Top all-time · #7947
God Plays Dice
Personal blog · godplaysdice.blogspot.commathscience
God Plays Dice is a personal blog at godplaysdice.blogspot.com about math and science. Since 2007, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times. The last post was in 2012, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this blog for its posts on re-identification, such as how birth date, gender and ZIP code can uniquely identify most people. The comments cite these posts as sources and do not evaluate the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A random walk through mathematics -- mostly through the random part.
Most-linked posts?
- /2009/12/uniquely-identifying-people-by-birth.html4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-03-12
What Hacker News says?
Just because it's not unique doesn't mean it's not personally identifiable. For instance, you can quite often uniquely identify a person given their date of birth, gender, and zip code, none of which are nearly as unique as a MAC address[1]. Even the combination of these factors results in < 2 billion unique permutations, whereas the MAC address space numbers in the hundreds of trillions. That means, given a MAC add…
Comment linking /2009/12/uniquely-identifying-people-by-birth.html
on “Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows”Submitted First number not in Google? (2008) as a story · 46 points
HN discussionOn anonymity and privacy... I always thought this was an interesting fact: Birthday, Gender and Zipcode is enough to identify someone uniquely approximately 85% of the time. And a quickly googled source but the meme is older than that: http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2009/12/uniquely-identifyin...
Comment linking /2009/12/uniquely-identifying-people-by-birth.html
on “About 33 bits”Submitted Why g ~ pi^2 as a story · 32 points
HN discussionIndeed. See this: http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2009/12/uniquely-identifyin... I imagine gender and DoB factor in heavily to something like a recommendation engine, and I'm sure zip code would come into play when trying to get those last couple percent as is the case with the Netflix prizes.
Comment linking /2009/12/uniquely-identifying-people-by-birth.html
on “Netflix Prize 2 Cancelled Due to a Lawsuit and FTC Inquiry”Submitted A hack I'm disturbingly proud of, and its connection to some real math as a story · 16 points
HN discussionOver 60%, and potentially up to 87% [0], of the US population can be uniquely identified just from gender, zip code, and birth date. This isn't all that surprising [1]. The EFF's browser fingerprinting (through Panopticlick) shows that a similar percentage of browsers are uniquely identifiable through fonts, plugins, etc. [2] If you're trying to identify someone, every "common" trait they have will still eliminate a…
Comment linking /2009/12/uniquely-identifying-people-by-birth.html
on “When Anonymous Isn’t Really Anonymous”Submitted Why mathematics doesn't need a Mitchell Report as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> The kilometer was based on 1/10000 the distance between the poles and the equator. The definition we should have used (and almost did) was that the meter was the length of a pendulum with 1 second swing (in other words, a pendulum with a 2 second period). https://maa.org/sites/default/files/images/upload_library/22... If we had done that, the gravitational constant of Earth would be exactly pi^2 m/s^2: Neat, right…
Comment linking /2007/09/why-g-2.html
on “Why is a second equal to the duration of 9,192,631,770 of radiations?”Submitted How many Scrabble racks are there? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Correlation is not causation as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
