German tank problem

This actually hit my previous company in a software context. We would number our hotfixes sequentially. Many would be items demanded by a single client, so would get deployed as hotfixes only to that customer's site, and just rolled into the main trunk for the next quarterly release for everyone else. Clients would always be notified about hotfixes going onto their live sites. One savvy client noticed the hotfix numbering sequence. Naturally, that ensued quite a number of extremely awkward…

I wonder how did the "conventional intelligence" so grossly overstate the production of German tanks. If the conventional analysis were true there would be ~350,000 tanks produced for two years of intensive warfare! Which is really funny considering that Germany invaded the Soviet Union with something like 4000 tanks if I recall correctly. 246 a month is the statistically estimated data, which is both close to the real number (245) and common sense - no matter how much you militarize…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7278198

Interesting that they discuss how frequentist and Bayesian methods give (slightly) different answers, but not which one was closer to the historical example. Although, either one would be so much closer to the truth than the intelligence community's estimate that perhaps it doesn't matter.