Re:API Integration Pain? Ouch. (HN Survey Results)
by IgorPartola on Thursday August 11, 2011 @12:10PM
(#2873460)
Just like with any online survey, remember that the survey results are utterly meaningless. There is self selection bias for one. Even the initial post title for this survey was "How much does external API integration suck? (survey)". Thus you are already inviting only developers that really hate using external API's, for one reason or another (maybe they are gasp bad developers).
You also had timing bias: the post got only 20 upvotes, so it likely did not stay on the front page for that long. For the few hours it was there, most of the developers around the world were asleep or away from HN.
That is not to say, that your results are not interesting/thought provoking. Just pointing out that they are most likely not statistically significant in any way. As in, don't say "we should take pain X away because it got more votes than pain Y".
You also had timing bias: the post got only 20 upvotes, so it likely did not stay on the front page for that long. For the few hours it was there, most of the developers around the world were asleep or away from HN.
That is not to say, that your results are not interesting/thought provoking. Just pointing out that they are most likely not statistically significant in any way. As in, don't say "we should take pain X away because it got more votes than pain Y".