One in a million happens a lot when your site is big | Hacker News Reader

One in a million happens a lot when your site is big

gabrielweinberg.com

91 pointsepi0Bauqu28 comments

I once posted a photo to Twitter, and some guy looked up the GPS coordinates in the metadata and accosted me at the Starbucks where I was working.

Turns out he was angry because I posted a tweet three weeks earlier about hating eBay.

There are some crazy people out there, for sure.

If you were working at Starbucks since Twitter launched, you've come a long way in a short period of time.

* I'm assuming, of course, that you're no longer working there :)

I for one took "working at Starbucks" to mean "sitting at Starbucks, working on my laptop."

I was working in the Starbucks, on my laptop.

Ah! My bad :)

Yeah, right.

How did he open? Did he say: "Hey Dustin" or did he say "Are you Dustin?" What were his first words?

The photo I posted showed where I was sitting.

He walked over, explained that he was extremely upset with my tweet about eBay, because his wife works there, and told me to be careful about what I say in public.

Then he took a deep breath, I assume to calm himself down, told me how he found me, said he was unfollowing me on Twitter. Then he left.

utterly creepy.

It's the unfollowing that hurt, isn't it?

That's the most awesome unfollow ever.

Old school

Thats scary. Wow.

Any more to the story? Intrigued by what you said and why this guy freaked out over it. Details?

Seems like it might not be a bad idea for services like Twitpic, etc., to strip certain EXIF data from photographs.

Does that mean it happens often enough for us to worry about it?

I haven't quite had the location-by-metadata gem, but I do get people tracking me down at public events or finding out my business number and calling to harass me with some insane ramblings, or emailing me based on some very confused interpretation of what one of my sites does.

To anyone interested in such events I would highly recommend "The Black Swan" The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

It never amazes me what you can experience, if you are living in a large City or get involved with a large group of people. When I was doing National Service, I once drove to the Hospital, about twenty, 18yr olds suffering from "nocturnal enuresis" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnal_enuresis). It is a very uncommon event in adults <0.5%.

"... To anyone interested in such events I would highly recommend "The Black Swan" The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. ..."

I always manage a chuckle when I hear "black swan" used to describe a rare event. Where I am, a black swan is the norm.

Antipodean? :)

To be fair, The Black Swan doesn't talk about a black swan being rare. The point is that until black swans were discovered in Australia, everyone in the (civilized) world were completely convinced that swans could only be white. Black swans weren't rare, they were inconceivable because it was so far outside expectations that no one considered even the remote possibility of non-white swans.

The Black Swan doesn't talk about rare events, it talks about the danger of not considering that which is so highly improbable as to seem ridiculous, such as the possibility of non-white swans.

In other words, the frequency of black swans wasn't 1 in 1 million swans pre-discovery of Australia, it was zero.

I'm sure you know all of this but if you haven't read the book I do think it is worth your time.

There are ways of provoking it, and given the context, it sounds to me like someone knew it.

Oh, you don't need a big site for this stuff to happen. These things aren't even close to one in a million. I've had tons of these and even weirder running sites with only 10-20,000 users.

Famous Gordon Letwin quote: "One in a million is next Tuesday". http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/03/30/10416...

Terry Pratchett was fond of saying that one-in-a-million chances come true 9 times out of ten, but I believe in that he was referring to fiction and not internet crazies.

I don't think it even has to be a million....100K is plenty for most of these things

You are right but they will occur at a tenth of the rate.

Having been developing on a high traffic site for a while, these things are very on point. We always joke that our inputs are superpositions: all combinations of inputs are possible into our site, due to the sheer number of people visiting a day, and the # of crazy people who will attempt to inject nonsense into their POST requests.

Reading his examples reminds me of when I worked tech support for a large cable ISP. But those situations were more like one in a hundred.

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