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Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

insect.sh

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Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#111

Post by sharkdp »

boramalper wrote: post #100

Kudos! I would love to see two more things: 1. Propagation of uncertainty.[1] I often yearned for a calculator that automatically propagated uncertainties for me while writing my (high-school) lab reports. I think it would be life-saver functionality for many students at the very least. 2. True high-precision. I don't know how Insect works under the hood (so maybe you are already doing it this way) but instead of usi…

Thank you very much for the feedback. That would be great, yes. I believe that both points are somehow already included in the issue that I'm tracking here: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/54

Unfortunately, it is not a simple change, no :-/

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#113

Post by anigbrowl »

Nice, but

  sin (30 rad)
  sin × 30 rad
  Unknown identifier: sin
Wouldn't it be great if software evaluated things, and if things didn't made sense, considered what the possible alternatives were, a bit like semantic checkers for spelling and grammar in text?

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#115

Post by sharkdp »

antrion wrote: post #94

Really great tool! Thanks for the hard work. It would also be really nice to specify custom units, such as ≫ U = 1e-6/60 * kat U = 1.66667e-8 kat Because now it does this ≫ 1 kat -> U 1 kat -> U = 1 kat

Thank you for the feedback. Defining own units does not work currently, but you can simply divide by your new unit:

  >>> U = 1e-6/60 * kat
  
    U = 1.66667e-8 kat
  
  >>> 1 kat / U
  
    1 kat / U
  
     = 60000000

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#116

Post by sharkdp »

psuter wrote: post #91

Nice tool! Not too obvious from the landing page that there is a terminal version. Also, some units come with implicit assumptions: ≫ 1 month -> days 1 month -> d = 30.4167 d ≫ 1 year -> days 1 year -> d = 365 d

Thank you for the feedback. I should probably consider adding something like "Full documentation and terminal version available here". I hesitated for quite some while before adding "month" and "year" but these (potentially confusing) defaults seemed more useful to me compared to leaving them out.

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#117

Post by sharkdp »

Mateon1 wrote: post #109
sharkdp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you very much for the feedback! This is on purpose (see operator precedence rules: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect#reference ). Implicit multiplication (without an explicit multiplication operator) has a higher precedence than division in order for something like this to work: tan(15cm/3m) = tan(15cm/(3m)) On the other hand, explicit multiplication has a lower precedence than division, so you would have to wr…

See how GNU units resolves this: 1/10 m -> 0.1 / m 1|10 m -> 0.1 m 27 ^ 2/3 -> 243 27 ^ 2|3 -> 9 You get the gist of it - a division operator with insane precedence.

Ha! That's a really neat idea. Thank you for sharing this. I'll consider adding it.

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#118

Post by jclulow »

So "megabytes" appears to be the power-of-ten unit, which is generally not that helpful in practice.

   ≫ 6 megabytes to bytes
     6 MB -> B
      = 6000000 B
Assuming you're sticking with the power-of-ten unit, that means you should really grow support for the (sigh) "mebibytes" family of units; i.e., what some folks are retro-actively calling the power-of-two byte unit.

   ≫ 6 mebibytes to bytes
     6 × mebibytes -> B
     Unknown identifier: mebibytes

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#120

Post by bo1024 »

jclulow wrote: post #118

So "megabytes" appears to be the power-of-ten unit, which is generally not that helpful in practice. ≫ 6 megabytes to bytes 6 MB -> B = 6000000 B Assuming you're sticking with the power-of-ten unit, that means you should really grow support for the (sigh) "mebibytes" family of units; i.e., what some folks are retro-actively calling the power-of-two byte unit. ≫ 6 mebibytes to bytes 6 × mebibytes -> B Unknown identifi…

I'd call them "MB (megabytes)" and "MMB" (marketing megabytes). Pretty clear.
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