[HN Gopher] Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? (2011)
___________________________________________________________________
Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? (2011)
Author : vinnyglennon
Score : 162 points
Date : 2021-01-06 23:43 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.damninteresting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.damninteresting.com)
| crazydoggers wrote:
| It's sad he spent so much of his time and energy on get rich
| quick schemes. Turns out it's not quick nor easy... and the ROI
| when you could do something productive is very poor.
|
| I often think if we taught more about entrepreneurship in schools
| a lot of these get rich quick schemes would wither. I think as a
| society we've got a lot of entrepreneurial personalities that
| simply lack a means and understanding on how to apply those
| skills appropriately.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Beating the system is the point of get rich quick schemes.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Mad offtopic unimportant nitpick here.
|
| I'm so extremely put off when an author spends three paragraphs
| building up to an exciting climax, hits enter enter and then
| writes "Michael Larson was born in the small town of Lebanon,
| Ohio in 1949". I had to skim half the article to find out how the
| story continued.
|
| Anecdotally, this strikes me as a uniquely American thing to do
| (or, at least, I've not read a single Dutch article pulling this
| trick), is there any point to it? Is it just something about
| eyeballs and ads? Do they teach this stuff in journalism school?
| Maybe Americans are immune to it because of the enormous amounts
| of "build up, build up, build up, almost there..... _Let 's
| continue after the messages! ^_^_" on childhood TV?
| runawaybottle wrote:
| People write drunk bro, or on speed, especially Americans.
| kodt wrote:
| This format is very common in long form journalism. New Yorker
| articles are a good example of this format.
|
| First they have the hook, then they go back and tell the
| persons entire life story. I think the point is for you to get
| somewhat emotionally invested in the story, almost like reading
| a novel or short story instead of just reporting the facts.
|
| Some people find it more enjoyable to read, or may find it
| easier to retain information in this format as you begin to get
| invested in the story.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| On many mobile sites (amp?) an ad is inserted every screenful
| of text so the longer the text the more ads.
|
| Not sure this is related but go look at english recipe sites.
| 10-15 screens of fluff to get to the recipe. It's clearly some
| kind of SEO or ad optimizing formula
| progre wrote:
| I was complaining to my wife about this exact thing
| yesterday. Her reply: You do know we own like 20 printed
| cookbooks right? No ads in those...
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| Author of the article here. It's definitely not about ads. On
| principle, we don't host ads on Damn Interesting, and we never
| have.
|
| We aim for narrative non-fiction, to tell a true story that
| keeps the reader intrigued throughout. We've found over the
| years that stories with a good "hook" or "teaser" seem to be
| best received by readers. We've also found that people want
| some background on the people/places they are reading about,
| and this often requires us to jump back in time after the
| teaser to fill in the relevant information.
|
| If your goal is just to extract the basic bones of the story
| rather than to be entertained for a while, you probably won't
| like this article, nor the others in our catalog. Our approach
| to storytelling is not for everybody. And that's okay with us--
| trying to please everyone is the short road to clickbait town.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| FWIW, I thought it was a highly entertaining read and well
| written. This style of introduction followed by a 'rewind to
| the beginning' is pretty common in my experience,
| particularly in magazine articles including longform
| newspaper pieces, here in the UK. I don't know why anyone
| would associate it with clickbait - I find that strange.
|
| If I were being hyper critical, I'd suggest maybe some kind
| of visual section break, like one of those stylised wavy
| lines - I have no idea what they're called!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Thank you, author. I actually _like_ the style - it is
| entertaining.
|
| And in fact, the guys back story was almost the highlight
| really. Laying himself off to collect unemployment ... what a
| piece of work.
| rriepe wrote:
| Articles occasionally get made into movies, and therefore have
| a huge incentive to be movie-like:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_magazin...
| FatalLogic wrote:
| Would you prefer the article to begin "Michael Larson was born
| in the small town of Lebanon, Ohio in 1949. Although he was
| generally regarded as creative and intelligent, he had an
| inexplicable preference for shady enterprises over gainful
| employment. One of his earliest exploits was in middle school
| ..."?
