logoalt Hacker News

cocotoyesterday at 7:53 AM1 replyview on HN

But I guess using the density distribution of floating points is rarely useful in a problem. Your actual distribution will almost surely be way different. Imo, the tool presented here should provide a way to manually provide a custom density function (with some common presets like uniform and normal distributions).


Replies

pavpanchekhayesterday at 1:56 PM

Author here! Yes, the float distribution isn't what you want in practice, but distribution selector isn't really the right thing either, because a low probability bad result can still be pretty bad! Hence the range selector; the float distribution is good at picking extreme values that trigger FP error.

We usually recommend looking for 90%+ accuracy or carefully examining the accuracy plot