Free for life ! KVM storage 1tb hdd for the customer number 100-200-300-400-500-600-700-800-900-999!

uptime

(unless there are any serious objections) I'll leave it to @MikePT and @Kyle_ to get in touch with @cociu to claim their fine fine superfine FREE FOR LIFE 1 TB prize for being the latest lucky OGs blessed by the sacred hash!

uptime

@uptime said:
Can use this message as the source for the next hash - will leave unedited for posterity as well.

though I suppose now someone could run that last source through sha256sum and see what the magic number is.

So will have to add some random salt.

Needless to say I do hereby also remove myself from being eligible to win this prize, in order to avoid appearance of possible shenanigans, just for the principle of the thing or whatever.

But will try to come up with a more verifiably fair lottery method before we get to 600 (which I'm guessing will be about a week from now, if not sooner)

thanks for trusting me with this

And thanks @cociu for providing such an awesome prize! You da real MVP!

Solaire

@uptime

import random
random.seed(0xb79de269356b34034f20c362ce13d5f22727b643ffaae4f24bca9a6f605576e1)
random.randint(1, 400)

joepie91

uptime said: Mathematically I'm not sure if that makes exactly even odds for all players - but it is about as random (that is, difficult to predetermine) as one could hope for.

Cryptographic hashing algorithms are specifically designed to have (on average) equal distribution of output values, so the hash part should be fine.

uptime said: As suspected, mathematically not perfect (especially since using same hash for 400 and 500 gave results ending in 73 each time)

That would be because 400 and 500 both end in 00, and so the last two digits of the result will always be the same, since nothing gets subtracted from the original value for those digits (which also ends in 73). Try hashing a concatenation of the original message + the user count instead, and then doing the remainder thing. That'll ensure that the input hash is different (according to equal distribution) for each user count.

InceptionHosting

This is why I initially sunk this thread, any fun, celebration and joy was sucked out of it by people wanting bulletproof methods of picking the winners, so much so BSDGuy joined to argue.

Its a bit of fun, have a smoke and a pancake and enjoy.

uptime

@Solaire - thanks! indeed that makes good sense, in line with what was agreed on before for as a nice way to bump odds a bit for the earliest OG OGs - thus encouraging people to sign up sooner rather than later

sorry I forgot about that!

so let's definitely do something along those lines going forward - but as for this time around, maybe we would redo it if and only if for some reason @MikePT doesn't want the FREE FOR LIFE 1 TB dealie - otherwise at this point in the game I'd feel like I was jerking him around a bit. (Might also note that @MikePT signed up a couple weeks ago, on November 23d.)

(and the odds would be shifted by 20% ... or 25% I guess? whatever that means, lol)

I'll take some time to think this out more carefully going foreward!

I suspect I may have missed a few wrinkles in my rush not to overthink the whole thing too much (primary goal was to remove the incentive to have people play a waiting game trying to sign up for a magic member id number, if that were able to be somehow predetermined)

uptime

@AnthonySmith - no worries about that, for me learning about useful maths is always fun (and I just try to keep it that way - no more, no less.) Though can see how having people casting aspersions as to the intent and integrity of the game would surely suck eggs - just maybe a bit less so for me, by virtue of the fact that idgaf

joepie91 said: Try hashing a concatenation of the original message + the user count instead, and then doing the remainder thing. That'll ensure that the input hash is different (according to equal distribution) for each user count.

@joepie91 - thanks very much for that succinct explanation and perfectly workable suggestion.

Whatever it may have lacked in:

• paranoia
• italics
• bulletpoints
• and walls of text

... it more than made up for in epistemological coherence!

Much appreciated.

MikePT

Hey guys,

No 1TB VPS needed.

Can be drawn to someone else!!! :P

mmuyskens

@MikePT said:
Hey guys,

No 1TB VPS needed.

Can be drawn to someone else!!! :P

i'd like to start the bid at $7.

dahartigan

Redraw! :-P

tgl

@cociu came this morning to check it seems, we need to pick a number

king8654

Could be good to go with my with 1tb 3yr sister plan

uptime

ok, thanks @MikePT !

just going to do the next simplest thing and run the snippet suggested by @Solaire

$ python3
Python 3.6.8 (default, Oct  7 2019, 12:59:55) 
[GCC 8.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import random
>>> random.seed(0xb79de269356b34034f20c362ce13d5f22727b643ffaae4f24bca9a6f605576e1)
>>> random.randint(1, 400)
316

which yields https://talk.lowendspirit.com/profile/316/winner400 - @yng68bld

hello hello hello OG @yng68bld - you have been Randomly Selected to receive a Wonderful Prize courtesy of @cociu and various pseudo-random machinations! Please make a post here to confirm you are indeed still active on this forum - and then send a PM to @cociu to claim your FREE FOR LIFE 1 TB KVM STORAGE

Thanks!

