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Guesstimate – A Spreadsheet for things that aren't certain
- crb002 8y agoI proposed writing something like this while working for DuPont's Encirca platform. Years later still little to no adoption in the farm IT field of these models.
- samstave 8y agoThis looks fantastic. I love that it was a no BS signup and start using. Super clean and easy. It would be great to be able to show data on GIS as well - effectively showing the outcomes geographic representations. Ill see if the data I was looking to work with today will work with this tool meaningfully.
- struct 8y agoGreat tool! (I’m a regular user :D)
- samstave 8y agoCan you give some examples on what you have built with it?
- struct 8y agoSure! Here's a particularly big one I built when deciding whether to invest in Walmart: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/10935 https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/10935 Here's another one I did to ballpark a pension plan: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/11133 https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/11133 Another thing I like is that you can do simple statistical reckoning for it. For my job, I often have to benchmark something several hundred times with or without a patch applied. It can be bit difficult to put "on average x% faster" in context when the benchmark is noisy, but Guesstimate allows you to answer questions like "assuming somebody ran one run of this benchmark with the patch, and one run without it, what's the expected range of performance improvement that they'd see?" with the actual numbers that you get out of the benchmark: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/11850 https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/11850
- thisisit 8y ago> whether to invest in Walmart: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/10935 https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/10935 That is one heavy model. My computer comes to a standstill trying to open this one. I am curious though what was the result of the analysis?
- iamwil 8y agoI saw this a couple of years ago, when it was just a project. Now that there's a price, how did you guys decide on a price? How did you find your first customers? For a broadly applicable tool, how did you know where to start looking?
- EGreg 8y agoWouldn’t it be cool if they got it from their own spreadsheet?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- iamwil 8y agoYeah, I wonder if they did. That would be an interesting spreadsheet to keep updated as people kept purchasing to update their model.
- ozgooen 8y agoWe initially had a lot of uncertainty on how to price it but wanted to experiment with more users rather than fewer, with the premise that if it were very successful we could scale up. I think if I were to start again or spend much time restructuring it, I'd probably focus a lot more on enterprise customers. That would be quite a bit of work though, so I don't have intentions of doing that soon.
- reitzensteinm 8y agoI feel like this was a big missed opportunity to link to your exploratory pricing guesstimate.
- dang 8y agoFrom 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10816563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10816563
- carlob 8y agoMaybe it's just the short video and the FAQ, but I found it particularly difficult to find information about the distributions involved and how to choose that. I imagine there a bunch of cases where the defaults would not work like you're trying to do error propagation (all normal distributions) or you're trying to compute interval arithmetic. Is it the case that if you input a range which span multiple orders of magnitude then you get lognormal rather than normal? I might not be exactly the target audience, but I would appreciate a more in-depth of the math and heuristics involved EDIT: I found this on their blog https://medium.com/guesstimate-blog/lognormal-normal-833bf413c7a3 https://medium.com/guesstimate-blog/lognormal-normal-833bf41...
- ozgooen 8y agoThanks for the feedback. We have some documentation [here](https://docs.getguesstimate.com/ https://docs.getguesstimate.com/), and some in the sidebar entree. Generally, we recommend lognormal distributions for estimated parameters that can't be negative. This works when you span multiple orders of magnitude, though it's possible you may want an even more skewed distribution (which is unsupported). I may be able to make a much longer video introduction some-time soon.
- Bootvis 8y agoIs this project still active? The activity on GitHub seems low.
- ozgooen 8y agoWe're keeping it running but aren't actively improving it.
- Invictus0 8y agoYou should add a gaussian quadrature method as well.
- chairmanwow 8y agoThis looks incredible! Heads up: the mobile version of the site (Safari/iPhoneX) could use some TLC.
- ozgooen 8y agoCofounder Here: Happy to see this on hnews again. Update: Matthew (the other cofounder) and I got Guesstimate to a stage we were happy with. After a good amount of work it seemed like several customers were pretty happy with it, but there weren't many obvious ways of making a ton more money on it, and we ran out of many of the most requested/obvious improvements. We're keeping it running, but it's not getting much more active development at this time. Note that it's all open source, so if you want to host it in-house you're encouraged to do so. I'm also happy to answer questions about it or help with specific modeling concerns. Right now I'm working at the Future of Humanity Insitute on some other tools I think will compliment Guesstimate well. There was a certain point where it seemed like many of the next main features would make more sense in separate apps. Hopefully, I'll be able to announce one of these soon.
- cheez 8y agoHey this is super cool, looking forward to your future tools to complement guesstimate. I'd imagine an Excel plugin to do something similar would be valuable.
- stanislavb 8y agoSeems like you've put some solid work here. Who would you name your top competitors?
- social_quotient 8y agoMaybe kaggle but different?
- make3 8y agothis has nothing to do with Kaggle, which is a competition platform
- ozgooen 8y agoOn the question of "what are other ways of doing MC analysis", there are two approaches. The first is to use Excel apps like Oracle Crystal Ball or @Risk. These are aimed at business analysists. They're pretty expensive, but also quite powerful. The other option is to use probabilistic programming languages. Stan and PYMC3 are probably the best now, but hopefully, some others will become much better in the next few years. That said, this is a pretty small space. The main "business competitor" is probably people just using google sheets or Excel without distributions to make models. Crystall Ball: https://www.oracle.com/applications/crystalball/ https://www.oracle.com/applications/crystalball/ @Risk: https://www.palisade.com/risk/default.asp https://www.palisade.com/risk/default.asp Stan: https://mc-stan.org/ https://mc-stan.org/ PYMC3: https://docs.pymc.io https://docs.pymc.io
- akdor1154 8y agoI get a big blank page when js is disabled. If your web design is that lazy it doesn't speak well about your product.
