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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

#41

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.

Typing “2”, “+”, “3” on an iPhone in Safari gets it to display “23+”, which doesn’t appear correct to me ? Looks cute otherwise.

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

#44
Some comments, based purely on https://www.calcverse.live/calculators/bmi.

• Keyboard accessibility is suffering, because the buttons aren’t associated with a form. Most notably, pressing Enter when one of the text boxes is selected doesn’t do anything. You should put everything inside a element, and then if you’re using , decide whether it’s type=button or type=submit.

• A tad more subjective, but actual radio buttons are better than the buttons you’ve used for Metric/Imperial.

• As it stands, they lack a keyboard focus indication. (And the submit button has poor focus indication.)

• People don’t talk about heights in inches. They talk about them in feet and inches. You want to be able to accept feet and inches as two separate inputs. Not everyone who knows that their height is X′Y″ knows that means 12X+Y inches, and even more will make a mistake in calculating that, or just give up.

• If you switch between metric and imperial, and there’s a number in height or weight, it should probably convert the number to the chosen scale.

• If you just recalculated on input rather than on submit click, the experience would probably be smoother.

• Colour contrast on “Category: Overweight” is definitely too low. “Category: Normal weight” is also a little too low; underweight and obese are fine.

• Consider sometimes what related information might be useful. Every BMI calculator lists the categories, but something I somehow haven’t ever seen and yet which would be very useful for giving someone something to aim for is a mapping: for a given height, what weights do the categories correspond to? e.g. for 200cm, underweight = 0–74kg, normal weight = 74–100kg, overweight = 100–120kg, obese = 120–∞kg. Consider visualisations too. And mentioning what the calculation actually is that is being performed. Calculations are simple. Presenting them well is the harder bit.

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

#45

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).

Another really fun one, though slightly less literal than L/100km, is charging rates in electric vehicles, which often present charge state as range (km), rather than energy stored (kWh); and so if it takes you one hour to gain 300km of range, well… you were charging at a rate of 300km/h.

(With in-flight refueling, you could potentially refuel an aeroplane at 300km/h at 300km/h…)

Related: Uncanceled Units https://xkcd.com/3038/>. (“50 gallons per square foot” especially is similar to your L/100km: volume ÷ area = length.)

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

#48
BMI calculators are dangerous tools in uncritical hands. Here is a link to the UK NHS page that provides such a calculator but only after it has described some of the limitations:

https://www.nhs.uk/health-assessment-tools/calculate-your-bo...

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

#49
A tiny bit of feedback, for you about unit conversion. I don't want to convert 47383974 seconds to hours, I want to know that it's 1 year, 6 months, 0 days, 18 hours, 51 minutes, and 18 seconds. I don't want to know that 7492837 inches. that's 624,403.0833 feet, but what I really want is for it to say 118 miles, 454 yards, 1 foot, and 1 inch!

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

#50

BMI calculators are dangerous tools in uncritical hands. Here is a link to the UK NHS page that provides such a calculator but only after it has described some of the limitations: https://www.nhs.uk/health-assessment-tools/calculate-your-bo...

Yep, according to BMI, Schwarzenegger has always been obese af.
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