Here (https://uncertainty.nist.gov/) is another similar Monte Carlo-style calculator designed by the statisticians at NIST. It is intended for propagating uncertainties in measurements and can handle various different assumed input distributions.
Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
51–60 of 170 posts
Re: Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
#52I 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 strongly agree with this, and particularly point 1. If you ask people to provide estimated ranges for answers that they are 90% confident in, people on average produce roughly 30% confidence intervals instead. Over 90% of people don't even get to 70% confidence intervals.
You can test yourself at https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-good-an-estimator-are-you/.
Re: Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
#53I 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…
I tried the unsure calc and the android app and they seem to produce different results?
Re: Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
#54I 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…
I tried the unsure calc and the android app and they seem to produce different results?
The android app fits lognormals, and 90% rather than 95% confidence intervals. I think they are a more parsimonious distribution for doing these kinds of estimates. One hint might be that, per the central limit theorem, sums of independent variables will tend to normals, which means that products will tend to be lognormals, and for the decompositions quick estimates are most useful, multiplications are more common
Re: Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
#55It sounds like a gimmick at first, but looks surprisingly useful. I'd surely install it if it was available as an app to use alongside my usual calculator, and while I cannot quite recall a situation when I needed it, it seems very plausible that I'll start finding use cases once I have it bound to some hotkey on my keyboard.
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Re: Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
#56It sounds like a gimmick at first, but looks surprisingly useful. I'd surely install it if it was available as an app to use alongside my usual calculator, and while I cannot quite recall a situation when I needed it, it seems very plausible that I'll start finding use cases once I have it bound to some hotkey on my keyboard.
> if it was available as an app
Consider https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nunosempere.distribution...
Re: Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
#57I put "1 / (-1~1)" and expected something around - to + infinty. It instead gave me -35~35. I really don't known how good it is.
I'm guessing this is not an error. If you divide 1/normal(0,1), the full distribution would range from -inf to inf, but the 95% output doesn't have to.
Re: Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
#58I 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…
Another tool in this spirit is https://carlo.app/>, which allows you to do this kind of calculation on google sheets.
Re: Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
#59So is it 250k calculations for every approximation window ? So i guess it will only be able to calculate upto 3-4 approximations comfortably ?
Any reason why we kept it 250k and now a lower number like 10k
Re: Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
#60This is neat! If you enjoy the write up, you might be interested in the paper “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox” which goes even more on-depth into actually multiplying the probability density functions instead of the common point estimates. It has the somewhat surprising result that we may just be alone. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
This was quite a fun read, thanks!