Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks (opens in new tab)

If I want to know how a classic trick is done I'll look at the Wikipedia page. It often won't reveal the secret directly, but if you check the page history you'll find an edit war between magicians which exposes exactly how it works.

> The site is a trading post for stolen, pirated and unlawfully copied tricks, which are covered by copyright, trademarks or other intellectual property in much the same way that TV shows and films are.

A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick". You can patent a process, but of course this reveals it to the public.

Most of the described contents of the tracker are commercially released products. That's really not "stealing tricks" in any way.

This hints at a more general problem: how does one gather a high-quality repository of knowledge on any given subject? How do you get enough stuff? How do you keep the noise down?

I believe some subjects make the problem harder than others. Programming for instance is full of hard to check claims. Even established techniques are hard to assess. Say you need to parse stuff. Will you go recursive descent? LALR? Earley? PEG? Might depend on what you want to parse, which environment you're working in, how much time you may invest… Or say you write a compiler. Will you use OCaml/F#/Haskell for the ease of handling recursive data structures? Or do you want C/C++ because of the speed, and you know tricks to avoid recursive data structures anyway?

One tempting solution is to start a secret society dedicated to hoard knowledge on the chosen subject. It would be hard to get in, but once there you'd only get quality stuff. (Or you might have gotten into a self-delusional sect…) The idea is, maybe if knowledge was visibly scarce and hard to obtain, instead of merely buried under a mountain of noise, we would treat it with the respect it deserves.

These aren't exactly big secrets. Anyone can get copies of The Linking Ring, the magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and see ads for many of the tricks that require special props. (There used to be a competing publication, the "Magic-Gram", but it may be defunct.)

Realistically, if there's a video of a trick, you can usually figure it out. If there are multiple videos from different angles, it's easier. For that matter, there are explanatory videos for most of the big tricks on YouTube now.

I once saw a professional magician having a miserable time performing on the stage on the Santa Cruz beach. He was doing a levitation, and in brilliant sunlight it was embarrassingly obvious how it worked.

Who's up for starting a comp sci secret society? We'll share the best ways to split a cake. The optimal algorithms on how many kittens to have to improve moods, and, best stats how to not forget important anniversaries while trying to boot up a Vulkan pipeline.

:)

I have been interested in magic for a long time, and have subscriptions or accounts at most major magic retailers in the world. I am not the best at performing magic tricks (mainly because I don't have that story telling personality that is needed to execute most tricks), but I love learning them and practicing them in my spare time.

No need to go to the dark net though - 99% of magic tricks are now readily exposed on Youtube public channels, and I am not just talking about the original instructions videos being leaked on there. A myriad of kids stand ready to either perform tricks so badly that they give away the techniques, or else outright show how things are done.

Still though, it is like seeing how a commercial airliner is flown. Watching hundreds of hours of video footage is no substitute for formal training and real like practice.

Also, one of the biggest draws of magic to me is hearing of the origins of most tricks, and researching guys who came up with these things over a hundred years ago.

Any if this on the darknet?

Sounds like the music industry.