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Comment by tuckermi | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a similar problem to the birthday paradox - only instead of looking at the likelihood of any two people in room having the same birthday, we are asking what is the likelihood of two major companies having the same major, visible failure day. There is a nice explanation and calculator here:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-birthd...

The parameters that you provide would be the number of companies that would be newsworthy and the number of possible "dates". You could probably back out the latter from an expectation on reliability (five nines, as an example) or think of it as the time between major, visible failures (e.g. enter 3650 if you think of it as a once in ten years kind of failure).

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thanks. that's an excellent read and adds tremendous balance.

If there's smoke there's fire. In my view, Occam's razor might indicate that coincidence is unlikely, and that the two major incidents in US on the same day China's market crash suggest it's a state sponsored cyber attack.

China's market has been crashing for a few days now. How does a cyber attack on the NYSE help China? All trades will go through just fine on NASDAQ and BATS.

maybe china doesn't have a sophisticated cyber-offense strategy so they are hitting whatever few targets they can.

Interesting hypothesis

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-08/what-first-world-cy...

China's cyber-offense is generally considered to be top notch.

> In my view, Occam's razor might indicate that coincidence is unlikely, and that the two major incidents in US on the same day China's market crash suggest it's a state sponsored cyber attack.

Occam's razor calls for an explanation that does not require the unneeded introduction of a new variable. If you need a state sponsored cyber attack as the alternative explanation, the coincidence theory should be preferred.

http://map.norsecorp.com/

Cyberattacks originating from China is not a new variable

> Cyberattacks originating from China is not a new variable

Sure, but its mere existence in other contexts does not automatically make it the cause of the NYSE etc. glitches. The assumption of causal relationship without any proof is what violates Occam's razor.

(And that map, while pretty, does not proof state sponsored cyber attacks. If I rented myself a $5 VPN account to Russia and then nmap whitehouse.gov, I would appear in that map as an attacker from Russia.)

Occam's razor would actually suggest that coincidence is much more likely explanation than a malicious hacking by a (especially particular) foreign state actor. You have to look at relative probabilities.

You state this in response to a comment linking to a good description of why, precisely, this is broken thinking. Did you even read it?

Also, you've got Occam's razor around backwards, always a good way to cut yourself in public (Occam's razor resists adding more complexity to the solution without evidence)

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