It was fun to see this near-adjacent to the submission below. I wonder if one answers the other!
> Q > What has a 1 in a million chance
What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
41–50 of 199 posts
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am seeing this same/similar comment on this thread which has been posted by three quite new accounts. Is this quite normal on HN now or is it some bots farming engagement? Btw, I'm a new member here, knew about HN since a long time but never bothered to make an account up until now
>Is this quite normal on HN now or is it some bots farming engagement? As you can see, my account is not new. I thought the comment will be funny. Not every comment should be terribly ingenious, long thought and crafted to show people how smart the commenter is. As a commenter you have the right to be spontaneous.
> As you can see, my account is not new. I thought the comment will be funny.
Yeah I did find it funny, no doubt. Was just asking of general culture here
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#43> If we guess a President will serve on average about 6 years, then 1 in 6 times 4.0 million = 24 million babies will someday be President. This sentence desperately needs parentheses. Took me five minutes to parse correctly.
To save some time for the rest of us:
> If we guess a President will serve on average about 6 years, then [1 in (6 times 4.0 million =) 24 million] babies will someday be President.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#44"Not in a million years"–something that might happen once in a million years for an individual–happens over 8000 times per year for people on earth. Many of them have smartphones with camera to record the event. That's why we have an actual video where quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like one old-ish account with a number of submissions and comments, and two very-similarly-named copycats that are getting voted down to oblivion. Not very common here, but it happens.
One of them seems to have deleted the comment just as I commented about this. Also downvoting is an option? It doesn't seem to be visible here.
Downvoting is only available to users above a certain karma threshold, I believe around 500 or so.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#46It may be nice to know the safety factors used for structural engineering of homes, offices and other regular buildings in the EU.
The Eurocode defines 3 consequence classes: CC1, CC2 and CC3. CC1 has the lowest consequence and is used for regular homes, light industry and agriculture. The chance of dying as a result of structural failure is low, 0.001. The chance for a CC2 building (apartment buildings, offices, hotels etc.) is defined as moderate with 0.03. And CC3 is for special buildings, such as large stadiums, with a high risk of death on structural failure, 0.3. There are other factors that go in defining a consequence class however, including economic and social concerns.
The consequence class maps to the chance that we find it acceptable for a building to collapse in a given year. Causes can be anything, like extreme weather. For CC1 this is 1 in 100, for CC2 1 in 10.000, for CC3 a chance of 1 in 100.000.
So the chance one or more people die in a stadium during a heavy storm due to structural failure could be 1 in 300.000 in a year if you purely look at the statistics behind the structural safety standard.
The statistics map to simple reference values for the loads of wind, snow, rain, usage etc. and easy safety factors. For example CC2 has a safety factor of 1,5 over all variable loads.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends on the quality of your randomness. If it's a person picking the number that definitely isn't a 1 in a million chance for most numbers. You need to get pretty specialized hardware before you can confidently say it's definitely an equal chance for every number every time.
No, you don’t need specialized hardware. The output of a modern hash for crypto absolutely needs to produce a uniform distribution across a million.
Technically, it's not actually uniform, or "random" - it only has to be indistinguishable from random, e.g. if you had access to a true random source and a pseudo-random one, it should be computationally infeasible to distinguish them.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#48It may be nice to know the safety factors used for structural engineering of homes, offices and other regular buildings in the EU. The Eurocode defines 3 consequence classes: CC1, CC2 and CC3. CC1 has the lowest consequence and is used for regular homes, light industry and agriculture. The chance of dying as a result of structural failure is low, 0.001. The chance for a CC2 building (apartment buildings, offices, hot…
> The chance for a CC2 building (apartment buildings, offices, hotels etc.) is defined as moderate with 0.03
Does this mean 3% or 0.03%?
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you don’t need specialized hardware. The output of a modern hash for crypto absolutely needs to produce a uniform distribution across a million.
Do you mean, after picking a million numbers, then every number in the range should have been picked exactly once?
That's not a uniform distribution. Probability doesn't remember previous state, so the chance of picking the number 241 out of 1 million numbers remains exactly the same after picking 241 once. In particular, the chance of getting no duplicate numbers if you pick a million times, is very close to zero.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#50Reminds me of https://markxu.com/strong-evidence
«One time, someone asked me what my name was. I said, “Mark Xu.” Afterward, they probably believed my name was “Mark Xu.” I’m guessing they would have happily accepted a bet at 20:1 odds that my driver’s license would say “Mark Xu” on it.
The prior odds that someone’s name is “Mark Xu” are generously 1:1,000,000. Posterior odds of 20:1 implies that the odds ratio of me saying “Mark Xu” is 20,000,000:1, or roughly 24 bits of evidence. That’s a lot of evidence.»
«Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but extraordinary evidence might be more common than you think.»