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Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators

calcverse.live

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Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators

#22

Post by akkartik »

bityard wrote: post #21

If you're taking suggestions, I have a frequent need to do basic arithmetic on fractions and not many "app" calculators do that well or at all.

This is very different, but check out my https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/notebook.love

Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators

#23

Post by ikhare »

On the topic of calculators. I discovered Figr[1] on HN a while ago, and it really helps when doing one off multi variable thing, like helping a customer estimate their bill etc.

Kudos on building this. I occasionally search for these on Google and am always disappointed by the mess. Bookmarked.

[1] https://www.figr.app/

Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators

#24

Post by neilv »

bityard wrote: post #21

If you're taking suggestions, I have a frequent need to do basic arithmetic on fractions and not many "app" calculators do that well or at all.

On the desktop, if you keep a Scheme interpreter installed, you can use it as a quick arbitrary-precision calculator, including support for fractions.

Guile is the most easily available one on a Linux system, though some others will give better REPL out of the box.

    $ guile
    GNU Guile 3.0.8
    Copyright (C) 1995-2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

    Guile comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `,show w'.
    This program is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
    under certain conditions; type `,show c' for details.

    Enter `,help' for help.
    scheme@(guile-user)> (+ 1/2 1/8 1/8)     
    $1 = 3/4
    scheme@(guile-user)> (* $1 1/2)
    $2 = 3/8
    scheme@(guile-user)> (define rate 42)
    scheme@(guile-user)> (* rate $2)
    $3 = 63/4
    scheme@(guile-user)> (define (foo x) (- x 1/32))              
    scheme@(guile-user)> (foo $3)
    $4 = 503/32
    scheme@(guile-user)> (exact->inexact $4)
    $5 = 15.71875
    scheme@(guile-user)>
You can also run a Scheme REPL within Emacs, with `M-x run-scheme RET`. Optionally with Quack. https://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/

Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators

#25

Post by bvanderveen »

A random dimensional analysis that I find amusing about fuel consumption units:

liters / 100 km => m^3 / m => m^2

(volume) / (distance) => (area)

This can be interpreted as the cross-sectional area of a hypothetical trough of fuel running alongside the road, whose contents you slurp up and consume in your engine as you pass (in lieu of using fuel stored in an onboard reservoir).

Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators

#26

Post by dijksterhuis »

fithisux wrote: post #5
adi_hn07 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really! Is it part of your profession or study?

Hobby, I am a data engineer and definitely I will need to encounter AI. But assembly gives a different perspective of machines, make my brain hard-working and in case of societal collapse you need an assembler. We need more assemblers more cross-platform frameworks (collections of macros) and more emphasis on the way things work, like guides, articles. Not less.

fellow data engineer -- yeah i've spent the last 6 months reverse engineering binary data files for the elektron octatrack as a hobby project while waiting to see how the hype cycle plays out. deffo gives a new understanding of how the machine's internals work getting to grips with the underlying stuff.

edit -- i've looked at some assembly posts on here before and they often hurt my brain, so respect to you for digging into it.

Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators

#27

Post by lubujackson »

stanleykm wrote: post #19

One 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…

Haven't tried Numi, but I made a calculator with variables as a side project on a whim: https://calc.li/ - it is online, but there is no backend and you can save the whole page as an offline file if you want, using localStorage for state.

Re: Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators

#28

Post by noduerme »

This is great. I really think that having a theme to iterate on is the best way of revisiting coding/math skills and learning new ones. And building things from scratch is so much more rewarding than snapping parts together. My free time right now is trying to rewrite 90s screensavers down to the rasterizer level, without consulting anything for how to do stuff like antialiasing.

One little note, just checking out your loan calculator: On my phone, the total interest div is cut off at the decimal point, and the total payment overflows the nice round rect holder. You could dial in the font size scaling with a bit of custom Javascript there. They stand out, too, because they're bottom line figures.

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