The Biggest and Weirdest Commits in Linux Kernel Git History

Clauset Shalizi Newman 2007 has not-nice things to say about the classic physicist's idiot trick of fitting power law distributions by drawing a straight line on a log-log graph: it's got huge bias. https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062 However, the other difficult thing about power law distributions is that the dataset size requirements for proper determination of the fact that it's a power law distribution are occasionally incredibly difficult. So their critique is very strong, given the comparative lack of data. It…

My startup's monorepo has 2 root commits as well. When the company was first starting out, my co-founder and I created independent git repos. I was writing OCR type research-y code and he was doing more traditional CRUD REST webserver things. When it came time to pull things together, we thought it'd be fun to try and maintain the histories. So I added his repo as a remote and simply merged his unrelated history into mine. Fast forward and now…

> Rails is probably more representative of the average project; I expect that most git users don't know that octopus merges are even possible. Joys of having Linux and git both written+managed by Torvalds:), although I do wonder if that points to to a shortfall in docs/UI.