|
| No, you probably would stop reading after two lines of that.
| Because who cares about this ordinary-sounding guy? We have to
| know why he's interesting, first.
|
| Or would you prefer to not know about Larson's background, and
| just get the exciting part of the story? Maybe you would, but
| many people would be left feeling dissatisfied by that and
| halfway through they would be asking, "So, who is this guy
| Larson, where did he come from? What's the context behind all
| this crazy stuff he did?"
|
| Organizing a narrative is a difficult logistical challenge.
| Could you do it better?
| anonymfus wrote:
| The simplest solution favoured by European magazines and
| newspapers is to put factoids away from the main body of the
| article. They can be put into separate text boxes, or added
| to illustration descriptions. The laziest illustration would
| be a photo of some generic landmark view from that town, but
| they can also try to find a photo of his school (there are
| about five schools in that Lebanon, right?), for example.
| Notice that they already have a photo with his girlfriend
| with a single sentence description, they could move a half of
| tangent about his personal life in it.
|
| The harder solution is to try to find a context which will
| make that factoid more interesting. For example, "Shaker
| Curse". Imagine an article telling you that everybody born
| there is cursed to never prosper, and now your mind is
| wondering, did Michael Larson broke the alleged curse, or
| affirmed it?
|
| The hardest solution I had seen was an entire separate
| encyclopedia with biographies of people mentioned in the news
| crosslinked with a news article.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| I don't know where (for example) Mark Zuckerberg was born,
| nor when, and nor do I care.
|
| I know the parts which are relevant to Zuckerberg's story:
| that he was likely born in the US, and was likely around 20
| when he founded Facebook.
|
| A journalistic interpretation of Larson's childhood is
| speculative non-sense. The journalist was not there, and does
| not even cite who thought Larson was "creative and
| intelligent".
|
| It doesn't add anything (for me), except that the journalist
| presenting themself as an omniscient narrator makes the
| article read as a fictional story.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Zuckerberg was a child of privilege raised in one of the
| wealthiest neighborhoods in the US and attended an
| extremely elite private high school. That's relevant.
| ehnto wrote:
| Absolutely. Part of that sentence is quite captivating "he
| had an inexplicable preference for shady enterprises over
| gainful employment". You've piqued my interest, and now I
| actually care to investigate how this story might unfold.
|
| I think the grandparent is talking about the tendency for
| writers to show all their cards in scene one and then retract
| them, saying "Aha! Got your attention, now instead of what I
| was previously describing, here's some mindless filler".
| dimeatree wrote:
| Yes. It's to the point.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I would prefer they at least tell us whether he cheated or
| got lucky. It's an awful cliffhanger that serves no purpose.
| This isn't a Dan Brown novel.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| This seems to be a typical feature of "long-form journalism"
| [1]. This might be a typically American format? (As a Belgian,
| I also see this type of articles less often in our media.) I've
| grown to dislike it because it feels pseudo-intellectual:
| making articles longer with the implication that they must be
| of higher quality (especially in contrast to clickbait), but in
| reality, it often feels like the journalist is just fluffing up
| the text with irrelevant information. I think these articles
| are supposed to be read like a short story, but nonfictional,
| rather than as a factual account of what happened.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-form_journalism
| [deleted]
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Journalism school has been removed from the equation for most
| American (and probably beyond those borders) bloggers.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| From what I can tell, the problem is that those first three
| paragraphs are a perfectly good introduction to a different
| article. Larson is obviously going to be a main character in
| this story, but there are strong signals that the article won't
| be primarily _about_ Larson. Instead, it seems to be building
| up to a story about how the show went wrong and what the wider
| effects were. In particular, it 's promising themes of themes
| of shock and incredulity.
