

Estimating objects from serial numbers: How a statistical formula won the war   - iamwil
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1824525,00.html

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tocomment
It doesn't say why this formula works. Does anyone know?

Does it depend on other assumptions about tank production not mentioned in the
article, or can you use this exact formula for any problem of this type?

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nickb
It's Order Statistic: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic>

PS: My years and years of studying math are good for something ;)

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eru
Answering questions online. Oh, how I look forward to my degree in math. ;)

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iamwil
I got this link from Joshua ala delicious's blog. He was saying how auto
increment on primary ids isn't a good idea--especially when it's exposed as a
part of the URL. Too bad this is the default in Rails.

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falsestprophet
Is it really that tragic if people know how many users you have? Maybe honesty
isn't an awful idea.

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iamwil
Well, it's not exactly that. If primary ids are in order, someone, somewhere,
is eventually going to write a script that sequentially goes through and pulls
all that data off. While that in itself might not be bad, pinging your servers
without throttling it might be.

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jsmcgd
Amazing. I love shit like this.

