Ask HN: Can personal luck be studied statistically?

1 pointslaetus-app16d ago1 comments

I’ve been exploring an idea that luck might have observable patterns when you accumulate enough random events.

Instead of predicting outcomes, the idea is to simulate many small “luck events” and observe how results distribute over time.

For example, I built a small experiment where virtual lottery bets are generated and compared against real lottery results worldwide. The goal is not to gamble but to explore probability patterns and personal outcome distributions.

I'm curious how people here think about this:

Is “personal luck” just cognitive bias, or could large datasets of random events reveal meaningful patterns?

Would love thoughts from people interested in probability and randomness.

1 comments

laetus-appOP16d ago

I'm the person behind this experiment.

The idea started from a simple observation: people often feel that their luck changes depending on time, context, or even certain types of events.

But most of the time we only remember a few outcomes, which makes it hard to see whether any real pattern exists.

So I started collecting large numbers of small “luck events” using virtual lottery simulations and comparing them with real lottery results from different countries. Over time this creates a dataset where you can look at distributions, streaks, clustering and other patterns.

I built a small tool to run these experiments here: https://laetus.app

Curious whether people here think this kind of dataset could reveal anything interesting about how we perceive randomness.

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