Are You 1 in 1,000,000? | Hacker News Reader

Are You 1 in 1,000,000?

areyou1in1000000.com

31 pointsLiron35 comments

I'm 1 in 1,000,000 but your page didn't work for me! It must be broken.

I kind of like the high number and how long it will take to find a "winner". Allows whoever wins to spread word about something they want (hopefully something clever) and it will be there for a while. The website would lose its meaning if the winner changed every day.

If the website gets over a million uniques a day, there will be a new winner every day.

Not necessarily. Just like the lottery, it is possible (maybe even likely) that having about a million hits in a day will have periods where nobody wins for a few days, or that a winner might happen two or three times in one day. I’ve forgotten my college statistics, but I believe there are permutation or combination equations that would explain this concept simply in symbolic terms.

Depends.

Do you roll a random number from a generator until it matches the displayed number?

If yes, if you have 1,000,000 visitors per day, the probability of having a winner is around 63 %.

However, if your random number generator guarantees that each player gets a different number then yes, the probability of having a winner approaches 100% as you get closer to the millionth visitor.

Actually not true. If the website gets a million unique visitors, there is about a 60% chance of someone winning.

What is the point of this?

To find out if you are one in a million and to advertise that fact if you are.

So it's pointless. Thank you for confirming that.

Fame lotto?

Suggest renaming to are you 1 in 1,000 or so at current traffic rates.

But then the name would not be accurate.

I am currently one in 7 billion if you want to be precise, but for that website to work you'd have to have enough traffic to make someone a winner every now and then. At the current traffic rates that's going to be too long between winners to make it work. Most likely 30 days from now that homepage will look the same as it does today.

So take it down a few orders of magnitude, reserve the other domains and build it up from there, switch to higher magnitude domains as appropriate.

I can see a slight problem with botnet herders gaming the system too.

There’s no cookie so I assume you’re restricting it to one entry per day based on IP. Could somebody ruin the whole thing by flooding the server with requests with spoofed IP addresses?

If someone in a position to fully establish TCP connections with spoofed IPs wanted to ruin something, I'd think they'd find something a lot more interesting to do...

There's no per-IP restriction that I could see. I tried 4 different browsers on the same machine and each was able to try.

I tried with new browser sessions, with HTTP cookies and Flash cookies cleared all to no avail.

I even tried: curl -d "" http://www.areyou1in1000000.com/

There's either some really good or really bad duplicate entry prevention going on.

There's either some really good or really bad duplicate entry prevention going on.

Probably IP + User Agent.

I have my own uniqueness detection heuristic. The short answer is yes, but then I'll invalidate the win and add a CAPTCHA.

Is this inspired by the GET concept in 4chan? http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/4chan_GET_Encyclopedia

Nope

At this rate it'll be half a year before anyone wins! That could put a damper on traffic. How about just randomly picking someone each day?

It does randomly pick someone each day... with 1/1,000,000 probability.

It is not possible to both guarantee a victor, and maintain 1/1,000,000 probability, if your amount of traffic is less than 1,000,000 people per day.

Once you have submit, you can refresh the page. This won't regenerate a number but increase the loser or number count. I guess it's a bug because once some one will win, the guy could just keep refreshing and increase the count of Win by a lot... and for the moment it's pretty easy to increment the count of loss just by refreshing the wrong value.

Thanks, will fix.

I looked into this and I don't think there's a bug -- you're just watching the actual loser count increasing.

Uhh, this will be over tonight unless they put a captcha on this...

Hey thanks for the suggestion; I actually didn't think of that :)

Everyone is unique, everyone is one in a million.

Nope. I am 1 in 7,000,000,000

Helen: "Everyone's special, Dash."

Dash: "Which is another way of saying no one is."

I was not.. and I don't think I ever will be :(

There are billions of women on this planet.

One drop of sperm contains hundreds of millions of spermatozoa.

So the answer is no. I am not one in a million. I am much less likely than that.

Not that it makes me special in any kind of way, it's not as if I was the only one.

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Reddit memes go on reddit.

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