5 ms·
Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision Edit: https://posti
by khalic 3mo ago
Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision
Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
- airstrike 3mo agoThis isn't really a bell curve.
- khalic 3mo agocheck my other response, it's very much a bell curve, statistically speaking https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
- j_maffe 3mo ago> statistically speaking That's a very big word you're using there for what is basically making shapes out of clouds. A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standar deviation. What does that have to do with a timeseries dataset?
- khalic 3mo agoA bell curve is not an "amortised function." Amortization applies to accounting and algorithmic time complexity, not probability distributions. You're likely thinking of a Probability Density Function (PDF). If you are going to police terminology, it helps to use the correct words. Second, fitting a curve with an R^2 of 0.911 is the exact opposite of "making shapes out of clouds.
- antonvs 3mo ago> A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standard deviation. The general notion of a bell-shaped curve is broader than that. Wikipedia has a reasonable overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-shaped_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-shaped_function > “typically continuous or smooth, asymptotically approach zero for large negative/positive x, and have a single, unimodal maximum at small x.”
- mmwako 3mo agothis. Thanks for pointing it out, I fell for "oh it was just AI" at first.
- fluoridation 3mo agoIt's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero.
- shevy-java 3mo agoI am not sure. I think SO died way before AI and that graph seems incorrect too. > Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it. AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already largely prior to AI.
- khalic 3mo agohttps://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb Goodness of Fit 0.911, Kurtosis -0.849, Skewness: 0.073 It's very much a bell curve
- fluoridation 3mo agoJust because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve. There are quite obvious separate phenomena shaping the curve at different times.
- embedding-shape 3mo agoYeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.
- j_maffe 3mo agoI'd call it significant that the number of questions halved within one year following the release of ChatGPT, the biggest relative or absolute rate of decrease in the timeseries.
- pydry 3mo agoAdd it to the list: - the downfall of junior devs - bad hiring market - layoffs in practically every sector theres a ton of things where AI took credit for a trend that had already started before it started being even halfway capable.
- j_maffe 3mo agoYou don't just fit a Gaussian distribution to a timeseries dataset. That's not what a Gaussian curve is designed for at all. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1725:_Linear_Regression https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1725:_Linear_Regr...
- khalic 3mo agoYou are confusing a Probability Density Function (PDF) with a phenomenological curve fit. No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution.
- j_maffe 3mo ago> No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution. You are doing that implicitly by fitting a Gaussian curve.
- khalic 3mo agoFitting a mathematical function to a dataset does not implicitly adopt the ontological baggage of probability theory. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of applied mathematics
- marcosdumay 3mo agoYes. At the same time, this is graph is something that really should not look anything like a bell curve. So the format is probably just a coincidence. Except if the "all the questions have been asked" hypothesis is correct. What I really doubt.