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Comment by ridiculous_fish | Hacker News Reader

"Prototaph" by Keith Laumer is a short story with this premise. All the computers refuse to insure a man, so he goes on a quest to figure out why. It's a fun read and incredibly prescient, published in 1966!

It's available online legally:

http://hell.pl/szymon/Baen/The%20Baltic%20War/The%20Lighter%...

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Isn't that the wrong way around? An arbitrary life insurance on this man should be available for a price of 0, since there is zero risk of ever having to pay out.

I suppose it's almost like a null return, something that can't be computed when the only expected outputs are positive non-zero numbers.

What a great read! The language is a bit bumpy at times, but it was published over 50 years ago.

What does 'BB' mean?

There's an English idiom "sweating bullets" [0] which refers to a state of panic or dread, possibly with the image that droplets of sweat are being forced out at speed.

I believe the author is replacing "bullets" with "BBs" [1] to fit the youthful 21-year-old protagonist. BBs are a much tamer kind of spherical projectile popularized by a variety of teen-toys. The actual origin of "BB" goes back to serious guns again, as a defined size of metal buckshot pellets.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sweat_bullets

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BB_gun

Ahh, excellent explanation, thank you!

I assumed it meant he was sweating bullets. Like little shots from a bb gun

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