chacha21

A study about black holes that highlights mathematical errors from the very beginning, already mentioned by some scientists in the past, but never really considered seriously.

Another model is proposed to describe the cosmologic objects currently considered as black holes.

Chalk also supports uncertainty : https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/chalk-features.php (combined with arbitrary long numbers and interval arithmetic)

I share a lot of thoughts with that, and built my own calculator, too A calculator that gives right instead of wrong answers

https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/chalk-home.php

I tried to explain what was going on https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/article/chalk.html, but it's not a very popular topic :-)

Desktop calculators are the best. Shame on computers !

https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/article/chalk.html#toc-14

Most people didn't understand that my goal was not to benchmark all existing calculator apps. It is on purpose that I did not mention all "pretty good" softwares, because I cannot know them all.

The article I wrote wants to mention every point that should be adressed (in my opinion) to make a good calculator. Qalculate, like many others, does address some of them.

But as far as I know, only Chalk addresses all of them.

An opportunity to post again my thoughts about software calculators !

https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/article/chalk.html

Let's say that : if you do not use arithmetic interval, at some point your floating point computations will be wrong and misleading if you do not carry information about how much bits are garbage. Chalk does that.

You can achieve that, this is a preference of Chalk about what should be the next input

Just a zip on the web page

RPN is just an option (provided by Chalk). The "minimalist" GUI is just the introduction of the full article. You have to reach <https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/article/chalk.html#toc-36> to go deeper into numerical problems of usual softwares.

Once again, Chalk is not the best software ever, it is just what I have to build myself to fix the problems I usually encounter. Not to say that all other softwares are equally bad, but to my knowledge, none of them will address as much limitations at the same time.

Chalk is kind of robust, I am surprise you hit a bug at first use. Go to <https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/chalk-contact.php> for bug reports

Thanks ! There were so many things to say that I was afraid nobody would read up to the end. GUI is only the visible part of the iceberg. Number representation (to keep exact values), accuracy, interval arithmetics... are hard to introduce in the first place.

Chalk has an option to use RPN

Thanks, I have added some more "mobile compliant" CSS styles.

Even with numbers only, it can still be useful to know how wrong the result is. Chalk keeps track of every inaccuracy when dealing with decimal numbers.

I don't use Emacs, but I feel that people should just have access to a decent calculator without digging developer forums. As good as Emacs Calc is, we can admit that it's unlikely to be seen as an easy-to-find lightweight tool.

I agree, but as good as it is, this is not where people would like to find a good calculator.

Thanks to Show HN I will be given tons of links to softwares I would never have found by myself :-)

You know what ? I was not even aware that it would work ! (Am I the only one to discover that just now ? I am not using Spotlight very often)

It's kind of cool, but I can still find many grievances about the way it's done :-)

We will somewhat disagree, partly because I can't help using calculators as a scientist, so my opinion is particularly biased. However, I don't like the trend to hide everything that looks technical. On the long run, letting people play with advanced features (that won't break things) is a win-win.

Quickfix : I have added a button to hide the TOC. Not sure if it fits mobile screens anyway.

Even if it proves me wrong, it still makes me happy that some work is done on this tool. (I will fix the article)

Hi,

>I wonder if the author considered an input method where keypresses translate directly into a rendered equation?

Personally, I don't like such systems, because I always end up moving the cursor up/down/left/right trying to add parenthesis here and there; so I am not considering adding it. I really feel better with fast, raw text input.

>The other point the author makes about discoverability of operators like sqrt and cbrt, I feel that you could circumvent it by introducing a semantic search feature for operators.

Indeed, I can add this kind of things by adding keywords to the documentation items. Currently I rather tried to narrow the search results, but I can expand them a little with some experience on what the users really needed.

>The last question I have is if the author has looked at libraries like Calcium (...) or the work that went into the Android calculator recently

I don't know Calcium, and I am not a smartphone user, so Android is beyond my little world :-) Calcium seems very interesting on its own, but it is unlikely that I can use it in Chalk. I already built my own abstractions to do everything low-level related to bit manipulation and garbage bits. Adding a little formal calculus will certainly be home-made either. However, like I did with ARBLIB, I can also cherrypick just a subset of the library that would exactly fix one problem or give some precious help even on a single feature. I will have a deeper look at its API and how it can mix up with the current Chalk design. Thanks for pointing it out !

Funny enough : the main problem of the previous layout derived from a large CSS-overflow of numbers with a large number of digits, that I finally fixed with "word-break:break-all".

Considering the topic of the article, large number of digits and overflow were not supposed to be a problem with Chalk :-D

I am not a big fan of Webview. But Javascript for pretty print was the only way, so I had no choice.

I hate CSS, I will have to spend hours trying to figure out that. In good old days, I would have used a table or an iframe, but that's bad practice I guess.