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> Customer data sizes followed a power-law distribution. The largest customer had double the storage of the next largest customer, the next largest customer had half of that, etc

I’m no statistician, but I’m like 99% sure that’s an exponential, not a power law

There’s a world of difference. The point of an exponential is that you can ignore big things. The point of a power law is that you can’t.



>> Customer data sizes followed a power-law distribution. The largest customer had double the storage of the next largest customer, the next largest customer had half of that, etc

> I’m no statistician, but I’m like 99% sure that’s an exponential, not a power law

I'm no expert either, but it seems correct. The power law distribution has each X value in an X/Y series decreasing by a specific factor, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#/media/File:Long_tai...

The exponential has each X value increasing by a specific factor, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function#/media/Fi...




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