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Michael Tauberg
Personal blog · michaeltauberg.medium.comculturedata
Michael Tauberg's personal blog at michaeltauberg.medium.com covers culture and data. Since 2020, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 4 times, most often “Power Law in Popular Media (2018)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link his posts on music and attention and on power-law distributions in popular media, citing them as support for their own points. None of the comments judge the writing itself.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Power Law in Popular Media (2018)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-06-20
What Hacker News says?
Its keeping up by increased density of words/minute https://michaeltauberg.medium.com/music-and-our-attention-sp...
Comment linking /music-and-our-attention-spans-are-getting-shorter-8be37b5c2d67
on “Streaming Is Stalling: Can Music Keep Up in the Attention Economy?”Submitted Power Law in Popular Media (2018) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMaybe the easiest and strongest counterargument against this paper is that a 97% accuracy is extremely unlikely because 97% is a near perfect score even though hit songs are distributed according to a power law [1]. If we could predict this power law with 97% accuracy, then we could also predict the next successful CEOs, companies, and soccer players with 97% accuracy. But we can't. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Scienc…
Comment linking /power-law-in-popular-media-7d7efef3fb7c
on “Predicting hit songs with 97% accuracy”Power law / Zipf function relations: "Power Law in Popular Media" < https://michaeltauberg.medium.com/power-law-in-popular-media... > Via: < https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2019/11/14/power-law-in-p... >
Comment linking /power-law-in-popular-media-7d7efef3fb7c
on “YouTube's ghost town of billions of unwatched, ignored videos”