frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Bayesian statistics for confused data scientists

https://nchagnet.pages.dev/blog/bayesian-statistics-for-confused-data-scientists/
39•speckx•3d ago

Comments

jhbadger•1h ago
I think Rafael Irizarry put it best over a decade ago -- while historically there was a feud between self-declared "frequentists" and "Bayesians", people doing statistics in the modern era aren't interested in playing sides, but use a combination of techniques originating in both camps: https://simplystatistics.org/posts/2014-10-13-as-an-applied-...
statskier•50m ago
I went through grad school in a very frequentist environment. We “learned” Bayesian methods but we never used them much.

In my professional life I’ve never personally worked on a problem that I felt wasn’t adequately approached with frequentist methods. I’m sure other people’s experiences are different depending on the problems you gravitate towards.

In fact, I tend to get pretty frustrated with Bayesian approaches because when I do turn to them it tends to be in situations that already quite complex and large. In basically every instance of that I’ve never been able to make the Bayesian approach work. Won’t converge or the sampler says it will take days and days to run. I can almost always just resort to some resampling method that might take a few hours but it runs and gives me sensible results.

I realize this is heavily biased by basically only attempting on super-complex problems, but it has sort of soured me on even trying anymore.

To be clear I have no issue with Bayesian methods. Clearly they work well and many people use them with great success. But I just haven’t encountered anything in several decades of statistical work that I found really required Bayesian approaches, so I’ve really lost any motivation I had to experiment with it more.

storus•42m ago
A large portion of generative AI is based on Bayesian statistics, like stable diffusion, regularization, LLM as a learned prior (though trained with frequentist MLE), variational autoencoders etc. Chain-of-thought and self-consistency can be viewed as Bayesian as well.
nextos•38m ago
> I’ve never personally worked on a problem that I felt wasn’t adequately approached with frequentist methods

Multilevel models are one example of problem were Bayesian methods are hard to avoid as otherwise inference is unstable, particularly when available observations are not abundant. Multilevel models should be used more often as shrinking of effect sizes is important to make robust estimates.

Lots of flashy results published in Nature Medicine and similar journals turn out to be statistical noise when you look at them from a rigorous perspective with adequate shrinking. I often review for these journals, and it's a constant struggle to try to inject some rigor.

From a more general perspective, many frequentist methods fall prey to Lindley's Paradox. In simple terms, their inference is poorly calibrated for large sample sizes. They often mistake a negligible deviation from the null for a "statistically significant" discovery, even when the evidence actually supports the null. This is quite typical in clinical trials. (Spiegelhalter et al, 2003) is a great read to learn more even if you are not interested in medical statistics [1].

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/0470092602

Tinybox – Offline AI device 120B parameters

https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox
284•albelfio•5h ago•166 comments

Professional video editing, right in the browser with WebGPU and WASM

https://tooscut.app/
117•mohebifar•3h ago•34 comments

Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/21/profiling-hacker-news-users/
38•simonw•45m ago•33 comments

Some things just take time

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/3/20/some-things-just-take-time/
494•vaylian•10h ago•171 comments

Boomloom: Think with your hands

https://www.theboomloom.com
35•rasengan0•1d ago•3 comments

Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

https://news.dyne.org/child-protection-is-not-access-control/
454•smartmic•4h ago•230 comments

Trivy ecosystem supply chain briefly compromised

https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/security/advisories/GHSA-69fq-xp46-6x23
14•batch12•1d ago•3 comments

The Impact of AI on Game Dev Jobs. Open to Work Crisis

https://darkounity.com/blog-post?id=the-impact-of-ai-on-game-dev-jobs-open-to-work-crisis--177412...
32•hacker_13•3h ago•8 comments

Bayesian statistics for confused data scientists

https://nchagnet.pages.dev/blog/bayesian-statistics-for-confused-data-scientists/
39•speckx•3d ago•4 comments

Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust

https://grafeo.dev/
184•0x1997•10h ago•59 comments

Electronics for Kids, 2nd Edition

https://nostarch.com/electronics-for-kids-2e
95•0x54MUR41•2d ago•14 comments

Show HN: Termcraft – terminal-first 2D sandbox survival in Rust

https://github.com/pagel-s/termcraft
81•sebosch•6h ago•9 comments

How Invisalign became the biggest user of 3D printers

https://www.wired.com/story/how-invisalign-became-the-worlds-biggest-3d-printing-company/
135•mikhael•2d ago•98 comments

How Ford burned $12B in Brazil (2021)

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/how-ford-burned-12-billion-brazil-2021-05-20/
25•kaycebasques•10h ago•1 comments

Common Lisp Development Tooling

https://www.creativetension.co/posts/common-lisp-development-tooling
31•0bytematt•5h ago•2 comments

Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons

https://512pixels.net/2026/03/hide-macos-tahoes-menu-icons-with-this-one-simple-trick/
97•soheilpro•7h ago•25 comments

The paddle wheel aircraft carriers of Lake Michigan

https://signoregalilei.com/2026/03/08/the-paddle-wheel-aircraft-carriers-of-lake-michigan/
43•surprisetalk•4d ago•4 comments

Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

https://github.com/hectorvent/floci
49•shaicoleman•3h ago•7 comments

"[St. Patrick's Day humor in security paper:] Sandboxing"

https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3733699
3•antlai•4d ago•0 comments

Welcome to the Block Universe

https://nautil.us/welcome-to-the-block-universe-1278973
9•samizdis•4d ago•0 comments

Show HN: Atomic – Self-hosted, semantically-connected personal knowledge base

https://github.com/kenforthewin/atomic
44•kenforthewin•5h ago•7 comments

Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords

https://pbxscience.com/ubuntu-26-04-ends-46-years-of-silent-sudo-passwords/
311•akersten•20h ago•315 comments

ZJIT removes redundant object loads and stores

https://railsatscale.com/2026-03-18-how-zjit-removes-redundant-object-loads-and-stores/
71•tekknolagi•3d ago•10 comments

Seam carving with forward energy

https://pictolab.io/seam-carving
12•ChadNauseam•8h ago•2 comments

Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/03/260319044656.htm
155•nothrowaways•5h ago•138 comments

Cuba rejects US embassy's 'shameless' request for diesel

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5794480-us-embassy-cuba-diesel-fuel-iran-conflict/
8•thisislife2•31m ago•0 comments

Meta's Omnilingual MT for 1,600 Languages

https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/omnilingual-mt-machine-translation-for-1600-languages/?...
113•j0e1•3d ago•32 comments

Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646
89•Anon84•9h ago•54 comments

Books of the Century by Le Monde

https://standardebooks.org/collections/le-mondes-100-books-of-the-century
96•zlu•3d ago•60 comments

A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01362/
460•cainxinth•1d ago•353 comments