Show HN: I Got Tired of Calculator Sites, So I Built My Own

I don't like that the loan calculator caps out at 50%, because the people most likely to want and need a simplified web interface are the ones most at risk of taking out batshit crazy loans (e.g. https://www.bigpictureloans.com/loan-rates).

For instance, check out this amortization table for one of those predatory lenders: https://www.calculator.net/amortization-calculator.html?cloa...

I'm capable of finding a working amortization calculator or banging it out on my HP-42s. You're capable of doing the math. The kind of people who can't do the math themselves are the ones who most need to see those numbers in front of their own eyes.

The biggest thing I'd want from a calculator -- having to calculate numeric expressions involving units, and getting the result in a specific unit. This is something I've used the google search prompt for because it can do these things to some degree, but google isn't a calculator and it will refuse to give you an answer right away if it doesn't think you entered a valid numeric expression.

Most of the time I'm looking for an answer in questions like:

    4 weeks + 59*3 hours in days
    1/2 * 36g * (900 m/s)^2 in joules

Other times when I'm working with memory and want to get a specific finite representation in hexadecimal:

    1 megabyte as hex

This might be off-topic because you're building a suite of calculators that I'd have to switch between to perform these tasks, rather than a single calculator that can do all / most of these things, but this kinda raises a point - if you want to switch between the calculators, maybe the UI should allow going from one to the other without performing the navigation, I'm thinking something like a sidebar that you can click on to switch to a different calculator.

Ideally when you switch and switch back the state should be saved because you might need to copy multiple values between calculators. EDIT: I forgot browsers have tabs, but still.

But really for me personally, nothing would beat a single thing that can do units and bases

  >>> 4 weeks + 59*3 hours -> days
  4 week + 59 × 3 hour  day
      = 35.375 day    [Time]

  >>> 5V / 50ohm -> mA
    5 volt / 50 ohm  milliampere
        = 100 mA    [Current]

This is a good project with a nice clean UI and of course the nice lack of ads that calculator sites love to paint everywhere.

That being said, I do a lot of maths at my day job (and side job) and have found that now that I can ask my phone (gemini) math problems directly in an unsimplified form, its totally made online calculators irrelevant.

"Hey google, calculate the power loss of a 20 ohm resistor if it is R1 of an RC circuit with a 1u cap, an input frequency of 25kHz, and a rms voltage of 1.2V. Then make me an applet that shows the power loss with a slider for the input voltage from 1V to 12V, and a frequency slider for 25kHz to 250kHz."

I really cannot emphasize how helpful this is, and basically removed the need to seek out online calculators for common electronics calculations (which can now be folded into single custom calculations), which replaced the need to manually write out and solve the equations.

What is it about traditional calculator UIs that you don't like on mobile? I think they work great, unsurprisingly, since the form factor is similar. I have several (paid) mobile apps that fully emulate a traditional calculator model and I regularly use them.

To give some positive feedback: I like your loan calculator. That's something that could really be useful for a lot of people. I think there's still more you can do there, eg let people figure out how much credit they can afford with a given monthly payment. Take a look at traditional financial calculators like the HP 12c, they're extremely versatile in that regard.

Personally, I don't see the need for separate calculators for things like percentage increase or rounding numbers. Most of those could be combined in 2-3 apps at most, imho, scientific, financial and unit conversion. The others are really separate apps that would need a lot more functionality than the pure calculation aspect to really be useful (eg time tracking).

On Firefox for Android on my phone, with the native keyboard the button to hide the keyboard is usually replacing the back button. With your own keyboard, the button to hide the keyboard is on the top right, but my muscles memory goes to hit the back button (which brings me back to the previous page rather than hiding the keyboard).

I'm not sure if that would be worth it to add an history element so that the back button can hide the keyboard, but for me that would make things more natural.

Wow, that site is fast. Granted, I have a decent computer and fast internet, but I don't usually get that kind of speed. And the site is not super-lightweight either (it is React, not hand-crafted vanilla JS).

Must be some good optimization, good hosting, and little if any crap like trackers, ads, etc...

You should check out this calculator here:

https://www.calculator.net/time-calculator.html

Very great calculator, good design, but it has too many functions. I advise you to add a "search" to find points, I also personally like the intuitive interfaces that are easy to understand even for beginners newbie.

Therefore, it may be necessary to add documentation.

In conclusion, the project is not bad, but I wanted the interface to be more user-friendly for beginners.

Can you add support for duplex numbers? (duplexnumbers.com)

The UI is still wrong.

The perfect calculator is an LLM that calculates it for you.

/Jk (but really tho, like a nice Wolfram alpha)

No but I want to see a normal calculator immediately. Maybe some tabs that allow me to change functions.

Looks good. It's like a swiss knife. I love it.

As FerkiHN says, a search function sounds really powerful. I find timezone converter is really helpful. I work with 5 different timezones, and ask "when is 9AM <some timezone> in my timezone?" a lot. That would be a good idea for your next time calc.

Please checkout my work as well! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492131