

Show HN: Kalu – Calculator concept for long and inter-linked calculations - chinchang
http://kushagragour.in/lab/kalu/

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pavlov
The name means "dick" in Finnish. Oh well, there are thousands of languages
spoken in the world, can't check them all!

...Actually, that would be a damn useful site:
doesthiswordmeansomethingdirtyinanobscurelanguage.com

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nvader
I'm rather surprised that doesn't exist already, actually.

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jeffasinger
This is a pretty cool idea.

One thing that would make it more useful to me, though much more difficult to
implement, is that when you click a reused value, it store a reference to that
result, so if you change the calculations for that result, all the references
change also.

For example, that way I could have some initial parameters up top, and use
those in a complicated calculation, with the end result changing if I change
those parameters.

~~~
TTPrograms
Bingo. Then add plotting functionality for ranges of those values.

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foxbarrington
Pretty neat.

Curious if it's out of score or valuable to make the output/input behave more
like a variable than copy/paste? e.g. line 1 is "2 + 3", so you click on the
result, "5" and you use that in a new expression: "5 + 20". However, if you go
and change the original line to "7 + 3" the second expression could update to
"10 + 20"

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robotmlg
This was the first thing I tested, and I think it would be extremely valuable
if results could propagate through future equations like this. Change the one
at the top and everything below updates.

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chinchang
Yes, I thought about that. The issue lies just in UX. Some people could want
to copy-paste value without propagation and other with propagation. How does
the app enable both things in the best way is the question. Just a thought:
Cmd+Click?

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dugmartin
@chinchang: If you replace the eval() with math.eval from
[http://mathjs.org/](http://mathjs.org/) here

    
    
        result = eval(match[1]);
    

You'll get access to many more functions, including unit conversions.

~~~
chinchang
That thing is awesome! Thank you so much for the link :) I'll look into it.

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onaclov2000
I like it, I'm taking the AI for Robotics class on Udacity, and I have a
chromebook as my primary machine, I'm going to bookmark this and likely use it
most of the time. Does it support math functions like power, exponential, etc?
and how?

~~~
chinchang
Yes, it does. Actually any JavaScript works. So you can do Math.pow, Math.sin
etc etc

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linksbro
> "keep writing your calculations in JavaScript"

None of the Math.x functions work, e.g. Math.floor(2.5). Defining functions
also doesn't work.

Looks promising though, I would use it for scratching project euler problems.

~~~
chinchang
Tried your example: Math.floor(2.5). Seems to be working on Chrome. Which
browser are you using?

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knd775
I really like this. The only issue that I found in my short time playing with
it is that a/0 returns infinity rather than undefined. 0/0 does return NaN,
though.

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jPaolantonio
Reminds me of [http://tydligapp.com/](http://tydligapp.com/) . I always
thought it would make a great desktop app.

~~~
lunixbochs
Calca has served me pretty well on the desktop:
[http://calca.io](http://calca.io)

