Top all-time · #4270
David R Hagen
Personal blog · drhagen.com/blogprogrammingmath
David R Hagen's personal blog at drhagen.com covers programming and math. Since 2015, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “The Missing 11th of the Month (2015)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link David Hagen's posts on the missing 11th and 23rd of the month, which trace the calendar-date gaps in text data to OCR errors and abbreviations like '2d' for the 2nd.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal website of David R Hagen, scientific software engineer
Most-linked posts?
- The Missing 11th of the Month (2015)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2015-12-29
- The Missing 11th of the Month (2015)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-11-04
- The Missing 23rd of the Month3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-11-24
- /blog/the-missing-23rd-of-the-month/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-06-19
What Hacker News says?
Very interesting. I've had a thought about a monthly "data preservation day" concept, (on the 11th, because: https://xkcd.com/1140/ , and yes, I know: https://drhagen.com/blog/the-missing-11th-of-the-month/ ) A multiplatform archival tool would be useful.
Comment linking /blog/the-missing-11th-of-the-month/
on “Myspace lost all the music its users uploaded between 2003 and 2015”Submitted The Missing 11th of the Month (2015) as a story · 224 points
HN discussionReminds me of how when xkcd looked at which days of the month were most common, the 1st, 10th, 11th, 21st and 31st were more or less common than they should have been due to OCR error: https://drhagen.com/blog/the-missing-11th-of-the-month/
Comment linking /blog/the-missing-11th-of-the-month/
on “An OCR cliche: Into his/her anus (2009)”Submitted The Missing 11th of the Month (2015) as a story · 136 points
HN discussionFor 2, 3, 22, 23, read the second part: https://drhagen.com/blog/the-missing-23rd-of-the-month/ . (short version: people used to sometimes write 2d, 3d, 22d, 23d.). This also explains why 12 and 13 don't show the deficit.
Comment linking /blog/the-missing-23rd-of-the-month/
on “The Missing 11th of the Month (2015)”Submitted Explaining xkcd's “missing 11th of the month” as a story · 35 points
HN discussionInteresting! Be sure to follow the link to the second post about what happened to the 2nd, 3rd, 22nd, and 23rd. It's simpler but still worth the read: https://drhagen.com/blog/the-missing-23rd-of-the-month/
Comment linking /blog/the-missing-23rd-of-the-month/
on “The Missing 11th of the Month (2015)”Submitted The Missing 11th of the Month as a story · 12 points
HN discussionNote that, the article being from 2015, the promised future post for the 23rd is already live at http://drhagen.com/blog/the-missing-23rd-of-the-month/ and differently fascinating.
Comment linking /blog/the-missing-23rd-of-the-month/
on “The Missing 11th of the Month (2015)”Submitted The Missing 11th of the Month as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThis is a great start, but as you get more serious about NLP, keep in mind that a Web crawl from 2006 is not the same as ground truth about language. The top 100,000 words in this data include a lot of ephemeral spam. If you're looking for slang, it'll mostly be outdated. And words like "sitemap" and "Shockwave" are not as common throughout language as the Web alone would indicate. The later Google Books Ngrams [1]…
Comment linking /blog/the-missing-11th-of-the-month/
on “Natural Language Corpus Data: Beautiful Data”Submitted The Missing 11th of the Month as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Missing 11th of the Month as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Missing 23rd of the Month as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Missing 11th of the Month as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Missing 23rd of the Month as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Missing 11th of the Month as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Missing 11th Month as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Missing 11th of the Month (2015) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
