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Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator (filiph.github.io)
constantcrying 6 minutes ago [-]
An alternative approach is using fuzzy-numbers. If evaluated with interval arithmetic you can do very long calculations involving uncertain numbers very fast and with strong mathematical guarantees.

It would especially outperform the Monte-Carlo approach drastically.

djoldman 2 hours ago [-]
I perused the codebase but I'm unfamiliar with dart:

https://github.com/filiph/unsure/blob/master/lib/src/calcula...

I assume this is a montecarlo approach? (Not to start a flamewar, at least for us data scientists :) ).

kccqzy 2 hours ago [-]
Yes it is.
porridgeraisin 1 hours ago [-]
Can you explain how? I'm an (aspiring)
kccqzy 1 hours ago [-]
I didn't peruse the source code. I just read the linked article in its entirety and it says

> The computation is quite slow. In order to stay as flexible as possible, I'm using the Monte Carlo method. Which means the calculator is running about 250K AST-based computations for every calculation you put forth.

So therefore I conclude Monte Carlo is being used.

vessenes 5 minutes ago [-]
cool! are all ranges considered poisson distributions?
pvg 2 hours ago [-]
Smol Show HN thread a few years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22630600
kccqzy 2 hours ago [-]
I actually stumbled upon this a while ago from social media and the web version has a somewhat annoying latency, so I wrote my own version in Python. It uses numpy so it's faster. https://gist.github.com/kccqzy/d3fa7cdb064e03b16acfbefb76645... Thank you filiph for this brilliant idea!
1 hours ago [-]
timothylaurent 2 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of https://www.getguesstimate.com/ , a probabilistic spreadsheet.
Recursing 2 hours ago [-]
The authors of Guesstimate are now working on https://www.squiggle-language.com/

Someone also turned it into the https://github.com/rethinkpriorities/squigglepy python library

baq 2 hours ago [-]
I was looking for this. Seen it (or a similar tool) ages ago.

Want to use it every 3 months or so to pretend that we know what we can squeeze in the roadmap for the quarter.

16 minutes ago [-]
croisillon 36 minutes ago [-]
i like it and i skimmed the post but i don't understand why the default example 100 / 4~6 has a median of 20? there is no way of knowing why the range is between 4 and 6
alexmolas 47 minutes ago [-]
is this the same as error propagation? I used to do a lot of that during my physics degree
thih9 2 hours ago [-]
Feature request: allow specifying the probability distribution. E.g.: ‘~’: normal, ‘_’: uniform, etc.
throwanem 2 hours ago [-]
I love this! As a tool for helping folks with a good base in arithmetic develop statistical intuition, I can't think offhand of what I've seen that's better.
rao-v 2 hours ago [-]
This is terrific and it’s tempting to turn into a little python package. +1 for notation to say it’s ~20,2 to mean 18~22
rogueptr 10 hours ago [-]
brilliant work, polished ui. although sometimes give wrong ranges for equations like 100/1~(200~2000)
thih9 2 hours ago [-]
Can you elaborate? What is the answer you’re getting and what answer would you expect?
BrandoElFollito 2 hours ago [-]
How do you process this equation ? 100 divided by something from one to ...?
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