Hacker News Reader

"It is true that playing the lottery doesn't work out for everyone, but it worked really well for us!"

It's sad that are multiple retorts about "lottery winners." Apparently, just on HN, we have about 25 lottery winners. Quite the coincidence!

(cloudflare, shopify, databricks, coinbase, stripe, openai, freshworks, gitlab, dropbox, hashicorp, amplitude, vercel, plaid, hubspot, quip, notion, twilio, etc)

Out of....

Certainly not 1 billion, which is what the lottery chances would be to win 25 times. (1 in 42m)

I don't understand this logic. The US has the Powerball lottery.

So far it has been won 403 times[1] what seems around 20 year time span. With a US population of around 360 million. So not sure why 25 winners would require a population of 1 billion.

[1] https://www.powerball.net/winners

I was using some state odds. Ok so 1 in 1m for Powerball, yet HN is ~3m, so we have 1 in 100k on HN. Already an order of magnitude difference. Then, of course, not even 1 in 100 here are actually giving a startup a serious go. So comparing successful startups to the lottery is easily 1000x off.

Do you understand what a metaphor is?

Of course. Stats say it’s a bad one though

Not really; the "lottery" includes all the stupid smaller games too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com