Hacker News Reader

Comment by whywhywouldyou | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those things that seems interesting/meaningful until you give it more than 10 seconds of thought, and then you realize this is just how life works.

I could whip up an infinite amount of articles explaining how I "Found X through Y degrees of separation", where Y is unexpectedly large. It's trivial to work backwards through your life and reshape everything as a series of coincidences that got you to where you are.

I got my job through 129 degrees of separation! You see, I was born in A, where I went to B school, and met C, who got me interested in D, which led me to discover I had a talent for E, and ... etc etc etc

View on HN

Get on any plane in the world, it's pretty unlikely that you know any of the passengers. It turns out to be extremely likely, however, that at least one of the passengers knows someone that you also know.

funny story: the only time I ever heard "Excuse me, are you jareklupinski?" was while I was looking for my seat on a plane, from a backer of a kickstarter I did years ago :)

There was a time, when for 3-4 flights over a couple of years, I would always meet someone I knew, so much so that my pre-teen son (in those days) mentioned it. Does not happen any more though, my streak just ran out :)

But I think if I use your approach, I may always find someone traveling who knows someone that I know.

Reminds me of my grandparents while they were alive. No matter where we went with them (often on family vacations all over the US and Canada) they would find someone that they either knew or someone with whom they shared a mutual acquaintance.

Yes exactly, I don't really even see this as an application of the 'n degrees of separation' phrase/principle. Why did OP stop at Felix: who suggested they take the class, or whatever, you can keep going back as you say, the six here is completely arbitrary.

Someone doing something for you whom you met not at birth but after some stuff happened isn't 6 degrees of separation, it's just life.

The challenge is that you might only need 6 hops to find that person you’re looking for (on average).

Yes but that would be about finding a Pete when you only know Felix - you knew every link in the chain already, including Pete.

I'm not saying don't be glad you met Felix because it led to your house, just that I don't think it's a case of 6DoS.

It seems we disagree on 6dos. I think it's a useful concept to anchor on, since you can predict the structure of your domain (social networks, renting) based on the size of the network, and then optimize your routing so you get to a certain node (a nice house to live) quickly. Or even in my case - realising there is a path in the first place.

I hope this translates more clearly into engineering terms. The original audience of this post was non-technical.

> It's trivial to work backwards through your life and reshape everything as a series of coincidences that got you to where you are.

What if you worked forwards based on this idea of coincidence engineering?

Well, now you've got Foundation.

There’s even a word for that: serendipity.

Haha congratulations! You got it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com