Top all-time · #775
Simply Statistics
Personal blog · simplystatistics.orgdatascience
Simply Statistics is a personal blog at simplystatistics.org about data and science. Since 2012, 85 different Hacker News readers have linked it 163 times, most often “Tukey, Design Thinking, and Better Questions”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Simply Statistics as a must-read applied statistics and data science blog, valued for its essays on replication, p-values and whether most published science is false.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Called a must read; liked for its summary of why most science is false, replication points and stats framing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Tukey, Design Thinking, and Better Questions4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-04-18
- The statisticians at Fox News use classic and novel graphical techniques3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-11-26
- A summary of the evidence that most published research is false3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-12-17
- Is most science false?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-09-26
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-06-01
- The 80/20 rule of statistical methods development2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-22
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-01-21
- A menagerie of messed up data analyses and how to avoid them2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-01
- Amplifying people I trust on Covid-192 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-29
- Context Compatibility in Data Analysis2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-05-27
What Hacker News says?
Palantir does really well for what they do, but this article is as true today as it was in 2016 in terms of what they are https://simplystatistics.org/2016/05/11/palantir-struggles/ They're almost just a consultancy.
Comment linking /2016/05/11/palantir-struggles/
on “Products I Wish Existed”Submitted The future of education is plain text as a story · 368 points
HN discussionI hear you express this sentiment often. Could you explain your thoughts on this? If anything, I think the stories are the problem. Cool hacks and interesting science often fail to get the 2-3 upvotes they need to escape the new page. On page 2 of "New", I've found the following fairly decent stories that died recently: http://simplystatistics.org/2014/03/20/the-8020-rule-of-stat... http://googlecloudplatform.blogsp…
Comment linking /2014/03/20/the-8020-rule-of-statistical-methods-development/
on “Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments”Submitted Fitbit, why can’t I have my data? as a story · 211 points
HN discussionAndrew Beam's post offered very persuasive evidence that Jeff Leek's intuition (deep learning yields poor performance with small sample sizes) is incorrect. The error bars and the consistent trend of higher accuracy with a properly implemented deep learning model, particularly with smaller sample sizes, is devastating to Leek's original post. I think this is a fantastic example of the speed and self-correcting natur…
Comment linking /courses/
on “You can probably use deep learning even if you don't have a lot of data”Submitted How to create an AI startup – convince some humans to be your training set as a story · 137 points
HN discussionOff topic, but since you mentioned jgrahamc's article in Nature, interestingly, this was what I read last night on Simply Statistics: http://simplystatistics.org/2013/01/23/statisticians-and-com... It's a similar issue. I think statisticians are taking constructive steps to correct their path, since you know, ML is the new sexy thing. Bioinformatics could take a much longer time to self-correct though. Although, as…
Comment linking /2013/01/23/statisticians-and-computer-scientists-if-there-is-no-code-there-is-no-paper/
on “A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)”Submitted Piketty in R markdown as a story · 94 points
HN discussionThat particular issue can also be solved by setting options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE). Anyway, the default behaviour was the sensible thing to do at the time: https://simplystatistics.org/2015/07/24/stringsasfactors-an-...
Comment linking /2015/07/24/stringsasfactors-an-unauthorized-biography/
on “A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R”Submitted Don't use deep learning when your data isn't that big as a story · 79 points
HN discussionSpeaking as an analytics architect ... You'll be a lot better off spending your mental energy thinking about the outcomes you want to achieve (user engagement, upselling, growth, etc) and the types of analysis you'll need to understand what changes you need to make to produce those outcomes. Protip: this is actually really hard, and people underestimate it by orders of magnitude. A blog post by Roger Peng (with indi…
Comment linking /2019/04/17/tukey-design-thinking-and-better-questions/
on “Ask HN: Good tech talks on how analytics systems are implemented?”Submitted Interview with Nick Chamandy, statistician at Google as a story · 57 points
HN discussionGrowth Mr. Money Moustache [ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ ] Study Hacks, Cal Newport [ http://calnewport.com/blog/ ] Tim Ferriss [ https://tim.blog/ ] Oliver Emberton [oliveremberton.com] Intellectual Farnam Street, Shane Parrish [farnamstreetblog.com/blog] Less Wrong [ http://lesswrong.com/ ] [lesserwrong.com] Raw Thought, Aaron Swartz [aaronsw.com/weblog] Slate Star Codex [slatestarcodex.com] Edge [ http://edge…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favourite blogs?”Submitted Teaching R to New Users – From tapply to the Tidyverse as a story · 47 points
HN discussionIf you find this interesting you might also like: http://biostatistics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/0... the paper was discussed by several leading statisticians including Andrew Gelman, D.R. Cox and Yoav Benjamini: http://simplystatistics.org/2013/09/25/is-most-science-false...
