Programming error voided Green Card lottery results

A bit more detail on the non-randomness:<p>But when the numbers were drawn, it turned about that 90 percent of the winners came from applications that were submitted on just the first two days of a 30-day registration period.

Wow, that is terrible if you won in the original draw.

I'd really like to see an NTSB/FAA-style post-mortem analysis of bugs like these, along with suggested process improvements that will prevent such errors from occurring in the future.<p>Our industry could really benefit from a body of analysis on programming bugs that rivaled the body of analysis we have on plane crashes.

They should (in advance) post the exact algorithm by which they choose the pseudorandom results, and (on lottery day) post a truly-random seed selected by a process performed in public or verified by independent observers. Then anyone would be able to verify the lottery results after the fact.

&#62; U.S. law requires that Diversity Immigrant visas be made available through a strictly random process. A computer programming error resulted in a selection that was not truly random.<p>Computer generated numbers are never truly random. At what point is it "random enough"?

Weirdly, this seems to be on the front page twice for me:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2545331" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2545331</a>

so it seems no one has posted the required xkcd joke in this cases, so here it is: <a href="http://xkcd.com/221/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/221/</a>

Yeah, that would be a truly horrible feeling.