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Good point! The formula indeed assumes a base probability of zero. That's actually why I put "The best cafe ever" in there and that it is called an "exceptional
by mg 3y ago
Good point! The formula indeed assumes a base probability of zero. That's actually why I put "The best cafe ever" in there and that it is called an "exceptionally awesome cafe". I got a bit lax later in the text just calling it "awesome".
For a cafe aficionado, who spends most of their time in cafes, reading HN and thinking about formulas, the probability that some random cafe becomes their new favorite is virtually zero.
In other words: The more cafes you already know, the closer to zero the chance that a random one will be the best of them all.
So yeah, it is a formula for cafe lovers. Not for the casual person who is happy with a random filtered coffee swill from the vending machine. Those would have to add a base probability, turning the formula into something like b+n/(n+x)*(1-b).
- cubefox 3y agoI think Laplace's Rule of succession [1] could be better here. It assumes there are binary "successes" and "failures" (e.g. thumbs up/down). Let s be the number of "successes", n be the total number of data points (successes+failures), and 1/x the prior probability of a success. Then the probability that the next data point will be a success is: (s + 1)/(n + x) E.g. for prior probability 1/2 (success and failure initially equally likely), x=2, so (s + 1)/(n + 2) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_succession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_succession