Comment linking /2013/09/25/is-most-science-false-the-titans-weigh-in/
on “A surge of p-values between 0.040 and 0.049 in recent decades [pdf]”Submitted The landscape of data analysis as a story · 46 points
HN discussionThis, I think, is the study the first poster meant, Ioannidis 2005, 'Why Most Published Research Findings Are False': http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj... It's quite a famous paper. Many rebuttals, comments, blog-posts etc, have been published, have a look at the comments on the PLOS site, I especially like this blog post summarizing more research: http://simplystatistics.org/2013/09/25/is…
Comment linking /2013/12/16/a-summary-of-the-evidence-that-most-published-research-is-false/
on “Correlation is usually not causation. But why not?”Submitted The key word in “Data Science” is not Data, it is Science as a story · 43 points
HN discussionI was very surprised when I first learned that results could be published without first having been reproduced. A lot of psychology journals have been burned by that over the years, http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology-about-to... http://simplystatistics.org/post/21326470429/replication-psy... http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/04/26/reproducibilit... and as a consequence, just within the last ye…
Comment linking /post/21326470429/replication-psychology-and-big-science
on “Science Exchange Reproducibility Initiative”Submitted Data science on a chromebook as a story · 42 points
HN discussionAs an academic statistician running the largest data science program in the world (10,000+ have completed a class) I think that CS/Data Science only pose a threat to statistics if we don't adapt. I wrote about it here. http://simplystatistics.org/2013/04/15/data-science-only-pos...
Comment linking /2013/04/15/data-science-only-poses-a-threat-to-biostatistics-if-we-dont-adapt/
on “Statistics: Losing Ground to CS, Losing Image Among Students”Submitted Yes, Clinical Trials Work as a story · 42 points
HN discussionPart II With good stuff in ML you are describing a world I've seen no solid evidence of first hand. Maybe that's to be expected: Long I did well learning math in part because I picked some really good books; due to some lucky parts of my background, that was easy to do. Then I tried this in statistics and picked a junk book -- eventually figured that out. I didn't have much respect for or progress in statistics befo…
Comment linking /
on “Acquisitions accelerate as tech giants seek to build AI smarts”Submitted Why I don't use ggplot2 as a story · 41 points
HN discussionFurther examples from Simply Statistics. http://simplystatistics.org/2012/11/26/the-statisticians-at-...
Comment linking /2012/11/26/the-statisticians-at-fox-news-use-classic-and-novel-graphical-techniques-to-lead-with-data/
on “Five Ways to Lie with Charts”Submitted Healthvis R package – one line D3 graphics with R as a story · 34 points
HN discussionI like this summary of the evidence that most published research is false[1]: -"One of the hottest topics in science has two main conclusions: Most published research is false There is a reproducibility crisis in science The first claim is often stated in a slightly different way: that most results of scientific experiments do not replicate." - [Ioannidis'] "Paper: Why most published research findings are false. Mai…
Comment linking /2013/12/16/a-summary-of-the-evidence-that-most-published-research-is-false/
on “Science Isn’t Broken”Submitted How I decide when to trust an R package as a story · 27 points
HN discussionI think one of the core problems is summed up down near the end: the idea of statistics being taught by an apprenticeship model. There's a slightly more fleshed out version of this idea, also by Dr. Leek, over at SimplyStatistics[1] It might be my own statistics-porous media filter, but it seems like this issue is finally getting the attention it deserves. Hopefully this discussion will lead to bigger and better thi…
Comment linking /2015/04/29/data-analysis-subcultures/
on “Statistics: P values are just the tip of the iceberg”Submitted The statisticians at Fox News use classic and novel graphical techniques as a story · 20 points
HN discussion