|
| The next four paragraphs deliver none of this, opting instead
| to make a study of Larson's character. The show itself, another
| major character, doesn't makes an appearance again until
| paragraph 8. The first hint at the foreshadowed themes doesn't
| show up until the end of paragraph 10, where "Bob Edwards was
| uneasy about Larson." and then not again until paragraph 14,
| where "Host Peter Tomarken became increasingly
| flabbergasted..."
|
| From that point on, the article seems to match the tone of the
| introduction. The correct fix is probably to rework the
| introduction to include some of the themes present in the first
| half of the article. Maybe focus on themes of escalation, as
| the whole article is built as a slow, constant build-up of
| intensity.
| kylewins wrote:
| Rough Calculation:
|
| 11.7 billion one dollar bills are in circulation today
|
| 100,000 / 11,700,000,000
|
| Every Day 1 in Million Chance of Winning
|
| The guy was seemingly clever why not take the 5mins to find the
| odds or a few hours to ask the local math teacher...
| mywittyname wrote:
| Depending on how the serial number was chosen, the odds could
| be dramatically higher, dramatically lower, or zero. If the
| serial number was derived from another, new bill, received from
| a local bank, then the odds are quite good.
|
| If it is chosen by writing the serial number of a bill in your
| pocket, then circulating the bill by purchasing something. The
| odds go up if you happen to stop by the banks a few days after
| that happened, or they go to zero if the bill was not fit for
| circulation and it was removed by the Federal Reserve.
|
| Also, there's a good chance that a random serial number is not
| actually valid.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| Yeah, I'd wager it was his laziness and proneness to shortcuts.
| One thing, though: Article states the radio show took place a
| few months after he won so probably 1984 or 1985. Federal
| Reserve website states that there were 7.5 billion one-dollar
| bills in circulation in 1999 (couldn't find numbers for years
| prior 1999). Increase of one-dollar bills in circulation seems
| to have fluctuated a lot over the course of years, might have
| been a significantly lower number in 1984/1985. I mean, it'd
| still be an impossibly long shot but I felt like pointing it
| out.
| [deleted]
| kylewins wrote:
| I was also thinking if the radio host was reading serial
| numbers from a specific newish year and the bank notes are
| more likely to be new then old maybe that would also increase
| the odds.
|
| Yeah, but I'll pass on that. Give me a job at walmart over
| reading serial numbers all day.
|
| Myth of sisphus
| [deleted]
| Vinnl wrote:
| As someone who also stacked the odds in their favour on a
| gameshow [1], I can appreciate the effort but am also glad I
| never got as obsessed as this guy. Although my partner in crime
| (my brother) did just go on another winning streak on another
| gameshow [2], so maybe I should start worrying...
|
| [1] https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow or Twitter
| thread:
| https://twitter.com/VincentTunru/status/1205527364739981312
|
| [2] https://www.nu.nl/media/6099564/andries-tunru-evenaart-
| recor...
| mabbo wrote:
| As a non-Dutch speaker, I have to know- what was the joke?
| w0utert wrote:
| For the second word he says 'my ex girlfriend...' and then
| guesses the dutch equivalent of the word 'cunt', basically.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| > Each day a disk jockey would read a serial number aloud on the
| air, and if any listener was able to produce the matching dollar
| bill they would win $30,000. Michael reasoned that 100,000 one
| dollar bills was 100,000 opportunities to win the prize, giving
| him a statistical advantage. [...] They soon realized that it was
| impossible for two people to examine that much money in the
| allotted time
|
| This doesn't seem possible. _Surely_ someone who thought the way
| he did would have realised that you could sort the money in
| advance.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| This scheme was such a profound misunderstanding of
| probability. You have 100,000 of the billions of dollar bills
| in circulation, so what? And of course his faulty risk
| assessment bit him in the end from the liability of having
| $100,000 in cash lying around.
|
| If he had invested the $110k in the stock market in 1984 he
| would have been a millionaire at the time of his death in 1999,
| but crazies and normal people never see that.
|
| https://www.noelwhittaker.com.au/resources/calculators/stock...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yes, I have always ascribed to the get-rich-slow schemes and
| I encourage my children to do the same.
