81–90 of 96 posts
Isn't how all software should be written? Expressions that represent a set of all possible values, effectively replacing the need for types. Surely, such a platform would make building an app 100 times easier. Not that building apps is a good use of our resources.
hey nice tool on a side note what tool did u use to create the animated tutorials on your git page: https://github.com/getguesstimate/guesstimate-app image link https://camo.githubusercontent.com/8fd97a97fa656a1eb92294f0f...
As per the paper , you can choose arbitrary distributions , construct a fluent graph , run Monte Carlo simulation and get the result - |via http://bit.ly/hnbuzz01 |
Cool idea but doesn't render into anything useful on my S5....
Thanks for letting me know. It's definitely not mobile compatible yet. I think making it viewable on mobile devices soon is doable. Making them easily editable will be much harder / require a different interface.
And to comment on the project, incredibly interesting. In my experience non-quantitative people (non STE-grads) tend not to be able to, at all, model decisions, decision trees and event trees as distributions or probabilities. This kind of decision analysis can be sold at very high margins, because it's value can be very high for the right audience. Intuitively, if you can form a solid business team and do enterprise/policy/strategy level sales, a company around this has a market (none of the established competing software pointed out by others is very cheap, and none of it is very modern, accessible or intuitive). Another option, more suitable for a freelancer mindset (and with a wider distribution of non-bust outcomes as well as arguably higher EV...), is starting and maintaining this as an OSS project, hopefully with a wide and growing contributor base; and establishing a career as a consultant in the modelling/predictions space with Guesstimate as your resume and business card. This of course depends as well on your personal interest - software developer vs. data scientist vs. fledgling capitalist.
I would be much more interested if this product were "choose probability density function centric." Then, the Monte Carlo engine would gain much more interest. Being able to choose or specify arbitrary distributions, and then run simulations, would be valuable. Of special interest are non-continuous distributions. How often have normal distribution reasoning failed in finance? Put another way, a user should be able t…
Very good to know. Right now you can choose between normal, uniform, and a few very simple discreet distributions, but not others. When I built this, my first goal was to make any distribution run quickly. At this point I believe adding other distribution types will be quite doable, expect them shortly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any plans to add different probability distributions? I do this kind of analysis by hand for things like project timelines and cost estimates, but I model each variable with a double triangular distribution ( http://www.mhnederlof.nl/doubletriangular.html ). You provide a best case, worst case, and then the most likely case. The distribution approximates the long tails on many kinds of distributions.
I do the same thing as cpitman, try to figure project times and costs using the same best, worst, most likely. It would be nice to have it automated so when the PHB looks at the numbers they just don't pick the "best case" because we have the "best team". 50 nodes would be plenty, I can roll up tasks into a bigger task set.
Isn't how all software should be written? Expressions that represent a set of all possible values, effectively replacing the need for types. Surely, such a platform would make building an app 100 times easier. Not that building apps is a good use of our resources.
If you don't like making types explicit, you could use implicit typing like in Haskell, or having values carry their types like in Ruby.
I wasn't expecting this to go on hnews yet, but happy to take any questions!
This is awesome! Have you heard of Augur? It's a decentalized prediction market: http://augur.net I wonder if the guys there would be interested in this.
I would be much more interested if this product were "choose probability density function centric." Then, the Monte Carlo engine would gain much more interest. Being able to choose or specify arbitrary distributions, and then run simulations, would be valuable. Of special interest are non-continuous distributions. How often have normal distribution reasoning failed in finance? Put another way, a user should be able t…
Perhaps that field can provide a potential source of new names, when you decide to market this as a company.