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Comment by bentpins | Hacker News Reader

Handy.

I'm rather fond of http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/

It gives names, (probably fake) addresses, credit card numbers, as well as a bunch else. It allows CSV export if you want up to 50,000 identities generated. It gives you options regarding the country too.

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Definitely. I used to work with the people making fakenamegenerator.com, and I never realized how much it really tells you until getting a bit into the code. A fantastic site, to say the least.

What are the odds that it gave me the same birth date as my actual birth date? Month and day, but not year. That's quite the coincidence, though I suspect it's only something like 1:60.

That would be 1:365.24

It would be 1 in 365, but leap years mess it up a bit.

Leap days are generated at the same frequency as regular days as far as I can tell. That simplifies things again to 1:366

1/365 I'd think. There are 365 days in a year and it has to match exactly one day. You might be interested in the Birthday Paradox though http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-birthd...

Birthdays are not uniformly distributed. http://www.panix.com/~murphy/bday.html

Yes, but the probability that it found the same month and day as iLoch's, depend on the uniformity and independence of the month/day generator, not the distribution of actual birthdays.

Yeah my guess was based on the birthday paradox. Though now I see that yes the software probably chose a random number between 1 and 365 so the birthday paradox wouldn't apply.

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