Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You can’t prove I meant X

lrb.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–133 of 133 posts

Re: You can’t prove I meant X

#131

Post by perl4ever »

monocasa wrote: post #130
perl4ever wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't tell you because my mind was not sensitized to that as I hadn't heard of it until now.

So, never. Like it's a 1 in 10000 chance that four digits are 1488.

You're suppressing the knowledge of how little time it takes to encounter 10,000 numbers and how long you will remember a bunch of digits that seem meaningful. And how quickly the possibilities multiply when you include everyone you're in contact with that might tell you about something that happened to them.

We're not arguing about one four digit number. Nobody who is paranoid about that is paranoid about just that. Doing a statistical analysis of uses of that number might be instructive if you're really obsessed with it, but it's not the point.

I see 666 and 1337 a lot.

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

Re: You can’t prove I meant X

#132

Post by monocasa »

perl4ever wrote: post #131
monocasa wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, never. Like it's a 1 in 10000 chance that four digits are 1488.

You're suppressing the knowledge of how little time it takes to encounter 10,000 numbers and how long you will remember a bunch of digits that seem meaningful. And how quickly the possibilities multiply when you include everyone you're in contact with that might tell you about something that happened to them. We're not arguing about one four digit number. Nobody who is paranoid about that is paranoid about just that.…

I'm not chasing every 1488 windmill. I don't freak out that some random number came to 1488.

I'm saying that when someone says "1488 - Questionably racist thing" like here https://www.coloradohometownweekly.com/2020/03/19/louisville... , or wears a 1488 jewelry, or gets a 1488 tattoo, that person is broadcasting that they are a white nationalist.

Post reply on HN