Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Fermi estimate time!

Anagrams are just sentences with the same letter counts. The anagrams they're posting have 25ish letters... how many ways are there to distribute 25 balls into 26 bins? (25+26)!/25!/26! is ~250 trillion. The birthday paradox square roots that down to ~10 million, and the fact that we prefer some bins (fewer Zs, more Es) probably cuts it down even further to ~1 million.

So one anagram per million short tweets; hundreds per day. Doesn't seem too unreasonable.




Quick sanity check: most of the anagrams there are from short tweets, as you'd predict.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: