4 ms·

By Hacker News standards, no research is good enough. Where do you find information that you find credible?

gruez 3y ago
>By Hacker News standards, no research is good enough First, "hacker news" isn't a hive mind, so the idea of "Hacker News standards" is non-nonsensical. From an academic/epidemiological perspective though, I think it's fairly uncontroversial that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > I think it's fairly uncontroversial that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard. Software with 99.999999% uptime [0] may be the gold standard, but that's not always practical, and we can benefit from other software too. If everything with a flaw in the world is useless, then everything in the world is useless, including all these HN comments and whatever you and I do for our livings. [0] I'm too lazy to actually imagine what the gold standard for software development is, sorry.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >Software with 99.999999% uptime [0] may be the gold standard No one seriously has that many nines as their "gold standard", because that's almost always too safe, which has costs: >We strive to make a service reliable enough, but no more reliable than it needs to be. That is, when we set an availability target of 99.99%,we want to exceed it, but not by much: that would waste opportunities to add features to the system, clean up technical debt, or reduce its operational costs. In a sense, we view the availability target as both a minimum and a maximum. The key advantage of this framing is that it unlocks explicit, thoughtful risktaking. https://sre.google/sre-book/embracing-risk/ https://sre.google/sre-book/embracing-risk/ see also: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... In this case though, other commenters have pointed out plausible reasons for why the cohort studies can't be trusted. There's also lack of evidence for the casual mechanism behind the effect, so on the whole it seems fairly reasonable to demand better evidence.
mgh2 3y ago
Use HN as a bs detector: a more critical analysis to minimize bias (though not error prone)
- wolverine876 3y ago
  You are perhaps arbitrarily choosing what is BS, based on the old primate behavior (I'm subject to it too) of choosing a 'team'. If my team is HN, I look for ways it can be winning; I root for it. IOW, how do you know where the BS is, HN or the OP? Another way of framing it: Which is the BS, a quick take by a random commenter on an Internet bulletin board or a scientifically researched, written, reviewed, and published document, often done over years, by an expert in the field with a PhD? I've said before: If the OP author posted on HN and said 'PhD who does research in this field here, and I think ...', they'd be upvoted. But if they do 1000x the work and 'post' to a scientific journal, it's almost always rejected by many on HN.
  - ed 3y ago
    You’ve now posted 4 meta comments about comments. If you have something substantive to say about the study, say it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

>By Hacker News standards, no research is good enough First, "hacker news" isn't a hive mind, so the idea of "Hacker News standards" is non-nonsensical. From an academic/epidemiological perspective though, I think it's fairly uncontroversial that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard.

wolverine876 3y ago
> I think it's fairly uncontroversial that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard. Software with 99.999999% uptime [0] may be the gold standard, but that's not always practical, and we can benefit from other software too. If everything with a flaw in the world is useless, then everything in the world is useless, including all these HN comments and whatever you and I do for our livings. [0] I'm too lazy to actually imagine what the gold standard for software development is, sorry.
- gruez 3y ago
  >Software with 99.999999% uptime [0] may be the gold standard No one seriously has that many nines as their "gold standard", because that's almost always too safe, which has costs: >We strive to make a service reliable enough, but no more reliable than it needs to be. That is, when we set an availability target of 99.99%,we want to exceed it, but not by much: that would waste opportunities to add features to the system, clean up technical debt, or reduce its operational costs. In a sense, we view the availability target as both a minimum and a maximum. The key advantage of this framing is that it unlocks explicit, thoughtful risktaking. https://sre.google/sre-book/embracing-risk/ https://sre.google/sre-book/embracing-risk/ see also: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... In this case though, other commenters have pointed out plausible reasons for why the cohort studies can't be trusted. There's also lack of evidence for the casual mechanism behind the effect, so on the whole it seems fairly reasonable to demand better evidence.

mgh2 3y ago

Use HN as a bs detector: a more critical analysis to minimize bias (though not error prone)

wolverine876 3y ago
You are perhaps arbitrarily choosing what is BS, based on the old primate behavior (I'm subject to it too) of choosing a 'team'. If my team is HN, I look for ways it can be winning; I root for it. IOW, how do you know where the BS is, HN or the OP? Another way of framing it: Which is the BS, a quick take by a random commenter on an Internet bulletin board or a scientifically researched, written, reviewed, and published document, often done over years, by an expert in the field with a PhD? I've said before: If the OP author posted on HN and said 'PhD who does research in this field here, and I think ...', they'd be upvoted. But if they do 1000x the work and 'post' to a scientific journal, it's almost always rejected by many on HN.
- ed 3y ago
  You’ve now posted 4 meta comments about comments. If you have something substantive to say about the study, say it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]