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getguesstimate / guesstimate-app

Create Fermi Estimates and Perform Monte Carlo Estimates
http://getguesstimate.com/
MIT License
2.34k stars 125 forks source link

Support for dates #997

Open sbarzowski opened 5 years ago

sbarzowski commented 5 years ago

The tool is really useful for estimating how long things are likely to take considering multiple factors. It would be really nice if such things could be presented as dates (rather than just the numbers of days or similar). I imagine it being used mostly as the last step.

I imagine it could be implemented through: a) a presentation option of a cell to treat the values as the number of days since some arbitrarily defined epoch (e.g. 01-01-1970) and format them as dates b) a builtin function which converts a date in human format to days-since-epoch representation

OAGr commented 5 years ago

I've been thinking about this for a related application. I'm not sure what the ideal format would be. One issue with ISO / time since 1970 is that, of course, it's only from 1970, so if people wanted to estimate things in history there would be issues. Do you have ideas about what format would be ideal?

That said, I think this would be a decent amount of work, so I think it's unlikely I'll do it personally.

sbarzowski commented 5 years ago

One issue with ISO / time since 1970 is that, of course, it's only from 1970, so if people wanted to estimate things in history there would be issues.

Not necessarily. You could have a negative number of "days since epoch" to represent the dates before that. The 0-point doesn't really matter it just needs to be set to something.

OAGr commented 5 years ago

That's a good point. I've been thinking about this more, may do it eventually.

fire commented 5 years ago

Did you think about this more?

OAGr commented 4 years ago

No real update yet.

I've been playing with this with a new experimental application, Estiband. I think doing it right is a bit tricky, it depends on how generic we want to be. You can go here and change "Unit type" to change the unit to one of date.

This work definitely seems doable, but tricky. Dates would involve changing several parts, input, visualization, calculation.

I'm working to set up a nonprofit and move Guesstimate into it, then continue development with Guesstimate a bit. The other nonprofit work would be pretty integrated, though somewhat separate.