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Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

I'd estimate that a greater percentage of HN readers than Google employees have perfect SATs.

I have been trying to use probability in real life occurrence like this whenever I can, so let's get started back of the envelop style

according to this site http://research.collegeboard.org/content/sat-data-tables

Roughly 1.53 million students take up SAT every year and of which 10k students get perfect SAT score in Math (let's just focus on math for now)

so that's 0.67% (rounded) people getting a perfect score out of the total.

According to this data set, http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analys...

It says there are roughly 31k active users on HN, considering that I have personally seen many google employee's responding to a query/commenting on HN, let's assume a higher number of 2.5k.

so, 2.5k * 0.0067 which is about 17 people, so there are 17 active google employees on HN which have perfect SAT score in Math.

So that was my attempt, can someone provide a better probabilistic model? (maybe I will learn something new and exciting)

I think it'd be a fair assumption that the percentage of Google employees with a perfect SAT score is higher than the national average. Just like the percentage of students at MIT with perfect SAT scores is higher than the national average.

Google employees aren't representative of the entire population.

Why?

Because HN's account registration is darn right hidden.

Not going to lie, I didn't know where the signup button is when I was trying to sign up for a throwaway. I simply gave up after that.

I'm confused (HN newbie). Are you saying it's difficult to create an account here on HN?

I just created one a few days ago to comment on a different topic. It couldn't be easier, I don't think I've ever created an account as easily as here. All I did was "reply" and it kicked me into a screen to choose a name and password. That's all. No email verification or anything complicated.

The point is that there's no registration option if you click on the "Login" link in the top left. The idea is that a visitor can only register an account if they are planning on contributing a comment or post.

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