In short, the simulator doesn’t buy enough ticket-draws to approach the Law of Large Numbers.
But that’s also a feature of the lottery — most people overestimate their ability to win or underestimate how many lifetimes of consistent play is required to statistically win a jackpot.
I don't think people actually make that mistake. They know the chance of winning is tiny. The point is more that a non-zero chance of life changing money (plus the entertainment of fantasising about a win) is worth more to them than the cost of the ticket.
Exactly, winning the lottery is massively life changing. This is actually something I think people don't understand about the psychology of lottery. In some regards it doesn't matter if the money is $50M or $500M for most players even though that has a huge impact on the EV.
this was my approach when i lived in oregon. i played the state lottery which was something like 20x better odds, granted the jackpot was usually like $6 million after cash out, but that was still totally good in my book. it cost a buck and i got to have fun with the idea of it for a few days.
one time i get like 20 weeks in a row up front (a post-dated ticket) and i won $56 dollars or something one week. i did the odds of that happened and it was something that would happen like once every 30 years if i played weekly. i stopped after that, haha.
Besides missing the actual testing (!), the staged rollout (!), looks like they also weren't fuzzing this kernel driver that routinely takes instant worldwide updates. Oops.
Not really, that thread showed only superficial knowledge and analysis, far from hitting the nail on the head, for anyone used to assembly/reverse engineering. Then goes on to make provably wrong assumptions and comments. There is actually a null check (2 even!) just before trying the memory access. The root cause is likely trying to access an address that's coming from some uninitialized or wrongly initialized or non-deterministically initialized array.
What it did well was explaining the basics nicely for a wide audience who knows nothing about a crash dump or invalid memory access, which I guess made the post popular. Good enough for a general public explanation, but doesn't pass the bar for an actual technical one to any useful degree.
I've used Anvil [0] quite often in the past years for what seems to be a similar purpose (not affiliated, just a happy customer). Does someone know how Reflex compares?
There are multiple types of SEPA payments, I think you're talking about SEPA Credit Transfer (essentially making the bank transfer yourself).
On the other hand, for SEPA Direct Debit, not only is the interface quite reasonable (you enter your IBAN and confirm a mandate), but consumer protection is very high. You can chargeback no questions asked for 8 weeks, it will be immediately accepted and the merchant can't do anything about it. And as a customer, besides the 8 weeks no questions asked policy, you have 13 months to ask for a refund of an unauthorised transaction, with supporting evidence. In practice, the bank will always accept such a request too.
SEPA DD is suited for recurring payments as it relies on a mandate. It doesn’t make sense to set up a mandate for every one off txn, and at which point you’ve authorized the merchant to pull money from your account at anytime. The ball goes back to your court to contest afterwards, as well as keep track of all the mandates you’ve signed.
Assuming you used the first lottery example (Mega Millions), the EV is easy to calculate directly and is -$0.66/ticket, ie -33%
The jackpot is a whole $1 of that EV! Without it, the EV is -$1.75/ticket, ie -87%, which is closer to what you got in the simulation.