Top all-time · #5250
Oscar Bonilla
Personal blog · oscarbonilla.commathdatadesign
Oscar Bonilla's personal blog at oscarbonilla.com covers math, data and design. Since 2009, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “An accesible & intuitive layman's explanation of Bayes' Theorem”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Oscar Bonilla's blog for its visual explanations of Bayes' theorem and the Monty Hall problem. Commenters say the pictures made the ideas intuitive.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
This is the personal website of @ob. I hope you find it useful.
Most-linked posts?
- An accesible & intuitive layman's explanation of Bayes' Theorem6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2011-09-02
- Visualizing Bayes Theorem (2009)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-12-01
- The Monty Hall problem2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-05-05
What Hacker News says?
Good article. I'm only a bit disappointed that the author seems not to realize that Bayes' theorem is just a simple consequence of probability theory, and should be attractive not because "maybe the brain is Bayesian", but because it is based on sound set-theoretic and analytic principles. If Bayes' theorem is false, so is probability theory, and so is nearly everything we know about probability. Edit: Here is a goo…
Comment linking /2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
on “Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?”Submitted Visualizing Bayes Theorem (2009) as a story · 148 points
HN discussionhttps://brohrer.github.io/how_bayesian_inference_works.html https://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/ https://plus.maths.org/content/maths-minute-bayes-theorem http://www.sumsar.net/blog/2017/02/introduction-to-bayesian-... http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
Comment linking /2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
on “Bayes’ Theorem in the 21st Century (2013) [pdf]”Submitted An accesible & intuitive layman's explanation of Bayes' Theorem as a story · 81 points
HN discussionFrom the same author, http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/the-monty-hall-problem/
Comment linking /2009/05/the-monty-hall-problem/
on “Bayes' Theorem Illustrated”Submitted Visualizing Bayes’ theorem (2009) as a story · 53 points
HN discussionBayes' rule is quite easy to understand as a Venn diagram, though the linked article doesn't seem to use this fact. But here's a blog-post that does: http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
Comment linking /2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
on “Bayes' Theorem Illustrated”Submitted Visualizing Bayes Theorem (2009) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionAgreed. I didn't really get Bayes' Theorem intuitively until I saw the pictures in this short blog post which emphasizes the idea you pointed out of 'scaling "universes"': http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
Comment linking /2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
on “An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem”Submitted Visualizing Bayes Theorem as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI really liked and easily understood this explanation of Bayes: http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
Comment linking /2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
on “Understand the Math Behind it All: Bayesian Statistics”Submitted Programming Fonts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm sad that every explanation of MCMC uses complicated symbolic explanations. I was trying to explain it once and came up with a fairly intuitive way to visualize it. Probably that is the way it was first discovered, though who knows. In words, you can visualize it as doing a random walk around the area of a probability graph. Then it just turns into an explanation of why random walks accurately sample from an area…
Comment linking /2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
on “Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian Inference – The Metropolis Algorithm”Submitted Visualizing Bayes Theorem as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI find this to be an even better explanation: http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
Comment linking /2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/
on “Technical Explanation (of Bayes' theorem)”Submitted The Monty Hall problem as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe best explanation I've seen of the Monty Hall problem is still Oscar Bonilla's: http://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/the-monty-hall-problem/
Comment linking /2009/05/the-monty-hall-problem/
on “Monty Hall problem explained visually”Submitted Visualizing Bayes Theorem (2009) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
