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Welcome to Wikifunctions

wikifunctions.org

41–50 of 179 posts

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#41

The documentation doesn't quite match the ambition of the project which may complicate the onboarding of new contributions Some suggestions for immediate questions that people might want to see on a landing page: * How does the function collection relate to existing function libraries in various programming languages * What are the target domain and range of the function set, i.e., what is the overall scope of the pr…

Yes, I think a pointer to somewhere like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia or around (possibly under https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Abstract_Wikipedia) should be here.

Also I'd say one of the more important pages here is actually https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:What_Wikifu...

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#42
post #8

There is a link on the main page titled "Decolonizing Functions", which leads to... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_... I'm not sure if that is satire, or for that matter this whole site.

Your outrage at this seems to be analogous to outrage of people who think that it is horrible that Unix has a "kill" operation. Basically, you don't understand that "decolonization" is a metaphor for a broader historical perspective, and instead you're trying to interpret it literally and in a bad faith.

What "outrage"? Might as well ask why you are going insane with hatred over a simple question. How would that feel? Would you even bother to respond to something like that?

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#43
post #19

What is everyone's favorite function / formula? Mine is n/(n+x) It has a bunch of interesting aspects: As n gets bigger, it goes from 0 to 1. When n equals x, it is 0.5 As n gets bigger, the difference between n and n+1 gets smaller For two sufficiently large n's, the results are equal. Say somebody told you about a new cafe in town and that it is completely awesome. The best cafe ever. What probability do you assign…

One way to view this formula is to use the fact that the Beta distribution is a conjugate prior for the binomial distribution. Essentially if you have a Beta(a, b) prior then your prior mean is a/(a+b) and after observing n samples from a Bernoulli distribution that are all positive, your posterior is Beta(a+n, b) with posterior mean (a+n)/(a+n+b). So in your example you effectively have a Beta(0, x) prior and x (“su…

Also, in case anyone is interested, the uninformative Jeffreys prior for this in Bayesian statistics (meaning it does not assume anything and is invariant to certain transformations of the inputs) is Beta(0.5, 0.5). Thus the initial guess is 0.5, and it evolves from there from the data.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#44
This has to be one of the most confusing documentation sites I have ever seen. Maybe I just don't get it, since I never edited Wikipedia.

Opening some of the pages at random, like

https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z828

https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z110

There's a "try this function" section, which I couldn't get to take any sort of input on a few tries. It always ended up with a field that said "no results found" on typing things in it.

There's a "current object" section, displaying some kind of alien script. Like, what is this? Is it supposed to tell me something?

    "Z1K1": "Z2",
    "Z2K1": {
        "Z1K1": "Z6",
        "Z6K1": "Z110"
    },
    "Z2K2": {
        "Z1K1": "Z8",
    this goes on for quite a while
Clearly I am not part of the target audience here. But who is?

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#46
post #19

What is everyone's favorite function / formula? Mine is n/(n+x) It has a bunch of interesting aspects: As n gets bigger, it goes from 0 to 1. When n equals x, it is 0.5 As n gets bigger, the difference between n and n+1 gets smaller For two sufficiently large n's, the results are equal. Say somebody told you about a new cafe in town and that it is completely awesome. The best cafe ever. What probability do you assign…

The Weierstrass ℘-function. It is what your function wants to be when it grows up.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#47

Well, that one hurts a bit. I think I got the domain name for close to 6 years now. Been paying ever since. Oh i got the hosting as well, been paying for that for 3 years at least. If only I ever got to finishing it. Though my version looks more like stackoverflow where people can upvote edits of functions.

Don’t sweat it. It appears this wikifunctions is not intended for “mortals” to use. It’s an implementation detail of an upcoming structured data project.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#48
post #19

What is everyone's favorite function / formula? Mine is n/(n+x) It has a bunch of interesting aspects: As n gets bigger, it goes from 0 to 1. When n equals x, it is 0.5 As n gets bigger, the difference between n and n+1 gets smaller For two sufficiently large n's, the results are equal. Say somebody told you about a new cafe in town and that it is completely awesome. The best cafe ever. What probability do you assign…

One way to view this formula is to use the fact that the Beta distribution is a conjugate prior for the binomial distribution. Essentially if you have a Beta(a, b) prior then your prior mean is a/(a+b) and after observing n samples from a Bernoulli distribution that are all positive, your posterior is Beta(a+n, b) with posterior mean (a+n)/(a+n+b). So in your example you effectively have a Beta(0, x) prior and x (“su…

Can this way to view the formula be expressed without the terms

    beta distribution
    conjugate
    prior
    binomial distribution
    bernoulli distribution
    posterior
?

Because I could easily grasp that it is a "trust formula" in the way mg described it. But this way to "view" the formula is a mistery to me.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#50
Most interesting functions use other functions. I did not find how they solve using existing functions, avoiding duplication of basic functionality, but also handling how things might break if an underlying function is independently updated. Does anyone know how they solve this, it is an interesting problem?
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