Free Idea: Calcul.at/or (Giving Away My App/Startup Ideas) | Hacker News Reader

Startup Ideas)

eurekaput.com

25 pointsdariusmonsef15 comments

I just started posting my ideas... feedback is always appreciated. Hopefully this community of hackers will find inspiration in something I post and make it happen.

(I'm a YC funded startup founder with a ton of ideas and little time for side projects... so rather than file ideas way in notebooks... I'm posting them online and giving them away. Some are small app ideas, some full on "startup" ideas and some fall somewhere else in the creative landscape. No need to steal these ideas, I'm giving you permission to take them. Good luck!)

Open articleView on HN

I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of this particular app idea, but I'm really impressed by your willingness to give your ideas away, complete with logos and domain names (assuming a prototype is built). I tend to hold on to ideas too tightly in case I want to do them down the road. You've given me something to think about :)

Valid opinion on this idea... by far not my best. But a place to start. I'm finding the whole process quite therapeutic. Maybe along the same lines of monks who make sand mandalas.

Will have to post some of my best / favorite ideas as a real challenge.

This app would be ridiculously easy to build if Wolfram Alpha allowed people to use their API without donating some organs. Essentially, just perform the calculations with the Wolfram Alpha API and keep history on "calcul.at"'s server side.

Problem is that WA would probably never let you use their API like that since it competes with Mathematica.

Computations generated from large datasets to answer user-submitted queries interpreted via natural language processing techniques displayed in a helpful and clear way? Try http://WolframAlpha.com. Mobile phone support? Check out their web or native iPhone and iPad apps.

A comment to the above site, by 'tlianza', mentioned http://instacalc.com which I found to be pretty impressive.

I didn't know it existed but am pretty sure I'll be using it.

Hey, thanks for the mention! I developed instacalc a while back and am planning on doing some updates. Feedback is always welcome (kalid.azad@gmail.com).

I love it, stuck it on my bookmark bar especially for doing conversions which I find google often misses (or often enough).

Do you know the application qalculate? It's fantastic, but X11 only. However it's by far the most feature complete calculator I ever saw.

relevant - Soulver http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/

Yup. Was just IM'd that link too. (I should update the post with related links.)

Yes, this is a really great app. Based on GNU bc, too. The iPad version is exactly what I have wanted for doing basic math on the device.

Google Calculator and Wolfram Alpha are good enough for me.

Is there a drop-in open source library that basically does Google-like calculations, including conversions? It's one of those things that Google does so well I don't really feel compelled to do myself, but really feel like I should have a tool for because it's not something you need a massive server farm for.

I'm not sure if it's open source, but there's a command-line tool that came with my Mac that may also be on your machine to do unit conversions. It's called "units". Even if you don't want to call it directly, you may be able to use the conversion table files that are stored somewhere for it to use. As for calculations, if they are basic, interpreting the calculation as Ruby or Python code might work, though it risks the user entering something more dangerous that might need to be checked for.

I think qalculate lib does just that, and even better than google (understand abbreviations, and convert even unseen units like miles per minute or whatever).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com