Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Beating TimSort at Merging - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27823180 - July 2021 (69 comments - including https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tim-peters - maybe luck will strike again...)

Timsort, the Python sorting algorithm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21196555 - Oct 2019 (131 comments)

On the Worst-Case Complexity of TimSort - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17883461 - Aug 2018 (74 comments)

Timsort is a sorting algorithm that is efficient for real-world data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17436591 - July 2018 (77 comments)

Functional verification with mechanical proofs of TimSort [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778243 - June 2015 (1 comment)

Timsort - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214527 - Nov 2011 (27 comments)

Visualising Sorting Algorithms: Python's timsort - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2092594 - Jan 2011 (3 comments)

Java has switched from Mergesort to TimSort - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752677 - Aug 2009 (13 comments)

Visualizing Sorting Algorithms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750858 - Aug 2009 (3 comments)

Apparently a lot of people heard of it. :-) I just love these headlines.

Heard of it? I've bought tim an Icelandic hamburger!

Story time, please :)

It's only a small story: I was one of the group sent to Iceland for the Need for Speed Sprint on Python back in ~2006. Among the other participants was, of course, tim. I mostly worked on benchmarking to determine how much of a speedup we had achieved.

tim gave me some really eye-opening tips, one that's really stuck with me is that you want to take the best of many short runs of the benchmark rather than running it a long time, because longer runs are going to guarantee interference from other parts of the OS (scheduling, etc).

tim is an insanely smart guy, kind, and funny.

One day for lunch we were ordering takeout from this little joint, I forget the name, it might have been Hamborgarabulla Tomasar, and I picked up the check for everyone (maybe 15 people). tim described it as "shockingly good", which was absolutely accurate. For how expensive Iceland was for food, it wasn't too terribly bad price-wise either.

I wrote up more here, though I guess my blogs are offline now. https://lwn.net/Articles/185399/

So, not too crazy of a story. Not like the story of how I first met tim.

> So, not too crazy of a story. Not like the story of how I first met tim.

Are you going to make us ask every time?

How did you meet Tim?

That's a story I only tell in person. ;-)-ly-yrs