| stainforth wrote:
| What does a dead guy do with a million dollars?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| What did he do with the no money he had at death?
| paxys wrote:
| It's possible that he was only dead because he didn't have
| good health insurance/enough money for treatment.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Never underestimate sorting. Finding something in a sorted list
| is much faster then going through all items every time.
|
| For example when pairing socks, first sort them by color. Or
| when doing hit-box-detection in xyz, first sort by one of the
| axis.
| jerf wrote:
| You don't need to fully sort it. You do a really, really
| partial radix sort and stop at step one or two, because you
| don't need a perfect sort, just to cut it down to a few hundred
| bills instead of a 100K.
|
| You trade an O(bucket size) linear search for the (log n) in
| the O(n log n) (assuming you optimally sort), which in computer
| terms is usually a bad idea but in this case, a significant
| savings.
| raldi wrote:
| Maybe this synopsis is mistaken, and to make the game winnable,
| the actual contest was to be the first to bring in a bill
| _containing a substring_ of digits, which sorting wouldn 't
| help with.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| n = 100_000 K = 2 # seconds time_secs = K * n *
| log(n) t = timedelta(seconds=time_secs) t #
| datetime.timedelta(days=26, seconds=56185, microseconds=92994)
|
| So around a month (at 24x7, so in reality more like 3 months)
| of time sorting if in a horrendous abuse of big O notation we
| assume that sorting the notes takes 2 * n * log(n) seconds.
|
| I guess he could use a pigeonhole sort though - at constant
| factor of 10 seconds this gives 11 days 49600 seconds.
| mamon wrote:
| Bigger problem is that there are 11.7 B one dollar bills in
| circulation [1]. Even having that $100k sorted you still only
| stand 1: 117000 chance of winning.
|
| [1] https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-
| finance/how-...
| egman_ekki wrote:
| But there is no downside (besides the time cost of the one-
| dollar-bill operation). If you don't win, you just put the
| money back to the bank.
|
| What is interesting is that you could theoretically deposit
| (part of) the money into your account and then withdraw
| somewhere else, so change the odds slightly.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Both loss of interest and loss of deposit insurance. You
| can lose the money to theft or fire.
| paxys wrote:
| The only downside is someone could break into your house
| and steal all the cash, but of course that would never
| happen.
| FatalLogic wrote:
| That searching is quite expensive, considering the odds
| (only one chance per day). Besides, there was also
| significant additional downside, which became obvious in
| this case: The risk of having a pile of cash in your
| house which could be stolen
| bluGill wrote:
| Back when this contest was running bank savings accounts
| paid enough interest that there was a real loss of having
| all your money withdrawn. I'm not sure what year this
| was, so I can't look up the interest rate, but a couple
| thousand lost per month isn't an unreasonable estimate.
| [deleted]
| kgwgk wrote:
| 20+% interest paid in a savings account (2% per month)
| seems unreasonable.
| bluGill wrote:
| 6%Apr, and a few hundred thousand.. 20% might have been
| possible briefly in the 1970s
| jacurtis wrote:
| > a couple thousand lost per month isn't an unreasonable
| estimate.
|
| This was the mid-to-late 80's... it wasn't THAT long ago.
| The majority of people reading this were alive back then.
| Yes interest rates were higher in the 80s and 90s, but
| not as high as you are insinuating. At this time (from my
| memory) you could expect about 1% per year in interest.
| Maybe upwards of 2% annual interest if you had a very
| generous deal with a bank, but even that is unlikely.
|
| At 1% a year, his $100,000 is generating ~$83 per month
| in interest.
|
| Granted he could do other things with his money to
| appreciate it. Which would increase his time value of
| money. But the opportunity cost of checking/savings
| account interest was pretty small.
|
| Granted the guy was stupid to begin with for even
| thinking he could win this contest and for putting $100k
| in cash in his house in case... I don't know, someone
| broke in or something... wait, that's what happened.
| drdec wrote:
| I would humbly suggest that perhaps your memory isn't
| quite accurate.
