The blog post was more than half padding. Good that the algorithm is so simple it's hard to write a full length blog post about it!
> Now you move forward with what the team calls Round 1. Keep going through Hamlet, adding new words as you go. If you come to a word that’s already on your list, flip a coin again. If it’s tails, delete the word; heads, and the word stays on the list. Proceed in this fashion until you have 100 words on the whiteboard. Then randomly delete about half again, based on the outcome of 100 coin tosses. That concludes Round 1.
It's not just removals you test with N coin flips in Round N, it's whether to insert the new item at all.
I think the pseudocode in the paper is very hard to beat.