CarsForaGrand.com: Simple idea that's generating big bucks
37signals.com
37signals.com
You can go buy a lottery ticket and win too. The question is, how many people just like this guy and the plentyoffish guy, etc exist compared to those who attempt to find success on the internet?
I'm not saying don't try hard and don't take risks. I'd be a hypocrite if I did, but don't forget to be realistic about how really hard it is to build a company and make money. The traditional rules of business apply to the internet as well. Lots of people got lucky striking oil in the old days, but there were way more prospectors than there were Rockefellers.
If somebody thinks they're just going to go to SVN, take a winning idea, and copy it, and make big bucks, well, yes, they're not going to succeed. Just cuz the person ahead of you in line at the lotto bought a ticket and won doesn't mean you will -- in fact, it decreases your chances.
But when a whole town calculates the odds, forms a strategy, and chips in to buy a critical % of all tickets available -- and then hits the jackpot -- you can't just say "well they just bought a lottery ticket." (This has happened before.)
It's not just the act, it's the attitude, the legwork, and the dedication.
I've made lots of "easy money" (and publicity/fame/cred) off things that didn't take me much time at all. But the key is that I am the all-grown-up version of a kid who read business books for fun & spent all night mucking around with Photoshop.
IMO my answer to your question would be, it doesn't.
EDIT: above is assuming that you can win more than once if k > 1. If not, the math is more complicated than I can be bothered to try to format in an HN post, but the principle should hold.
My expected return may go down if the person in front of my wins (I have to split with more people, so each winner gets less) - but my chances of winning don't change.
I think the form of lottery I (and others) are referring to is the one where there are N unique tickets and you have a 1/N chance of matching those N numbers. Therefore, there is no dependence between different tickets and the likelihood of matching the winning numbers.
The takeaway is that "distributed uniformly at random" is not a great assumption at all when inputs are generated by a process. It's one of the relatively few things I did learn in my graduate algorithms class.
But - forest, trees, guys? Seriously?
Clearly it isn't a forest/trees issue, I just thought it was a bizarre addition since under any reasonable assumptions it is incorrect.
The guy in front of you has a 1/10 chance of hitting the winner. You ALSO have a 1/10 chance of hitting the winner.
The likelihood of you BOTH hitting the winner in a row is 1/10*1/10 = 1/100.
So, yes, the person in front of you winning DOES decrease your chances of winning. You could also think about it like this:
You have made a few simplifying assumptions. One, that the pmf of picking an number is uniform, and two, that the two choices are independent.
WLOG the first person is male (ease of pronoun usage)
Neither of these are particularly odd assumptions.
Therefore. You have a 1/10 chance of winning. He has a 1/10 chance of winning.
The probability of you BOTH winning is 1/100.
The probability of you winning GIVEN that he won is 1/10.
This is because P(A|B) = P(AB)/P(B) => 1/10 = (1/10 x 1/10)/(1/10), which is in fact a consequence of independence.
To explain: Conditional probability is special. Unlike the intersection, you have to correct for all the stuff that you know wasn't possible (i.e., guy 1 choosing the wrong number). In this case, that exactly compensates for the low probability of the intersection.
EDIT: Asterisks for times and italics don't mix
I'm assuming that you and/or the GP are assuming that everyone can win and everyone's ticket has a random digit drawn separately. However, if we assume that you know what number you picked, you don't know the result of the lottery, you know that the person in front of you won, and he chose his digit uniformly at random, the probability is still 1/10, because it has already been decided that he and the lottery chose the same digit.
But the fact remains that Rockefeller was a prospector. Point being that 37S uses cheerleading as advertising. Their products rely on many "prospectors" taking the plunge; leaping into the world of running a business. The more successful their customers are, they more successful they are.
Hence, many "you can do it too" messages. What's even better about the whole thing is although you can chalk this up to slick marketing, 37S - because of what I said earlier - actually do want their customers to do well.
It's a brilliant piece of positioning that creates a lot of win-wins.
The old boy in his writings showed quite a healthy respect for the machinery of war (eg see atomic bomb). I don't see him saying such a thing in earnest.
But the other part of the quote is this: "Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It’s the tenacity and courage to continue that counts." And that seems to come up quite a bit as being attributed to Churchill.
I think there is a lot of false hope in what [some person or group] are telling their audience. Just because someone out there does [some activity] to make a lot of money doesn't mean that's how the average jane or joe has to do it.
No shit!
Couldn’t $9,999.99 be considered high six figures in the most literal sense?I didn't say though that it was the only way, just that it was the main reason most businesses exist.