9 ms·
My mom left behind some number code
- kleiba 4y agoStarts out like a Dan Brown novel, except that the climax is slightly less exciting.
- kurthr 4y agoSure does look like she was testing her short term memory. (That's the first and only answer)
- indigodaddy 4y agoAnd I surely would not have done anywhere close to good on that test
- wutheringh 4y ago[flagged]
- wruza 4y agoI also thought that until I took the test above itt. Level 11 with some luck and morning brain fog.
- kevmo314 4y agoIf you'd like to test your own short term memory in the same vein: https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/number-memory https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/number-memory
- jcims 4y ago49yo level 12 reporting in :P wish they had an IP address version
- loganc2342 4y ago20 year old level 11 here :)
- FrostKiwi 4y agoLevel 1, thanks to full width numbers: https://i.imgur.com/nSn7Yi8.png https://i.imgur.com/nSn7Yi8.png
- hn_go_brrrrr 4y ago...what happened here?
- adastra22 4y agoHis input IME output a full-width 5 instead of an ASCII/Latin 5. Different code point.
- orbital-decay 4y agoA nice entry for another "Falsehoods programmers believe about..."
- 4ggr0 4y ago24 year old level 11, seems like level 11 is the sweet-spot for HNers.
- alarmingfox 4y ago24 level 10, missed out on level 11 by 1 number :')
- 4ggr0 4y agoI was honestly surprised that I reached level 11, the last 3 levels felt like I completely forgot the number, but my subconsciousness seemed to remember after all. Missed out by 1 number as well on the last one :')
- geocrasher 4y ago46 year old level 11... I think
- churchill 4y agoAge 21, Level 11 - I remembered the last digit of level 12 but I fatfingered 3 instead of 4.
- nunez 4y ago35, level 12, and I slept poorly today too!
- wintorez 4y agoPosts like this remind me what an amazing phenomenon Internet is. 20 years ago a question like this would have been left unanswered. I hope we get to protect and keep Internet for generations to come.
- p-e-w 4y agoNot only would it have been left unanswered, it would have been almost impossible to get an answer even with enormous resources. You could have paid a detective agency millions of dollars and the chance that one of them would stumble upon an obscure memory test containing the numbers would have been slim to none, even with tens of thousands of man-hours dedicated to the task.
- tasuki 4y agoMakes me wonder how many man-hours were spent on this now. Surely either it was luck that a person with this knowledge read the question, or an extremely large number of people read the question?
- Sander_Marechal 4y agoLinus's law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - Eric S. Raymond
- GTP 4y agoOr maybe the one who answered just tried googling for an increasing sequence of those numbers. You can try by yourself to see if it works.
- gibolt 4y agoProbably someone with some good search engine skills. Considering most of the numbers are exact matches, searching for those exact numbers should result in a hit if it has been crawled
- kataklasm 4y agoYou assume that question could only have been with innate knowledge of the answer. But just by querying a search engine with two of the numbers I was able to get the same link: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22627418%22+%2219223530%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22627418%22+%2219223530%22 With DuckDuckGo it is even the only search result for the same two numbers and I didn't even have to quote them: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=627418+19223530 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=627418+19223530
- isitthough42 4y agoThis is simply answered by https://www.google.com/search?q=925+8642+37654+627418 https://www.google.com/search?q=925+8642+37654+627418 The first page results would have answered it already - better than the stackexchange answers quoting random slides: 925 8642 37654 627418 0401473 19223530 486854332 2531971768 85129619450 918546942937 Figure 1: Digit Memory Test by Howard (1983, in Bernstein et al., 2008:215).
- aaron695 4y ago"Essentials of Psychology" Douglas A. Bernstein, Peggy W. Nash which is on the net has it (spaced out - "9 2 5") They reference Howard which doesn't seem to be 'available' Here is a test of your immediate memory span (Howard, 1983). Ask someone to read to you the numbers in the top row at the rate of about one per second; then try to repeat them back in the same order. Then try the next row, and the one after that, until you make a mistake. Your immediate memory span is the maximum number of items you can repeat back perfectly.
- aaron695 4y ago[can't edit above] Just a confirmation it's in Howard 1983 through Google Books. But you have to search on the first number of each line "9836014289" because it's a table. This is why the books don't come up directly in search. Also you can't 'see' it, you just know it's there - https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&id=ho8QAQAAIAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%229836014289%22 https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&id=ho8QAQAAIAAJ&f...
