Chris Said
chris-said.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2016
Chris Said, a data scientist, writes about statistics, A/B testing, scientific misconduct, the Soviet economy, and the air quality index.
What HN saysCommenters repeatedly point to his Soviet optimization post as a good read on the Soviet economy and cite his air quality index piece.
21HN people shared it
10linked it in comments
26stories submitted
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Most-shared posts
- 1Optimizing things in the USSR (2016)9 people · 303 points · first shared 2016 · 200 comments on HN
- 2The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct4 people · 61 points · first shared 2024 · 47 comments on HN
- 3Solar storm risk and EMP attacks3 people · 144 points · first shared 2020 · 67 comments on HN
- 4Optimizing sample sizes in A/B testing2 people · 35 points · first shared 2020 · 15 comments on HN
- 5How to make polished Jupyter presentations with optional code visibility2 people · 4 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 6Double Descent in Human Learning2 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 7Four pitfalls of hill climbing1 people · 136 points · first shared 2016 · 22 comments on HN
- 8Empirical Bayes for multiple sample sizes1 people · 104 points · first shared 2017 · 17 comments on HN
- 9Why inaccurate antigen tests are better than slow PCR tests1 people · 5 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 10Keyboard shortcuts I couldn't live without1 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 11Religions as firms1 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 12Learning by flip-flopping1 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 13The Shower Problem (2020)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 14Small correlations can drive large increases in teen depression1 people · 1 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 15Instrumental variables analysis for non-economists1 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
amai · 2025-01-30
I can recommend the book Red Plenty, if you want to learn more about the successes and failures of Soviet economy:
https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/
csaid81 · 2024-09-28
Sorry, here's the correct link https://chris-said.io/2024/06/17/the-case-for-criminalizing-scientific…
coldtea · 2024-05-22
>Turned out not to work, probably b/c you can't stablize an inherently unstable complex system.
Or because they didn't have enough computing power at the time
https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/#:~:tex…
kakwa_ · 2023-07-31
To extend, interesting read on the subject of the soviet economy:
https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/
HN discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515225
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25084479
apwheele · 2023-06-25
Of interest to folks looking at this post -- Chris Said has a deeper dive on US air quality metrics and their provenance, https://chris-said.io/2023/06/19/the-air-quality-index-doesnt-make-any…
The attempt to make things easy to interpret using a nice relative scale ends up in the end make them very opaque to interpret the number itself in any meaningful way.
btilly · 2022-02-25
There is an open debate about the likely damage done by power surges along long-distance power lines. Industry funded research claims that they should survive both EMP and major solar storms. Real world experience suggests that they are overconfident.
See https://chris-said.io/2020/06/18/everything-ive-learned-about-solar-st…
Regardless of which side you believe, it is clear that any "worst case scenario" should include the possibility of an EMP attack that actually does take out the power grid.
The_Amp_Walrus · 2021-08-02
At least computationally, central planning is quite hard
https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/
ablekh · 2021-02-27
I have recalled related post[1] and relevant NH discussion[2] from 2020. Also just ran across another recent related article [3] and its Reddit discussion [4].
[1] https://chris-said.io/2020/06/18/everything-ive-learned-about-solar-st…
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580362
[3] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sun-solar-storms-earth-havoc-space…
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/lt7tnd/solar_storms_can_wreak_…
google234123 · 2020-12-31
This is historical revisionism. The soviet leaders tried to copy the success story of Deng Xiaoping's transitions from socialism to capitalism in China. The planned economy system just didn't work. The "US Empire" can't explain why by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union had 4x tractors as the United States which was totally wasteful.
Here is a good article on why it's computationally challenging to completely plan an entire economy.
https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/
PartiallyTyped · 2023-04-28
Parent comment refers Double Descent in Human Learning [1, 2] which references the Deep Double Descent phenomenon in Large models [3].
The gist of double descent is the phenomenon where a _large_ model appears to over-fit as we expected from traditional ML, but then the val loss starts decreasing. The general consensus is that the model switches from memorization mode to interpolation mode which enables generalization.
In essence, the large number of parameters initially fit directly to the data, but then smooth out.
The reason we can continue improving the model is the fact that over-parameterized models always have a descent direction, simply due to the dimensionality of the model.
The paper that the post references, shows that by trading parameters with more training steps, we can have small models that exhibit similar if not identical behaviour.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35683754
[2] https://chris-said.io/2023/04/21/double-descent-in-human-learning
[3] https://openai.com/research/deep-double-descent