Show HN: All desktop software calculators are wrong, so I had to build my own

> Some much needed features are difficult to implement and require a large amount of work. If these features are not available, this is because nobody really cares, and there are few pre-existing parts to build upon.

Some things resemble "nobody really cares", but are distinct. Being unaware (eg "I didn't realize how bad it was until it stopped"). Being impoverished (eg "Any cost, including attention, is an insurmountable cost barrier", or as in education, a chain-of-care disaster triage). And so on.

The "few [...] parts to build upon" is indeed a mechanism for "large amount of work". Yay patents./s But there are others, and subtleties. For example, one can lack a part to build upon, because there are lots and lots of similar parts available, but all are variously not fit for purpose, or are collectively hiding the existence of a part that is - a prohibitive discovery cost (also effort dissipation). Or recursively, a part might not have been built, because its multiple potential uses have not been gathered to incentivize it, or a part it in turn needs - an economic communication failure. All our usual dysfunction.

I emphasize this because the "nobody really cares" model can be very attractive, but also very misleading. It can be a wonderful fit for observations, and predictive of further observations of the undisturbed system, while also being a very poor model for planning and predicting interventions.

For example, from kindergarten to undergraduate, introductory astronomy content tells students the simply wrong color for the Sun. In some sense, "nobody really cares" is an excellent description. Not teachers, professors, authors, publishers, reviewers, parents or students. But... they could care. Individually, it's not too hard to flip their state. And it's possible to imagine interventions with broader impacts. But we collectively don't get to it, for all the diverse reasons things aren't gotten to. Much of science education dysfunction is like that. Because "nobody really cares" that it succeeds... sort of, kind of, but also no - that's very not a root cause analysis.

We have calculators open on our machine label computers. Those computers don't have a keyboard only a touch screen. Without the keypad these computers could not use the windows calculator. That said this is an unusual use case.

Alfred has a pretty good calculator for Mac that acts like the Google calculator without the need for internet connection.

I like it, except that the Enter symbol confuses me. I associate it with a windowing button or on/off switch. I probably would use ⏎ (U+23CE) instead.

I haven't seen Soulver, but it looks very similiar to the one I use on Mac, called Numi. On Android, I use an app called CalcNote which works in a similiar way. Neither does graphing, but you can do common formulas and functions like cos/sin/rad. I use numi for simple calculations, and find it fantastic when I'm trying to figure out project stuff. A recent use is entering wall dimensions to figure out square footage and compare different building materials. I often leave most of my old calculations in numi like a long-lived numerical memory.

https://numi.app/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.burton999....