- pgalvin 4y agoHappy to report the full book can be borrowed on the Internet Archive. This can be found on page 92, as indicated in your link. https://archive.org/details/cognitivepsychol00howa https://archive.org/details/cognitivepsychol00howa
- LanceH 4y agoWhoa. Did this exact test in '95. They made a point of this being your memory span, but it's definitely something which can be trained. This is something we would do as part of (professional) language transcription/translation, just recording mass amounts of numbers, because those tend to be important.
- userbinator 4y agoA few hours ago, while searching for something completely unrelated (decoding serial numbers for some obscure equipment) on Google, this odd result showed up and I decided to have a glance out of curiosity, but now to see someone else submitted this exact same page to HN and that it's on the front page? A very puzzling coincidence indeed!?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- robin_reala 4y agoIt was earlier on Stackexchange’s list of “Hot Questions” that appear in the sidebar on their sites. Presumably Google prioritises those in the SERPs.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoA puzzle on top of the puzzle. The fractal nature of our reality.
- nsoonhui 4y ago[flagged]
- k_sze 4y agoIt gives me great relief to know that we’re still very VERY far from the singularity.
- threadweaver34 4y agoIt's BS good enough for the humanities, but not the sciences.
- k_sze 4y agolike PhD-level postmodernism essays, right?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bee_rider 4y agoPerhaps it is harder to detect bullshit in the humanities because the material is more complex.
- threadweaver34 4y agoIt's that that right answer is fuzzier.
- CJefferson 4y agoActually, so far I've seen humanities people discard chatGPT output faster than sciences. In the humanties there is lots of well-written text of no useful depth, so academics in the humanities get good at filtering it quickly. In the sciences, it seems "this is well written and well structured" is treated as a filter to assume the text probably contains something worth reading -- of course eventually it is found to be nonsense.
- upwardbound 4y agoJust for fun, it would be cool if each of us remembers to take the time to leave at least 1 or 2 little puzzles for our descendants to figure out, as a way to have happier feelings again one last time with you, in a way. My grandpa would totally have done something like this. I remember he showed me a big book of unsolved lost locations of buried treasure, and a related story he read me about a golden key hidden behind a wooden tile of Key West, FL in a large, painted wooden wall map of that part of the ocean. I'd totally love to leave a little puzzle for those I love. Maybe we could all try to remember to do so, or do it now way in advance by setting up cloud compute accounts running a script like a time capsule that will send out certain messages at a specific date in the future.
- lostlogin 4y ago> I'd totally love to leave a little puzzle for those I love. Maybe this is a good way of reframing my mess of a Home Assistant install. Why does the coffee machine turn on at that time? Why does the ventilation system do that?
- dopidopHN 4y ago« Gran pa is the gost in the machine honey, he often skip documenting his work, too »
- brabarossa 4y agoWait till people start personalizing ChatGPT…
- AYBABTME 4y agoI'm away from my family (with a 3.5yo kid) and I've been annoying them and reminding them of my existence daily by talking to them over the security system, replaying "I love papa" songs in our Tesla when they drive and making the car fart when my daughter walks by it. I like to think if something happens to me, my wife could impersonate my "ghost in the machine" presence for a bit.
- deleted 4y ago
- Archipelagia 4y agoIt reminds me of a time when I've looked found an old password-protected .rar archive on my old computer. It took me around a day to brute force the password and I ended up finding a bunch of old guitar tabs I completely forgot about. Fun times!
- blackfawn 4y agoIt could be a clever way to obscure one/both "wrong" numbers by hiding them in plain sight in a memory test... :)
- luxuryballs 4y agodang this is really depressing
- dudeinjapan 4y agoOH sh*t those are the nuclear launch codes.
- eunos 4y agoThis is the closest HN submission resembling r/nosleep submission.
- z3t4 4y agoBefore moving from my childhood home I collected a fair amount of shiny stones and hide them in a coffin in the woods. And also made a treasure map and hid it in the house. I wonder if anyone has found it.
- more_corn 4y agoPro tip. If you’re creating a code, make it look like something that’s not a code so your code breaker concludes there’s no code there and gives up.
- mrguyorama 4y agoIt's a funny reminder of humans that this random info in a notebook made the person jump to "she was into numerology and left us a puzzle" rather than "oh these are just some things she wrote down" Remember, humans are pattern matching machines and will torture a pattern out of ANYTHING. Think horses not zebras, and it's never the compilers fault.