|
| https://www.bankrate.com/banking/cds/historical-cd-
| interest-...
|
| https://barbarafriedbergpersonalfinance.com/savings-
| account-...
|
| Also, due to inflation, if you want to compare with
| today's dollars you need to multiply the amounts by
| approximately 4.
| kgwgk wrote:
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
| xpm-1986-03-31-mn-2097-s...
|
| MARCH 31, 1986
|
| "A wealthy San Francisco socialite in her 80s keeps $1
| million in a passbook savings account earning a mere 5.5%
| interest."
|
| A "mere" 5.5% is quite higher than 1%.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| I'd sort into 10 piles by first digit, and then sort each
| pile into ten piles by second digit. This would involve
| looking at each note twice, so at two seconds per note it
| would take 400000 seconds, or around 7 days of two people
| working 8 hours a day. The small piles would have 1000 notes
| in them, which is easy to check in a day.
| genera1 wrote:
| > The small piles would have 1000 notes in them, which is
| easy to check in a day.
|
| By the time you could even buy an 8-bit home computer for
| couple hundred dollars, store all the serial numbers on a
| floppy and simply search through them once per day
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That would take so much more time than sorting each batch
| of 1000 notes, and sorted notes let you do your daily
| check in less than a minute.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| That would let you check instantly if you had that
| dollar, but you'd then have difficulty physically finding
| it.
| llampx wrote:
| Create an index. Sort the notes into sets of 1000 and
| label them, add the label as a column into your Foxpro
| database.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Most likely scenario, you never look sort through it
| again. Least likely scenario, you get $30,000 (probably
| like $280,000 in today's money) to dig through them all
| one more time.
| frombody wrote:
| I'm sure I'm missing something in this discussion, but why
| wouldn't you just OCR the serial numbers and put the
| results in a textfile and sort that?
| drdec wrote:
| How long would it take you to OCR each bill?
|
| Then, once you know you have the winner, how long is it
| going to take you to find it?
| rootsudo wrote:
| Back then, I'm assuming the contest was late 80's/early
| 90's the tech wasn't around for that.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| There's a good chance the contest was a ruse and the disk
| jockey was reading a serial number off a dollar he just pulled
| from his wallet.
| eutectic wrote:
| That would be illegal.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's only a crime if you get caught.
|
| Anyway, I know lotteries and gambling are regulated, what
| about e.g. radio or charity raffles?
| Loughla wrote:
| Yes, radio, charity, and other raffles are regulated. I
| encourage you to search for [your state] raffle statute.
| Or [your city/county] raffle statute.
| ehnto wrote:
| Just because it is illegal doesn't mean it's not done.
| I've seen plenty of faux competitions ran successfully
| without consequence.
|
| Same with email signup regulations. Plenty of laws and
| regulations, yet it's really hard for people to get
| caught and fined for misbehaving.
| Retric wrote:
| The same is true of shoplifting etc. Getting caught has
| nothing to do with something being a crime.
| zip1234 wrote:
| How many people break a traffic law every single time
| they drive and don't get caught>?
| [deleted]
| jacobr1 wrote:
| One of the common regulations you often hear about is "no
| purchase necessary" - even for games where most player
| get a chance to win by purchasing a product, they still
| need to provide some other mechanism like mailing in a
| request.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Oh, no. Ooooh, no.
|
| So, thinking about how you would run this contest, you've got
| three basic ways of generating a random serial number.
|
| The first is literally generating a random serial number; the
| problem being, there is an infinitesimal chance the serial
| number you just generated is in the pocket of someone in your
| listening area.
|
| The second is to choose a sibling serial number of a bill in
| your pocket -- change one of the last couple of digits. If
| you're lucky, the sibling bills will have been delivered to
| the same bank in the same area and still be in circulation.
| But there's still a pretty slim chance it's even possible.
