Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator

Summary

Unsure Calculator Loading... Calculate with numbers you’re not sure about Hi, I'm Filip, and I'd like to introduce to you an early version of an uncertainty calculator. Statistics are scary, but they don't need to be. If you allow me to simplify, the field of statistics is just saying: I'm not certain about these numbers, but I would still like to reason about them. Turns out we're unsure about a lot in our lives, but we can't just throw our arms in the air and say, well, I'm not a statistician. Filip’s imperfect uncertainty notation The idea is simple: apart from regular numbers (like 4, 3.14 or 43942), you can also input ranges (like 4~6, 3.1~3.2 or 40000~45000). The character between the two extremes of the range is a tilde (~), a little wave symbol. You can find it on most keyboards, but for convenience, I also included it in the keypad above. The range notation says the following to the calculator: I am not sure about the exact number here, but I am 95% sure it's somewhere in this range. That's it. I thought long and hard about this, and I got to the conclusion that simplicity is key. Yes, we could have notations for different probability distributions, for different confidence levels, for truncations, for covariance, and so on. But that would also make it harder to understand. My assumption is that, if you're already cozy enough with things like confidence levels, you'll want to use something more sophisticated anyway. Here, we're interested in unlocking the power of statistics to a broad audience. Reading the notation is easy: when you see 10~15, you say: "ten to fifteen". Statistics for the rest of us People short-circuit when they encounter uncertainty. "Well, this is not certain, but that other thing also isn't, so it doesn't matter." It often does! "Well, I don't know this number exactly, so I'll just pick the first number that seems plausible and calculate with that." Please don't! Our brains like the simplicity of single numbers, simple answers, but it'...