Top all-time · #4065
Andrey Akinshin
Personal blog · aakinshin.netprogrammingdatascience
Andrey Akinshin's personal blog at aakinshin.net covers programming, data and science. Since 2016, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Normality Is a Myth”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Andrey Akinshin's posts on quantile and median estimation, such as the P² quantile estimator and the Greenwald-Khanna quantile estimator. The linked posts are cited as references for these algorithms.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Writings on software performance, benchmarking, statistics, and other engineering topics
Most-linked posts?
- Normality Is a Myth4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-10-11
- P² quantile estimator – estimating the median without storing values2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-24
- DateTime under the hood2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-08-23
- Reflecting on performance testing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-08-01
What Hacker News says?
It certainly is possible to approximate the median: https://aakinshin.net/posts/p2-quantile-estimator/ A quick search shows that Boost.Accumulators have several median estimation implementations available to choose from: https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_84_0/doc/html/accumulators/... > Median estimation based on the P^2 quantile estimator, the density estimator, or the P^2 cumulative distribution estimator.
Comment linking /posts/p2-quantile-estimator/
on “The One Billion Row Challenge”Submitted P² quantile estimator – estimating the median without storing values as a story · 136 points
HN discussionSee also the Greenwald Khanna quantile estimator, an online algorithm which can compute any quantile within a given ϵ. https://aakinshin.net/posts/greenwald-khanna-quantile-estima...
Comment linking /posts/greenwald-khanna-quantile-estimator/
on “My Favorite Algorithm: Linear Time Median Finding (2018)”Submitted 65535 interfaces ought to be enough for anybody as a story · 131 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why is NuGet search in Rider so fast? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Statistical Approaches for Performance Analysis as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fast moving median and quantile estimator as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Statistical Approaches for Performance Analysis as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stopwatch Under the Hood (2016) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Misleading standard deviation as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Normality Is a Myth as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Analyzing distribution of Mono GC collections as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reflecting on performance testing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stopwatch under the hood as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Insidious Implicit Statistical Assumptions as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Quantile estimators based on k order statistics, Part 4 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Plain-text summary notation for multimodal distributions as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lowland Multimodality Detection as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reflecting on Performance Testing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A robust outlier detector for software performance distributions as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Normality Is a Myth as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Normality Is a Myth as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Normality Is a Myth as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reflecting on performance testing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted NuGet2 and a DirectorySeparatorChar bug as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted DateTime under the hood as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted DateTime under the hood as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
