I appreciate a data-focused response here! What I'm more curious about is how many of these reached the front page. My impression is that the rate of how often they reach the front page is probably a good amount lower than once a week, which I think makes the question of whether this is a coincidence or not more reasonable.

This is the kind of pedantry I come into HN for. Poisson is such an under-utilized distribution for these kinds of phenomena.

> Poisson is such an under-utilized distribution for these kinds of phenomena.

Yeah, Poisson distributions show up everywhere if you are paying attention. You can even use the theory as the basis for a fast, elegant algorithm to take parallel, weighted random samples. You can even do it in SQL!:

    SELECT *
    FROM Population
    WHERE weight > 0
    ORDER BY -LN(1.0 - RANDOM()) / weight
    LIMIT 100  -- Sample size.

For more on the Poission connection, see: https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql....

Isn't it a natural modeling choice? If your events arrive on exponentially distributed deltas, you end up having poisson arrival counts.

possion distribution is what i learned in university for describing this kind of event?

the book is underutilized?

No I learned it in university like most of us did but 10+ years in tech I have never once seen somebody reach out for it in situations like this one where it is a natural fit.

Few people understand it well, even though it's effectively a binomial distribution (easy to grok) but with special constraints.

Except I'm pretty sure there are three from the last 24 hours. Two live on the front page right now and one about some almost flooding just dropped off.

where does ~5 weeks come from?

I don't understand either. I would have said 1.3 (52 * 2.5%).

From bad math. 2.5% of 52 was the one thing I didn't plug into a calculator. Back to high school I guess