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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

In China, that would be the unluckiest phone number ever. My 30 story Beijing apartment building lacked floors 4, 14, and 24 due to superstition about 4 meaning death.

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That sounds absurd. I can't believe a civilized society would exclude so many floors! In the US where we are completely reasonable and rational we only exclude the 13th floor. I used to work on the "14th floor" (actually floor 13) and I thought this was hilarious.

In China what happens on the 4th floor stays on the 4th floor.

In Thailand every 13th floor is named 12A. They’re not fooling anyone.

It might also be a trick on the building owner to make their building look taller. They also exclude the 13th, so that’s a total of 4 floors excluded, but it is only 30 stories, so they get to exclude 34 as well so the top floor is 35.

I feel like if I was superstitious about floor numbers I'd still not want to live on the 4th/14th/24th floor regardless of what they called it. It's still the 4th/14th/24th floor.

Is the first floor the floor at ground level or the one above that?

I appreciate your contrition of contention.

Apparently it's pretty common for tall buildings in NYC to skip a few floors so that the top floors have higher numbers. I was grateful for this when my friend's building's power was out and I had to take the stairs to the 42nd floor.

That's not that bad. There is a building in HK with no floors at all with 4 in them. So it is missing 4, 14, 24, 34, 40-49, 54, ...

And its not that four meaning death. In Cantonese, the word for "four" sounds very close to the word for "death"

Awesome. Imagine telling folks that calls to you had better be important enough to warrant risking death!

A Harvest Moon game on the GBA would softlock if you interacted with the clock or something at 4:44.

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