|
| The _best_ way to ensure that your contest is actually
| winnable, that your target bill is in circulation would be to
| start the contest by taking all the bills from your
| collective pockets, at the studio, writing down the serial
| numbers, and then handing them to someone to go buy coffee
| for the studio across the street. Wait a week or two, and
| your target bills will have circulated through the area
| enough, but almost certainly be in the pockets of people who
| could tune in and listen, and not someone halfway across the
| country.
|
| So enter the 100,000 $1 bills sitting in stacks in this
| dude's house. Not circulating. At first, this isn't a problem
| -- he took out the bills after the contest start, after all
| -- but as time goes on, and the studio repeats the process of
| tagging and releasing new bills in circulation to generate
| new numbers to call out, suddenly, there is _no_ chance that
| _any_ of these hundred-thousand bills you are laboriously
| checking will work.
| giarc wrote:
| Even if they physically had the bill and ensured it was in
| circulation in the city, the chances that someone has it
| and is listening to that radio station is so small. The
| radio station had to know it was an unwinnable contest. Why
| anyone would think they could win the contest is beyond me!
| saalweachter wrote:
| I don't know enough about this particular contest -- and
| since it happened in 1984, I'm not going to attempt to
| find more information on the internet -- but typically
| the goal isn't to have an _unwinnable_ contest, just to
| have it drag on long enough while drawing more and more
| people into listening.
|
| At the start of the contest, you might have 0.1% of the
| people in your listening area tuning in for the reading
| of the serial number, and by the end, 1-5%, before
| dropping down to, say, 0.2-0.5% after the contest is
| over. Early on, there's a 1 in a 1000 chance of someone
| listening having the bill, more or less, so the contest
| won't end too early, but by the end, you are up to a
| 1-in-20 chance, so once it gets popular enough, it will
| end fast enough that people don't get too much into
| grumbling that your contest is rigged.
|
| Meanwhile, the radio station probably didn't actually put
| up the $30,000 -- it was probably an _advertiser_ who
| paid the radio station $40,000 out of their advertising
| budget to run the contest, or should I say, the Wonder
| Widget 's daily drawing, brought to you by Wonder
| Widgets, your wonderful source of wonderful widgets. You
| repeat the advertiser's slogan three or four times as
| people are tuning in to the station to listen for the
| day's serial number, and three or four more times
| throughout the day reminding people to tune in at X
| o'clock.
|
| There's no need for the contest to be rigged or
| unwinnable -- it's a bargain for everyone at half the
| price. The advertiser _knows_ people are listening to
| their ads, the radio station is getting paid outright as
| well as getting a boost in their listeners (which gets
| them more money from _other_ advertisers). And actually
| paying out the money, eventually, lets you go back to
| that same gold mine again and again.
| giarc wrote:
| I totally agree, you want a hard to win contest so more
| and more people tune in. But I think you want...need... a
| winner. The radio station and the advertiser want a
| picture in the newspaper with someone holding a $30,000
| cheque, you want that person screaming on the radio when
| they win. You want interviews with that person talking
| about how they will spend their winnings. A contest
| without a winner would be a terrible thing for everyone
| involved, well I guess for the ad agency putting in
| $30,000, maybe they get their money back?
|
| This all reminds me of the lengths I went to a few years
| ago. An admin assistant in my office was really into
| these contests. She would listen to all the various
| stations and call in. There was a contest that was
| "identify this song" and everyday it went unguessed, they
| would add to the pot. It was getting up to $20,000 or
| something and no one could guess. I ended up downloading
| the clip and putting it through various Shazam like
| programs trying to help identify it. Never did win, but
| it was exciting for a short time. If after 30 days, they
| had just said, no one wins, I would have been pretty
| erked.
| ehnto wrote:
| > The best way to ensure that your contest is actually
| winnable
|
| This is definitely not a requirement according to some
| business owners. No shortage of faux competitions used to
| generate email signups around, even from reputable
| companies.
