←back to thread

214 points Brajeshwar | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.235s | source
Show context
mr90210 ◴[] No.45087189[source]
> survey of 791 developers

We have got to stop. In a universe of well over 25 million programmers a sample of 791 is not significant enough to justify such headlines.

We’ve got to do better than this, whatever this is.

replies(3): >>45087551 #>>45087557 #>>45088403 #
1. oasisaimlessly ◴[] No.45087557[source]
You should read more about statistical significance. Under some reasonable assumptions, you can confidently certain deduce things with small sample sizes.

From another perspective: we've deduced a lot of things about how atoms work without any given experiment inspecting more than an insignificant fraction of all atoms.

TL;DR: The population size (25e6 total devs, 1e80 atoms in observable universe) is almost entirely irrelevant to hypothesis testing.