InceptionHosting

you may need to actually PM the people for them to notice

uptime

@AnthonySmith said:
you may need to actually PM the people for them to notice

right-o, will do

elliotc

Seems we need some PhD in math to solve this random number question. The "Real random numbers" are produced using physical phenomena so we might need Physicist and engineer

uptime

@elliotc lol true ... see https://web.archive.org/web/19971210213501/http://lavarand.sgi.com/cgi-bin/how.cgi for a "state of the art" example from the previous century

EDIT - whaaa lavalamp tech still going strong at cloudflare? (who knew!) https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/encryption-lava-lamps

photo by Tom Scott

also I guess we could just have 10 people each do a coin flip to generate a 10 bit number, sufficient for our purposes here

(something something blockchain lol)

anyhoo - I'm inclined to call this close enough for jazz, for now - but I'll try to wrap it up in a nice, bulletproof package by the time we get to 600 members for the next draw.

meanwhile, I sent PMs to @Kyle_ and @yng68bld asking them to post in this thread. I'll send a PM to @cociu as well shortly, just to let him know where we are at with all this.

Fun stuff. Thanks errybuggy!

FAT32

So... may I ask what's wrong with my previous method?

uptime

@FAT32 - I forgot what it was? lol

FAT32

@uptime said:
FAT32 - I forgot what it was? lol

Basically you write a few sentences as seeds, then only show the hashes of the seeds. When the time comes, you can reveal the seed which is fair.

https://talk.lowendspirit.com/discussion/comment/4289/#Comment_4289

notty

Why not just keep things simple?

uptime

aha - in all the confusion since then, I totally forgot! (perhaps mind was scrambled by black friday eggs ...)

Thanks - this looks good, will take a closer look now

@FAT32 said:

@poisson said:
Actually a lucky draw when we hit the milestones will also be fun! Reminds me of that event FAT32 did. I won an idling machine

He probably still has the entire setup ready to roll.

I have a suggestion on whether lucky draw should include the users joined earlier to increase their chance.

For example, when reaching 300 users, draw from 1-300 instead of 201-300. That means the earlier you join, the higher the chance of winning. Need approval from @cociu and @AnthonySmith

Round 0: Draw from 1-100 (Additional for early adopters)
Round 1: Draw from 1-300
Round 2: Draw from 1-400
Round 3: Draw from 1-500
Round 4: Draw from 1-600
Round 5: Draw from 1-700
Round 6: Draw from 1-800
Round 7: Draw from 1-900
Round 8: Draw from 1-1000

If it sounds good I can build a simple script and give the hashes of the seeds for the random algorithm.

 

@FAT32 said:
Not sure if I should do this but these are the SHA256 hash of the random generator seed for fairness purpose, the actual seed will be announced when we hit the target.

Round	Range	Hash
0	1-100	63dc9a321e11a17d64d6d661d4a8c7cc16b6cebf4559b473062d3a4f0e0202d8
1	1-300	892d9333f872ed34c08a745a090e7a266f072e809a80191a4777b3093567a362
2	1-400	6cf1a05c37fce8a6eba9d8423610490e984a1da6688fdb01c8a3c35c2f2fe357
3	1-500	3cc6767b9a93a58970b591210c2492704494d9406226b37d1b0c92e25a92c427
4	1-600	0619daa83965571edc624c80030684ca2b432afb21d4396b404c338163282b4d
5	1-700	1323b7ddd7afaf0526a68e99a97770f8dd34b7cee7cac95c12871e77905d6796
6	1-800	9bc67df4011bbe6f3b7195d49a4e63cf2f25c1affd49b7b60e51608eb52ac60f
7	1-900	461539ae139d921c84f3264bd0e3a1705bc86c58238e5626f187ed7d311ba686
8	1-1000	8bd567e8a29480a40a4940e975e4702b439ab68f8df82d75c0e197a7b23c1433

---

This is the code to select a random user:

const seedrandom = require('seedrandom');

function selectWinner(seed, username, total) {
  const rng = seedrandom(seed + '_' + username);
  return Math.ceil(rng() * total);
}

---

When the function above is called, username will be populated with the user with ID at the upper bound of the range.

For example, to select a winner for Round 3, the function call will be selectWinner('some_seed', 'username_of_the_user_with_id_500', 500)

uptime

@FAT32 - this looks good - I'd like to bolster the trust factor (mostly as a psychological exercise) by inviting people to post their favorite "random" numbers here. We can then take some arbitrary number (lets say 7? or whatever) of those posted numbers and concatenate those with the seeds you have already given hashes of - if you don't mind doing a little extra work to run your code again?

Does this seem like perhaps a reasonable way to further obfuscate our elaborate scheme?

uptime

Let's start with the number 4 - as posted by @notty

yng68bld

I just got a PM said i won. Is that for real or just a chance to enter some drawing?

tgl

its for real man, we all hoped you were gone

tgl

@cociu provide the prize man when you come

tgl

@yng68bld you should PM @cociu i think if you want to get it earlier, he's not always here

yng68bld

This is nice. I just barely joined the forum to get some low end boxes for VPN and now a nice prize to add to my stack. Really nice Xmas gift for my daughter to learn more about the world of linux VPS and the awesome shell commands.

uptime

@yng68bld said:
I just got a PM said i won. Is that for real or just a chance to enter some drawing?

congrats - glad to hear this one will be put to good use!

please go easy on @cociu - it may take a while to get setup, but good things do eventually come to those who wait