design until I decided on a whim to support Arabic in an app [1], and before doing so I would have easily laughed at this. After doing so, I can completely understand it. It seems so simple—text just goes from right to left instead of left to right, but truly grokking that seems impossible for me. It's like riding a bike with the handlebars backwards [2]—it just doesn't work in your brain, as much as your higher-level thoughts seem to understand it. I was lucky that Flutter did almost all of the heavy lifting for me, but I spent more time than I'd like to admit ironing things out and I still don't think it's quite right. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]
Cites aurizon · 2023-05 · on “Poisoning Language Models During Instruction Tuning”
This reminds me of the 'poisoned' clown bike, which has a geared stem that inverts steering, move bars in an arc to the right = bike goes left. [this video]