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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

#93
post #39
post #3

This is pretty cool, it's one of the rare applications I've used where the things I've tried "just work". For example "10 kg to g", "c", "c to km s^(-1)", "c to km/s" all work intuitively. It's great it works at the command line too. Something I wish I'd had when I was studying Physics.

GNU units(1)

Included on OS X, too! (though apparently a BSD version). Wow, I did not know this.

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

#98
hmmm, I'm a little bit skeptical about this.

I'd be cool to have this as a python script somewhere but I am not quite sure wether I would visit this site whenever I need to calculate some physical units, especially since google already covers most of my needs

dont get me wrong, I think otherwise it looks and feels great and is easy to use but I dont know who will use this.

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

#99
post #84

> high precision ≫ e*1e15 e × 1000000000000000 = 2718280000000000 Needs a bit of work, I think.

Yet weirdly enough sin(pi) and 1 - log(e) are pretty close to 0 (still not exact but accurate to 30 digits).

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

#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 using high-precision results of the operations, store the operations themselves and calculate the final result at the end with the desired amount of precision.

I am aware that both requests requires a tremendous amount of change so you might as well think of them for the next major version! =)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty

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