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Comment by mkprc | Hacker News Reader

I wonder who would install this onto their calculator in earnest. Like, who’s the segment of folks with the savvy to learn about this and install this on their TI calculator, but who aren’t savvy enough to just learn to do the computations in curricular calculus class?

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I used to use a TI-89 in high school, which had a calculus-enabled CAS built-in. It was really handy for checking my work and for working on components of problems. And if you're in a class where the work is more applied math, like physics, it's really helpful so that you can think of the overall problem without getting bogged down in the computation.

I 'cheated' in my Astronomy 1001 class by reverse engineering some sort of moon phase calculation I was supposed to do every day, by hand, for a month.

I didn't want to check the location of the moon at the same time every day so I just worked out the math instead, and then fudged the numbers on the worksheet so they wouldn't look too perfect.

I did this back in...1999 or 2000, I think? Apparently kids are still doing the same silly assignment a quarter century later: https://www.reddit.com/r/uofmn/comments/1km6zzv/comment/mseh...

I feel like this would describe me to a T.

What's really novel and innovative about this is that you just plug the calculator into your computer and press install.

There is absolutely an overlap in those two circles. The venn diagram is almost exclusively people who are heavily motivated by novelty and hate the drudgery of actual work. I have been a pathological member of that particular venn diagram overlap for my whole life. It's exactly as maladaptive as you might imagine.

I definitely would’ve installed it as a kid. It’s not about the computations it’s about doing it with style.

Highschool nerds, that is why there are plenty of CASIO graphical calculators with this stuff built-in.

Which are quite common outside US, where the TI monopoly with the education system doesn't exist.

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