> be true! If you ignore the fact that the correlation is so weak that calling it 'statistically insignificant' would be quite generous.

I actually came to a different conclusion than the author. Here is the way I'm thinking about the presented statistics:

1. There is 17 Kebab shops (out of 400 samples) with a google review lower than 3 stars. Let's call them "bad kebabs".

2. All those "bad kebabs" actually located within 500m from the nearest station. No kebab located in further than >500m is bad.

3. So if you've ever gotten a bad donor kebab, we can safely assume that you have purchased it from a kebab shop near a train station.

Maybe there are so many kebab eaters near a train station that a mediocre kebab offering becomes profitable?

> with a google review lower than 3 stars

At least here, the majority of 1-2 star reviews are actually complaining about third-party delivery services like Foodora[1].

Of course the fries will be soggy and the burger luke warm when you got a guy who had to pedal a bike for half an hour to deliver it for you. Like what did you expect?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodora

I expect this guy to keep it fresh for me.

I don't know if you're joking or not but in case you're not, you can't really keep fries "fresh". Regardless, the point remains that the quality of third party food delivery services shouldn't be considered when studying the quality of restaurants.

I always open fries. They will get cold. Fine. Cold fries can be reheated; they won’t be as good as fresh, but soggy fries are much harder to fix.

I agree. Nothing is worse than receiving fries which have been in a closed or semi-closed container and have been soaking in their own steam.

> 2. All those "bad kebabs" actually located within 500m from the nearest station. No kebab located in further than >500m is bad.

Right, but this is selection bias. There will always exist a distance D from which all bad kebabs are located.

Unless D is provenly chosen _before_ looking at the data, this has no meaning.

One also has to take the kebab density into account.

This "you have to choose D" ahead of time nonsense is why people distrust and dislike statisticians! Humans have priors on what is "close" that are independent of this particular article. If they had said "See, everything within 5000m" or "everything within 5m" you might have a point but "500m" being a rough definition of "close to a train station" is pretty reasonable.

> If they had said "See, everything within 5000m" or "everything within 5m" you might have a point

On the contrary, if everything was within five meters, that would make the finding much more impressive.

Bad kebab shops may survive if located near a train station.

The more generally interesting a topic is the more likely a HN user is to read the article. A study.

I am definitely guilty of sometimes clicking "reply" and then reading the linked article to check that I'm not about to essentially tell you what you'd have read or worse, tell you something the article actually debunks.

I only read articles with headlines that describe informative content, not with headlines that sound funny or thought-provoking.

Heh. You've just captured the reason why (the better) clinical journals explicitly and specifically forbid having a statement of results in the title of a paper.

Would it help if I were to chime in with a response about the benefits of kebab case over train case?

Hi there, inventor of the kebab plugin for traindeck here. I'm afraid I was the one who introduced the concept of kebab case, way back in the early 1990s. Back then, trains didn't have enough processing power to handle full cuts of meat, so I thought I'd introduce kebabs as a hack, and it ended up taking off! Didn't expect anyone to still be using it. It's always fun to share stories on HN - you never know who you'll meat here.

Easy fix: just add a ? to the end.

"study" is already in scare quotes

Ha ha I had my coding eyes on. I removed the quotes mentally as the entire title starts with one.