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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the phone was silent but still flashing a screen? Mine does that in that mode.

At my first job we had a guy who could spot incidents coming on the monitoring dashboard before they happened. He never managed to explain or even understand what he was looking for and no-one else picked it up, but he would just see something that made him say things were odd, and most of the time we'd get an alert shortly after.

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Make or get a human to stare at streams long enough and they’ll attune to the patterns. We’re wired for patterns. It doesn’t even have to be conscious and explainable. The signals just suddenly aren’t right.

The perennial example being lab techs/equipment operators and machine hum.

My s/o is convinced she has a tell when we play rock / paper / scissors, and maybe she does, but if so I don’t know it. I just know that if I observe her closely and don’t make a conscious decision about what to throw, I win 80% of the time.

Somewhere deep in my brain, there are neurons that developed for some more evolutionarily-relevant purpose and which are now a little disgusted with how they’re being used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microexpression might be one explanation.

You can somehow subconsciously detect those in your SO without doing it on purpose.

We call those guys the canaries and we keep them deep in the mineshaft

Maybe some signals just bypass the part of the brain which deals with well defined facts. I read somewhere about a construction foreman (HN comment maybe?) who gained the respect of the crew by having an unusually good hit rate in finding piping in the ground or walls. He started to believe in his superpowers but later came to the conclusion that he just subconsciously learned the typical patterns, plus an occasional non-obvious sign. Something like a vent pipe in the wall of the building telling you that sewer piping is probably below ground.

happened to me when playing cyberpunk 2077 on psf ataunch (shudder).

I got to a point where I could reliably tell "the game is about to crash, better save." I save, and 10 seconds after resuming the game, it crashes. I still don't know how I could tell.

Wasn’t the name of that guy Colin Laney

Working solo w/out Frank Woodley?

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