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Freakonometrics
Personal blog · freakonometrics.hypotheses.orgdatamatheconomics
Freakonometrics is a personal blog at freakonometrics.hypotheses.org about data, math and economics. Since 2017, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “The U.S. has been at war 222 out of 239 years”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite this blog's analysis of Wikipedia war entries, which counts the years the US has been at war (222 years since 1776), as a source in discussions of US military history and war.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The U.S. has been at war 222 out of 239 years6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-08-30
What Hacker News says?
> my country has been at war my entire adult life The US has been at war for most it’s existence. Someone made a search tool to see how many years the US had been at war for, and then ran it on Wikipedia. Interestingly, France performed worse (assuming one doesn’t like war), though being involved in things like ‘The 100 years war’ skews things a little. https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473
Comment linking /50473
on “Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware”Submitted Classification from scratch, logistic regression 1/8 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDid you try to find data? Or just reporting on your intuition about this thing that someone else thought might be surprising and turned out to be surprising? It seems like half of Canada's populations lives south of 45.5°N. [1] Someone else calculated the mean population latitude of France to be just over 47°N [2] Mean and median aren't the same, but in this case, the measures are far enough apart that it does seem…
Comment linking /1125
on “Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024”Submitted Insurance analytics: prediction, explainability and fairness as a story · 2 points
HN discussionEr what? The US has been at war for 222 years -- https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473
Comment linking /50473
on “F-35 Program Cutting Corners to “Complete” Development”Submitted If No One Pays for Proof, Everyone Will Pay for the Loss as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTo me, it's basically p-hacking. Because the it starts with human artifacts the similarity is more on the level of finding that two English language texts have similar letter frequencies and presenting it as an episode of Ancient Aliens . http://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/19817
Comment linking /19817
on “The Strange Similarity of Neuron and Galaxy Networks”Submitted The U.S. has been at war 222 out of 239 years as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere is an article on freakonomics[1] from 2017 analyzing the Wikipedia entries to see how many of the US's years of history the country has been at war. Regardless of whether you want to agree or disagree. The wikipedia article[2] is pretty accurate on the active/inactive wars. So yes, whoever said this is pretty Euro/Westerncentric is right. [1] https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473 [2] https://en.wikipedi…
Comment linking /50473
on “Why Our Postwar “Long Peace” Is Fragile (2018)”Submitted Coffee and Productivity – Freakonometrics as a story · 1 points
HN discussionRe: military boondoggles, the US has been at war for over 222 years of its existence, at least in the sense that it was involved in at least one war in each of 222 different years since 1776: https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473
Comment linking /50473
on “Closing The Collapse Gap: The USSR was better prepared than the US (2006)”Pretty crazy is right. The US needs to work on its violence problem. The US is a marshal society where killing people, as long as they are the currently officially designated people to hate and kill, makes you a hero. Even though the most recent wars were illegal wars of aggression, there were "Support the troops" signs everywhere. The local dollar store even was collecting donations to send to soldiers in the illeg…
Comment linking /50473
on “AR-15s put in all Madison County schools to enhance security in case of shooter”