| Benjammer wrote:
| I worked at a small company for a short period of time
| where we would run a "contest" on social media, but then
| our social media guy would just comb through the entries
| and find someone attractive, in the right demo, and very
| active on social media and just give them the prize as a
| way to generate more social media buzz.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I worked next desk to a bunch of social media marketers,
| and then dealt with some individual social media
| marketers later on. My entire experience makes me
| immediately distrust anything such a person says. The
| only thing you can trust is that they'll do the thing
| that creates most engagement.
| llampx wrote:
| That's pretty much how I figured most small contests are
| done.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Back when the mafia used to have their own lottery (aka
| "the numbers"), there were two ways to pick the winning
| number (usually between 1 and 100).
|
| Option 1:
|
| Use the last two digits of some commonly available public
| number that was, essentially, random or at least
| unpredictable and not controllable. A good example today
| would be the cents portion of the SP500 index.
|
| Options 2:
|
| Tally up which of the numbers had the least amount of
| money bet on it and then make that the number.
|
| You can guess which of the two options the more nefarious
| organizations used.
|
| Interesting related note: back in the first half of the
| 20th century, there used to be a game in the newspapers
| where you were presented with a grid of faces, each one
| being numbered. The goal was to pick the face that you
| though OTHER people would pick most often. In other
| words, if you picked the most popular face, you would
| win. This led to lots of "well which face do I think
| other people will think is most popular etc"
|
| John Maynard Keynes used the game above as a proxy for
| the stock market with stocks being the faces e.g. you
| were trying to pick the stock you thought that everyone
| else would buy.
| im3w1l wrote:
| That's spot on for the crypto currency market.
| frenchy wrote:
| > Tally up which of the numbers had the least amount of
| money bet on it and then make that the number.
|
| I mean, pretending that it's random is fraud, but if you
| were honest about the affair, that would actually make
| for a mildly interesting game.
| thisisnico wrote:
| I'm almost certain the Mafia does not care about
| committing fraud.
| monknomo wrote:
| I think the numbers runners need community trust though,
| so it has to be the right kind of fraud
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| I believe the title is referencing this classic:
|
| https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/who-wants-to-b...
| alisonkisk wrote:
| No, both the OP and SNL are referring to "Who Wants to Be a
| Millionaire"
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| WWtbaM came first.
|
| Then SNL made fun of it.
|
| Now the OP is leveraging both with a nod.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| Author of the article here. I see why you drew that
| conclusion, but in this case, I was not aware of the
| similarly titled sketch until now. If I _had_ been aware of
| it, I would have selected a different title for mine, to
| avoid the appearance of title pilferage. Mine was just a
| play on the game show title, essentially the same joke
| independently conceived.
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| Thanks for chiming in to this internet digression from
| your actual statement. :)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I'm working on my second million!
|
| (...I gave up on my first.)
| code_duck wrote:
| Another discussion [2015]:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713
|
| Found this while trying to determine the definition of
| "unbeardily".
| theguppydream wrote:
| Brilliant story. This reminds me so much of David Foster
| Wallace's 'Little Expressionless Animals,' I wonder if DFW was
| aware of the broadcast and took it as inspiration
| [deleted]
| ryanmercer wrote:
| Can we bring this game show back, and can I talk to the casting
| associate? I'd prefer to be a millionaire so I could be
| independently wealthy and do what I want instead of living just
| to pay bills, but if I could be a thousandaire, hey that is a
| nice start!
|
| I'm always amazed, despite being well aware of inflation, the
| cost of things/cash value of prizes in things of yesteryear. When
| you hear someone bought their house for something like 7,000
| dollars or their brand new car for 2,400 dollars my monkey brain
| just refuses to stop for a second and go "yeah but inflation".
|
| Then there is the rabbit hole of goods that have gotten
| significantly cheaper over time, or even those that have been
| volatile at times (such as the spot price of silver and gold).
|
| Way too easy to get lost thinking about stuff like that.
| jeofken wrote:
| Get ready for inflation to go absolutely nuts in the wake of
| last year.
|
| https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m1
|
| People who own (fiat) currency or have their salaries denoted
| in $ will face tough times - Weimar style.
| spuz wrote:
| Could you explain how your link backs up your claim?
