
One in a million happens a lot when your site is big - epi0Bauqu
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/02/one-in-a-million-happens-a-lot-when-your-site-is-big.html
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dcurtis
I once posted a photo to Twitter, and some guy looked up the GPS coordinates
in the metadata and accosted me at the Starbucks where I was working.

Turns out he was angry because I posted a tweet three weeks earlier about
hating eBay.

There are some crazy people out there, for sure.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
If you were working at Starbucks since Twitter launched, you've come a long
way in a short period of time.

* I'm assuming, of course, that you're no longer working there :)

~~~
dcurtis
I was working in the Starbucks, on my laptop.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Ah! My bad :)

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yannis
To anyone interested in such events I would highly recommend "The Black Swan"
_The Impact of the Highly Improbable_ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

It never amazes me what you can experience, if you are living in a large City
or get involved with a large group of people. When I was doing National
Service, I once drove to the Hospital, about twenty, 18yr olds suffering from
"nocturnal enuresis" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnal_enuresis>). It
is a very uncommon event in adults <0.5%.

~~~
bootload
_"... To anyone interested in such events I would highly recommend "The Black
Swan" The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. ..."_

I always manage a chuckle when I hear _"black swan"_ used to describe a rare
event. Where I am, a black swan is the norm.

~~~
mmelin
To be fair, The Black Swan doesn't talk about a black swan being rare. The
point is that until black swans were discovered in Australia, everyone in the
(civilized) world were completely convinced that swans could only be white.
Black swans weren't rare, they were inconceivable because it was so far
outside expectations that no one considered even the remote possibility of
non-white swans.

The Black Swan doesn't talk about rare events, it talks about the danger of
not considering that which is so highly improbable as to seem ridiculous, such
as the possibility of non-white swans.

In other words, the frequency of black swans wasn't 1 in 1 million swans pre-
discovery of Australia, it was zero.

I'm sure you know all of this but if you haven't read the book I do think it
is worth your time.

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lionheart
Oh, you don't need a big site for this stuff to happen. These things aren't
even close to one in a million. I've had tons of these and even weirder
running sites with only 10-20,000 users.

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spolsky
Famous Gordon Letwin quote: "One in a million is next Tuesday".
[http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/03/30/10416...](http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/03/30/104165.aspx)

~~~
liquidben
Terry Pratchett was fond of saying that one-in-a-million chances come true 9
times out of ten, but I believe in that he was referring to fiction and not
internet crazies.

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vaksel
I don't think it even has to be a million....100K is plenty for most of these
things

~~~
seanos
You are right but they will occur at a tenth of the rate.

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jamesjyu
Having been developing on a high traffic site for a while, these things are
very on point. We always joke that our inputs are superpositions: all
combinations of inputs are possible into our site, due to the sheer number of
people visiting a day, and the # of crazy people who will attempt to inject
nonsense into their POST requests.

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chaosmachine
Reading his examples reminds me of when I worked tech support for a large
cable ISP. But those situations were more like one in a hundred.

