Top all-time · #11912
marcinciura.wordpress.com
Personal blog · marcinciura.wordpress.comdatamath
marcinciura.wordpress.com is a personal blog at marcinciura.wordpress.com about data and math. Since 2015, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times, most often “Slicing Earth, Carefully: On Wet and Dry Great and Small Circles”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-06-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Marcin Ciura's blog posts on a map-projection metric that maximises land area in one hemisphere, and on his discoveries of new Polish pangrams, which led to an IOCCC entry.
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.
Most-linked posts?
- Slicing Earth, Carefully: On Wet and Dry Great and Small Circles2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-11-17
- Reproducing the AuthaGraph World Map2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-21
- Smiths, Millers, Priests: European Occupational Surnames2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-10-10
What Hacker News says?
I seem to have found this one, basically: https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/min-land-4/ But my metric wasn't as much intersection as maximum land area in one half. edit: I didn't even know about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_and_water_hemispheres
Comment linking /min-land-4/
on “A flat map with the least error possible: The Gott-Goldberg-Vanderbei projection”Submitted The Vector Space of the Polish Parliament in Pictures as a story · 130 points
HN discussionIf your metric is the length of the land that the map boundary cuts, then the best centre lies somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Proven here: [1] [1] https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/slicing-earth-c...
Comment linking /2015/11/17/slicing-earth-carefully/
on “A flat map with the least error possible: The Gott-Goldberg-Vanderbei projection”Submitted Cracovians: The Twisted Twins of Matrices as a story · 81 points
HN discussionA while ago, I did a piece of armchair research on Spanish flu in Austria-Hungary [1]. TL;DR: the dates it occurred throughout the empire differ insignificantly. The linked blog post shows also a table with the week of highest mortality in North America, Great Britain, continental Europe, and India, copied from an old book. [1] https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/tracking-spanis...
Comment linking /2016/01/28/tracking-spanish-flu/
on “History of 1918 Flu Pandemic”Submitted Slicing Earth, Carefully: On Wet and Dry Great and Small Circles as a story · 28 points
HN discussionI'm not sure if you have seen this: https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/slicing-earth-c... — loading country polygons instead of land polygons and changing the LengthOfIntersectionInKm() function should be enough to answer your question. Be wary, however, that parts of France lie in Africa and the Americas ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_department ).
Comment linking /2015/11/17/slicing-earth-carefully/
on “Which lines of longitude and latitude pass through the most countries?”Submitted Slicing Earth, Carefully: On Wet and Dry Great and Small Circles as a story · 24 points
HN discussionHere is a polished version of my argument: https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2020/10/11/bad-medicine-th...
Comment linking /2020/10/11/bad-medicine-the-median-artery-and-microevolution/
on “Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?”Submitted What Makes a Best-Selling Novel? A Machine Learning Approach as a story · 5 points
HN discussionTangent: While I get the gist of Figure 1, expressing historical prices in "daily wages" that disregard the place and the profession strikes me as sloppy [1]. [1] https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/earnings-in-pol...
Comment linking /2016/01/17/earnings-in-poland/
on “Gutenberg’s moving type propelled Europe towards the scientific revolution”Submitted Reproducing the AuthaGraph World Map as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMy map of the most frequent occupational surnames in Europe [1] also went viral in 2015. When I posted it on Reddit, newspapers from Ireland (they asked me for permission to reprint it) to Greece (nobody else asked) and countless people on Facebook republished it. Well, everybody has a surname, an occupation, and a country. Late advice: when making a viral image, put your URL on it :-) [1] https://marcinciura.wordpr…
Comment linking /2015/09/17/smiths-millers-priests/
on “Virality in cartography: What makes a map go viral?”Submitted What Makes a Best-Selling Novel? A Machine Learning Approach (2016) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMarcin Ciura has famously discovered many new Polish pangrams: https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2018/06/24/perfect-polish-... https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2018/12/17/more-perfect-po... And submitted an IOCCC entry in 2019 on the topic: https://www.ioccc.org/2019/ciura/hint.html
Comment linking /2018/12/17/more-perfect-polish-pangrams/
on “Pangram”Submitted How to squeeze a lexicon (2001) [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI invented a game that uses tiles in the shape of a regular hexagon plus a rhombus. IMHO, you can tile the plane aperiodically with them. See the first picture in [1]. [1] https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2023/10/14/orinoko/
Comment linking /2023/10/14/orinoko/
on “A Brief History of Tricky Mathematical Tiling”Submitted Reproducing the AuthaGraph projection as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Smiths, Millers, Priests: European Occupational Surnames as a story · 1 points
HN discussion