Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators
11–20 of 118 posts
Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators
#12Where’s the math actually done, on device or on your server? Feedback: the compound interest calculator doesn’t support continual compounding? That’s surprising, and also the easiest to compute.
I must admit I still don't understand continual compounding
Explained in a terrible way, it's integrals for interest if "compound daily/monthly/yearly" was an estimation using discrete intervals
Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators
#13[deleted]
Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators
#14Where’s the math actually done, on device or on your server? Feedback: the compound interest calculator doesn’t support continual compounding? That’s surprising, and also the easiest to compute.
I must admit I still don't understand continual compounding
Sibling’s explanation is a great starting point! If you understand annual, weekly, and daily compounding, continuous compounding is the limit of what happens when the time you compound over becomes ever shorter. It’s not obvious without calculus, but it’s a well-defined function.
Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators
#15Where’s the math actually done, on device or on your server? Feedback: the compound interest calculator doesn’t support continual compounding? That’s surprising, and also the easiest to compute.
I must admit I still don't understand continual compounding
Imagine that instead of compounding the interest every day, you wanted to calculate it every nanosecond. And then, every billionth of a nanosecond. If you keep dividing that until it’s an infinite number of infinitely small compounding, you get a super simple equation:
interest = e^(years*rate)
e^(5*.1) = 1.649
e^(8*.03) = 1.271
Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators
#16You're not the only one. I recently took up running and didn't particularly like any of the existing running pace calculators, so I made my own: https://calcubest.com/health/runningpace
And then kinda realized that there were others I wanted to have, and a few I thought others might want, so I added more.
A calculator is simple enough that it's fun to work on one when I need a break from something more complex but want to be able to do something other than doom scrolling. So now every couple of weeks I add another one.
Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators
#17I like `units` for unit conversion. It's in the default install of MacOS, so readily accessible for most people.
Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators
#18Somehow related:
“A calculator app? Anyone could make that”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066953
Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators
#19One calculator I’ve come to love over the years is Numi. I keep it open all day every day and it does a pretty good job of bridging the gap between the typical skewmorphic calculator app and scilab or python. It’s a text based calculator that allows you to declare variables and do unit and base conversions and save and load your work. No graphing though unfortunately and i dont think it really has much in the way of plugin support.
Anyway not to say your calculators arent useful op, i just think that something that can be open on the desktop is more useful than something that is hidden in a chrome browser tab.
Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must admit I still don't understand continual compounding
Explained in a terrible way, it's integrals for interest if "compound daily/monthly/yearly" was an estimation using discrete intervals
you didn't really improve by hiding behind "integrals"; this is why so many kids are afraid of calculus.