41–50 of 170 posts
- for command line, fermi: https://git.nunosempere.com/NunoSempere/fermi
- for android, a distribution calculator: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nunosempere.distribution...
People might also be interested in https://www.squiggle-language.com/, which is a more complex version (or possibly https://git.nunosempere.com/personal/squiggle.c>, which is a faster but much more verbose version in C)
I have written similar tools - for command line, fermi: https://git.nunosempere.com/NunoSempere/fermi - for android, a distribution calculator: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nunosempere.distribution... People might also be interested in https://www.squiggle-language.com/ , which is a more complex version (or possibly https://git.nunosempere.com/personal/squiggle.c >, which is a faster but much more verbose vers…
```
5M 12M # number of people living in Chicago
beta 1 200 # fraction of people that have a piano
30 180 # minutes it takes to tune a piano, including travel time
/ 48 52 # weeks a year that piano tuners work for
/ 5 6 # days a week in which piano tuners work
/ 6 8 # hours a day in which piano tuners work
/ 60 # minutes to an hour
```
multiplication is implied as the default operation, fits are lognormal.
I actually quite like it. Really clean, easy to see all the important elements. Lovely clear legible monospace serif font.
In the grand HN tradition of being triggered by a word in the post and going off on a not-quite-but-basically-totally-tangential rant:
There’s (at least) three areas here that are footguns with these kinds of calculations:
1) 95% is usually a lot wider than people think - people take 95% as “I’m pretty sure it’s this,” whereas it’s really closer to “it’d be really surprising if it were not this” - by and large people keep their mental error bars too close.
2) probability is rarely truly uncorrelated - call this the “Mortgage Derivatives” maxim. In the family example, rent is very likely to be correlated with food costs - so, if rent is high, food costs are also likely to be high. This skews the distribution - modeling with an unweighted uniform distribution will lead to you being surprised at how improbable the actual outcome was.
3) In general normal distributions are rarer than people think - they tend to require some kind of constraining factor on the values to enforce. We see them a bunch in nature because there tends to be negative feedback loops all over the place, but once you leave the relatively tidy garden of Mother Nature for the chaos of human affairs, normal distributions get pretty abnormal.
I like this as a tool, and I like the implementation, I’ve just seen a lot of people pick up statistics for the first time and lose a finger.
The ASCII art (well technically ANSI art) histogram is neat. Cool hack to get something done quickly. I'd have spent 5x the time trying various chart libraries and giving up.
I have written similar tools - for command line, fermi: https://git.nunosempere.com/NunoSempere/fermi - for android, a distribution calculator: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nunosempere.distribution... People might also be interested in https://www.squiggle-language.com/ , which is a more complex version (or possibly https://git.nunosempere.com/personal/squiggle.c >, which is a faster but much more verbose vers…
Fermi in particular has the following syntax ``` 5M 12M # number of people living in Chicago beta 1 200 # fraction of people that have a piano 30 180 # minutes it takes to tune a piano, including travel time / 48 52 # weeks a year that piano tuners work for / 5 6 # days a week in which piano tuners work / 6 8 # hours a day in which piano tuners work / 60 # minutes to an hour ``` multiplication is implied as the defau…
900K 1.5M # tonnes of rice per year NK gets from Russia
* 1K # kg in a tone
* 1.2K 1.4K # calories per kg of rice
/ 1.9K 2.5K # daily caloric intake
/ 25M 28M # population of NK
/ 365 # years of food this buys
/ 1% # as a percentage
I like this! In the grand HN tradition of being triggered by a word in the post and going off on a not-quite-but-basically-totally-tangential rant: There’s (at least) three areas here that are footguns with these kinds of calculations: 1) 95% is usually a lot wider than people think - people take 95% as “I’m pretty sure it’s this,” whereas it’s really closer to “it’d be really surprising if it were not this” - by and…
I love this. I've never though of statistics like a power tool or firearm, but the analogy fits really well.