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<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Re-inventing Willis · HackerPapers discussions</title><link>https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/physics_0601192/</link><description>Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.</description><language>en</language><lastBuildDate>Mon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMT</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/physics_0601192/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /><item><title>Re-inventing Willis — mentioned by abetusk</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14817421</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:physics_0601192:14817421</guid><pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2017 01:16:22 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out, power laws are more &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; than the normal distribution. The reason for this is that if you have the sum independent identically distributed (I.I.D.) random variables (R.V.s), if they converge to a distribution, that distribution is Levy Stable [1], which is power law in it&amp;#x27;s tails. The Gaussian is a special case in the family of Levy Stable distributions. The article states that &amp;quot;the sum of many independent, additive effects is approximately normally distributed&amp;quot; which is patently false. The sum of many independent random variables with finite variance is…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/physics_0601192/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>physics.soc-ph</category></item></channel></rss>
