Why is this number everywhere?
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it in LLM randomness and number-picking threads as evidence that humans are also biased and predictable when asked for random numbers.
What it is
Veritasium explores why the number 37 turns up so often, drawing on Tom Magliery's collection of 37 sightings and a poll of about 200,000 people asked to pick a random number. It covers how humans choose numbers and why 37 stands out.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2024 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec golergka · 2024-03 · on “Thirty Seven”
Probably posted because of this video: [this video] Which not only links to this website, but also explains the topic in detail. Can highly recommend the channel anyway — especially for the HN crowd.
Recommends mitch_f · 2025-08 · on “The Ski Rental Problem”
Derek Muller did a good overview of this concept on his Veritasium channel: [this video] . Even more interesting for HN is a link in the description to one of the speaker's (Tom Magliery) websites: [LINK] .
Cites sdenton4 · 2024-04 · on “The question that no LLM can answer and why it is important”
Wellll.... Watching that video now, it looks like the most-selected number in their poll of 200k people was 69, followed by 42. Once /those/ are eliminated, 37 and 73 stand out. [this video]
Cites unshavedyak · 2024-05 · on “LLMs can't do probability”
I assume somewhat related to this, but humans are also terrible at "random". ~See~ Related 37[1]. The more we advance on LLMs the more i am convinced i'm an LLM. :s [1]: [this video]
Cites sigmoid10 · 2024-05 · on “LLMs can't do probability”
>You are a weighted random choice generator. About 80% of the time please say ‘left’ and about 20% of the time say ‘right’. Simply reply with left or right. Do not say anything else I could have told you these results solely based on the methodology combined with this system prompt. No need to spend money on APIs. Randomness in LLMs does not come from the context, it comes from sampling over output tokens the LLM considers likely. Imagine you are in this situation as a human: Someone walks up to you and tells you to say "left" with 80% probability and "right" with 20% probability. You say "left" and then the other person walks away never to be seen again. How do you determine if your own "ou
Cites brabel · 2024-05 · on “LLMs can't do probability”
Those humans, really difficult to know what they're thinking! Anyway, humans are fairly predictable when trying to come up with random numbers, for example, have a look at this Veritasium video: [this video]
Cites knowitnone · 2025-02 · on “'Hey Number 17 '”
according to vertasium 37 is [this video] and he monetized a whole video on it. Edit: his number range is 1-100 instead of 1-20 so different
Cites leakycap · 2025-10 · on “What Is the Funniest Number?”
Interesting that the funniest numbers also combine to become the most commonly made up numeric answer "Why is this number everywhere?" [this video] Veritasium, 2024