| irjustin wrote:
| Not the poster, but the M1 denotes how much money gets
| printed.
|
| Because of COVID, for better or worse, US has been printing
| money like crazy to hand out and prop up different areas of
| the country. Whether you agree/disagree with this, that's
| for another thread. Point is, we're printing money.
|
| If you're familiar with inflation, stop here. Obviously the
| country and the world are not producing nor consuming at
| the same level. Thusly at an extremely extremely simplistic
| level, we're not creating more "intrinsic" value, but
| adding more printed money to represent that "intrinsic"
| value. Each dollar now has less "intrinsic" value. (this is
| over simplified to the n-th degree).
|
| This is the basis for inflation. Any unstable country would
| have seen hyper inflation given these numbers. So, the
| parent comment is alluding to this... eventually production
| has to catch up or inflation will.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Neutral money is the spherical cow of economics, and it
| isn't correct. You need to take into effect the
| Cantillion effect. The only way we would getting
| meaningful CPI inflation is if the new money was going to
| people who would increase their demand of CPI items if
| they got it. This year the FED has bought bonds, and so
| that is who that money was given to people with those
| bonds. Those people can then spend that money, but as
| we've seen with the stock market, that money was just
| pumped into the stock market. So all we will see is that
| the velocity of money will drop further, the prices of
| items tracked by the CPI won't move, and wealth
| inequality just got a little worse.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > This is the basis for inflation.
|
| Hum... Sure, it's the basis of some kind of inflation.
| But you'll get no useful kind that only depends on the
| amount of paper money in existence.
|
| There is much more to inflation than the amount of paper
| money on the economy, and even than the amount of money
| the government creates.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Do you mean literal "paper" (which is irrelevant) or M1,
| which is largely electronic?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The comment applies to both paper and M1. It also applies
| to M3, although M3 is already way too broad for any
| useful inflation number, it is also too restrictive in
| different ways.
|
| Inflation is a complicated concept.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| The graph looked like that in 2009 too, and yet inflation
| stayed around the 2% target.
| irjustin wrote:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1
|
| I wouldn't say it looked similar... The time scales are
| different for the same _relative_ amount printed. 2009 took
| longer to play out. We're not even 1 year in.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Yeah, you're right. A good way to compare the relative
| increases is to go to 'Edit Graph' and set a log scale in
| the 'Format' tab. That makes it clear the relative change
| in 2020 was huge.
|
| I'm still not sure it will cause inflation though, since
| COVID has had a big deflationary impact and the Fed can
| always unwind if needed.
| the-dude wrote:
| Real estate and stock market.
| unreal37 wrote:
| Yeah, we're seeing inflation in "financial assets". Just
| not yet in a basket of groceries.
| flerchin wrote:
| If he sorted the bills by serial number he could find out if he
| won the contest by binary search in around 17 cuts. His wife
| probably still would have stolen his money though.
| [deleted]
| Vaslo wrote:
| This is one of those stories I go back to reading about from time
| to time. I remember being a little boy home from school, either
| sick or summertime, and saw this episode. Well at least the first
| part where they had to freeze frame mid show and the show's host
| Peter Tomarken walked out to tell everyone how Larson was making
| Game Show history. I was too young too know much about
| statistics, patterns, etc. to understand how impossible this
| could be if the board was truly random. Larson just seemed like
| an awkward but lucky and smart guy.
|
| Hearing this full story some years later shows how much we were
| in the dark on so many situations before the internet. As hard as
| you try to bulletproof things, there's that one person who
| figures out a way to bypass it.
| Lio wrote:
| For some reason I thought this might be related to Neal
| Stephenson's book Anathem, which has monk like characters who
| lock themselves away for 1000 years.
|
| The article is a great read though, reminds me of a childhood
| friend who tried to build a light operated solenoid to beat
| fruit-machines on their stop the trail features.
|
| Long story short, it didn't work because the people who build
| fruit-machines were smart enough to randomise the latency of the
| button push.
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