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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Hit 30 times, no flag but 404 each time. Am I just lucky or are they showing them only to certain IP ranges (I'd guess Russian, but then why the English text)?

Edit: Now over 60 times with the same result. And yes, I have confirmed that it is making the request each time.

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I finally saw it --- but only after I changed User-Agent header to a more common one. It seems like some thought was put into this to make it show only for "normal" users, and not unknown/crawler/etc. (I hit Cloudflare CAPTCHAs all the time.)

In case you're curious, many years ago when Imageshack started restricting images based on Referer and other things, I had a proxy rule created to bypass that --- appropriately named ImagesHack --- and one of the things it did was change the UA too.

- It might just be random, but at 60 tries it's unlikely. Fun experiment: check the reviews of any game that uses RNG output. Drink when you see a 1 star complaining that the RNG is clearly broken with anecdotal evidence. (With 100k players playing 10 rounds a day, you're going to see a one-in-a-million event daily. (Afaik most devs make such games "more random" in response by increasing bias towards the mean.) That's probabilities on the order of flipping a coin and it coming up heads 20 times in a row (0.5^20==1/1e6 if I'm doing this 2am math right). Scaling that up to a 1 in 5 ratio, there's only a 1 in ~0.5M chance that you didn't see it after 60 tries. Of course, I have zero insight into what Imageshack is actually doing here, perhaps it excludes you for some reason (maybe it excludes the Bay area not to tip off the executives or their friends... for all we know).

- Perhaps I'm just wrong about 1 in 5 since my sample size was low.

- Confirmed from a German, Dutch, Argentine, and Belgian IP before posting this, all residential. I was indeed wondering if the person who initially mentioned this to me was detected to be in Russia or something since I didn't see it at first, but we all got it with varying numbers of retries; the Belgian on the first try.

Here is a rule of thumb for this type of thing:

If something has a 1/N chance of happening, then after N tries = 65% chance of it happening at least once. 2N = 85%, 3N = 95% and 4N = 99%.

It took one refresh for me. I refreshed again, and it was gone. Tried ~20 more times, no flag.

I refreshed once and saw it. By the odds, you should see it by now, so something else may be at play like a cache engine somewhere.

I got it in about fifteen tries. Pure-D American IP here.

I tried it and it worked after around 6 or 7 tries

The math checks out ;)

I got it on my 6th

Took about 10 tries, got the flag. Canada here.

First try for me.

Here in Australia I saw it on the first go.

3 attempts to get a hit for me, in NZ

2nd try for me on the west coast USA

I got it on my second try in the EU.

I got it in less than 10 tries.

Showed in three tries, US IP.

17x for me, US West Coast

i got it after 59 refreshes

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