Top all-time · #5797
Søren Sandmann Pedersen
Personal blog · ssp.impulsetrain.com · on HN as sspmathprogramming
Søren Sandmann Pedersen's personal blog at ssp.impulsetrain.com covers math and programming. Since 2011, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Celebrities Die 2.7183 at a Time”. The last post was in 2014, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for an explanation of why celebrity deaths and plane crashes seem to cluster in groups of e (a Poisson-process argument) and for a write-up of Porter-Duff compositing and Photoshop blend modes.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Celebrities Die 2.7183 at a Time5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2014-07-25
- Porter/Duff Compositing and Blend Modes (2013)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-09-06
- First Class Goto2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-03
What Hacker News says?
"Celebrities die 2.7183 at a time": http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html
Comment linking /celebrities.html
on “Twitter was down”Submitted Big-O Misconceptions as a story · 62 points
HN discussionYou know the old adage that celebrities die in threes? It's actually mathematically supported... or, well, it's supported that they die in 2.718s. Same principle would apply to cloud service outages if all the services and their failures were actually independent. We'd expect them to happen in "clusters" of e: http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html I still love me a good conspiracy theory, but clustering of ra…
Comment linking /celebrities.html
on “Apple iCloud Experiencing Issues”Submitted Celebrities Die in E's as a story · 4 points
HN discussionVery related is our perception of randomness and our surprise at a cluster of accidents. It falls out quite nicely: if plane crashes are a poisson process, then, on average, they happen in clusters of e . See: Celebrities die 2.7183 at a time: http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html
Comment linking /celebrities.html
on “How odd is a cluster of plane accidents?”Submitted First Class Goto as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIf you generalize labels so that they become first class, then call/cc can be written in terms of goto. http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/goto.html
Comment linking /goto.html
on “An argument against call/cc (2012)”Submitted Celebrities die 2.7218 at a time as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThanks for mentioning this. I found a nice article about it and generalisation to blend modes here: http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/porterduff.html
Comment linking /porterduff.html
on “Tom Duff on Duff's Device (1988)”Submitted Celebrities Die 2.7183 at a Time as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe original Porter-Duff compositing operators don’t cover Photoshop-style blending. Here’s a link with pictures: http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/porterduff.html The Porter-Duff operators are appealingly rigorous and easy to implement because they’re simply the possible combinations of a simple formula. But many of these operators are not very useful either. The Photoshop blending modes are practically the opposite: the…
Comment linking /porterduff.html
on “So you want to modify the text of a PDF by hand”Submitted Celebrities die 2.7183 at a time (2013) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttp://ssp.impulsetrain.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Celebrities Die in e's as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Big-O Misconceptions (2012) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Celebrities die 2.7182 at a time as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Porter/Duff Compositing and Blend Modes (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Celebrities die in e's as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Over is not Translucency as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
