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Comment by thehappypm | Hacker News Reader

Source?

We did an experiment. We talked about how hard it is to find highlighter yellow nail polish. Nobody in the house is a purchaser of nail polish nor did we do any searches for highlighter or yellow or nail or polish. A day or two later my wife got an Instagram ad for highlighter yellow nail polish. It could have been a coincidence or maybe they were listening.

Or maybe some combination of things we did previously led naturally to thinking about that yellow nail polish. I'm thinking about something like the trick where you ask somebody a bunch of addition problems that have 14 as the answer (what's 10+4? 2+12? 3+9? etc...) then ask them to name a vegetable and they will almost always say carrot.

Am I missing something? Why carrot?

It's an association thing. I thought carrot too. Maybe it's because of the tedious nature of processing. Maybe it's because the orange bar at the top of the screen makes me think carrot.

I’ve always assumed it’s because of the association of 14 with 14 carat gold.

Interestingly, I've always seen it as any number of quick math problems, not just ones that equal 14, and it consistently works too.

12 year old me was not much of a scientist. I don't think I ever tried any number other than 14...

"I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that, there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays--my grandmother wasn't dead. So I remembered that, just in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way." -- Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman"

Do you have the setting that turns on end to end encryption? I thought by default it was off (and always off for group chats) ?

Are you thinking of Telegram? There is no such setting in WhatsApp.

Someone did this trick with me in the '80s, but the numbers were to sum to 13. I still said "carrot", however. Wish I would have thought to use a different number than 13 when I tried it out on others.

Ah yes, a bunch of anecdotes in reply.

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