- gpsx 8y agoIt sounds like two guys made this. Its hard for two guys to be experts enough to make a product like this and also happen to be up on the current state of making web sites. I say this because I am working on a product in my spare time and I'm surprised to see how many different areas of expertise are required. (My web site is terrible. And good documentation is tough.)
- lwansbrough 8y agoIt's ~2019 which means JS has been around for 23 years, so turn JS on or stop complaining -- and it's pretty absurd to comment on the laziness of a person based on their decision to use a defacto-available technology that you chose to disable. Actually, I'd like to hear how you'd build this application without Javascript and have it meet users' expectations of modern web apps.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- akdor1154 8y agoShould have been more clear - The app? No issues if this is a js web app, makes perfect sense. But the frontpage, a basically static description of what your product is and why I should use it? That's more of an ask.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoIt's a spreadsheet tool online. I don't think you can escape javascript.
- hornbaker 8y agoCalling https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says
- scottmcdot 8y agoAlmost looks like it could be used in education, teaching stats?
- ozgooen 8y agoI've heard of it being used in a few classes. There was one estimation session with one group of what I remember to be 8th-graders. Honestly, I really don't think you need to be great at statistics to understand the fundamental concepts.
- hliyan 8y agoIs there a regular spreadsheet product that allows cells to have explicit names and descriptions like this? (in addition to the value)
- dr1ggins 8y agoExcel lets you name the cells, I don't think you can describe them though...
- ken 8y agoI assume all of them do -- Excel certainly lets you name cells, and attach notes to them.
- knight17 8y agoExcel has named cell ranges. So instead of =A5*A6 you could have =interest*principal You can create them easily too -- can name the individually, can assign names from existing tables and so on. You can have constants too, that is, they don't have to point to any cell [1]. It is a godsend when working with bigger tables having lots of formulas. [1] https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2017/07/11/excel-name-named-range-define-use/#named-constant https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2017/07/11/excel... [2]https://www.contextures.com/xlNames01.html https://www.contextures.com/xlNames01.html
- flaque 8y agoThis is super cool.
- ken 8y agoThis is terrific! The UI is very clever. I may have to steal some ideas from this.
- ozgooen 8y agoPlease do so. The UI is all open-source react, so you may be able to copy some components directly if you wanted. I'd be happy to help people out with this if you have requests.
- wenc 8y agoCan this sample from an empirical distribution? (i.e. from a CDF, not from a known distribution family)
- wenc 8y agoI should add that I was thinking about this method -- Inverse Transform Sampling [1]. It's also just a fancy name for generating a pseudo-random number from a Uniform distribution in [0,1], and reading off the x-axis of the CDF. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_transform_sampling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_transform_sampling
- ozgooen 8y agoYou can copy & paste an array of samples and Guesstimate will sample from that cluster. For instance, try pasting the following into the value field of a cell: [1,1,1,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,3,3,4,4,4,4,4,7,7,7,7] You can use tools like distshaper6 to generate arbitrary distributions, then copy the samples into Guesstimate. http://smpro.ca/pjs/distshaper/ http://smpro.ca/pjs/distshaper/ Guesstimate doesn't yet support an input format for distributions outside of via samples.
- m0zg 8y agoThis is such a no-brainer for Microsoft to acquire.
- oferzelig 8y agoI love it! so well executed!
- wcrichton 8y agoDoes this permit Bayesian inference? e.g. looks like graphical probabilistic programming (hooking up various distributions and performing inference), except the key missing component is the ability to observe values for any given distribution beyond the prior.
- marmaduke 8y ago> the key missing component is the ability to observe values Spot on, it’d need to load some data on final predictions. Or, it could dump the model in a way that another software could use it. I was thinking of the same thing.
- leot 8y agoThe mode of the distribution in the video appears to be zero. How is that possible?
- jsharf 8y agoI think technically the mode is one of the middle buckets, it looks slightly taller to me. Anyways, it's a histogram, so the x-axis is split into buckets. The bar all the way on the left is likely some range of hours from 0 to whatever the bucket size is
- triggercut 8y agoI've used Palisade @Risk quite a bit, but for my use case, most of the time I feel like I'm taking a Lamborghini to the comer store. This is perfect for someone like me who is more of a "casual" estimator of things modelling with probability.
- paraschopra 8y agoIt wasn’t obvious from the landing page but can you link estimates from different models? It would be super cool to directly import variables and their estimates from other models.
- revskill 8y agoI hope the pricing model could be uncertain, too :P
- zemlyansky 8y agoI'm developing a similar open-source app for statistical modeling and inference in the browser: https://statsim.com https://statsim.com. You can create probabilistic models and then infer their parameters using algorithms such as MCMC or Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. The app is still in beta but it might be useful. Some models: https://github.com/statsim/models https://github.com/statsim/models
- r0mulus 8y agoGod dammit. This sort of thing pisses me off. Here I am, on vacation, waiting for my family to wake up. What better way to spend my time but pursue HN. I happen upon something like this. Something so damned useful that I have no choice but investigate.
- jmhnilbog 8y agoI would love to see this idea translated into event planning/calendaring. Probabilistic party planning. I want to see what might be happening tonight in addition to what is definitely happening. "If 5 people show up at my house tomorrow evening, I'll hold a poker night." 10 people were invited and 4 of them RSVP yes and 2 of them RSVP no. It looks like there's a 95% chance I'm holding a poker night tomorrow. "The X team has a monthly meeting on the 1st, never fail. They haven't decided on the location yet, just that it's on the North Side." As the team members pick possible locations, the possible locations appear more distinct until one is chosen.