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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

This is the "modern" one with the egregiously bloated UI (including a loading screen!) and telemetry... but funny that it's using the same calculation code. Of course they still managed to screw it up somehow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17670644

In one of the old Win2k source leaks the code can be found for the far more efficient "classic" one.

Also, title needs (2019). There are some other HN articles from around that time discussing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321217

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The loading screen technically isn't part of the calculator's UI - Windows automatically shows a loading screen for all new (UWP) apps unless they explicitly opt out (and even then the OS will still show the loading screen if the app takes more than a second to load). The purpose of this is to keep the OS feeling responsive, since it allows it to bring up the window immediately (for UWP apps the OS shell is in charge of creating and managing apps' window frames, unlike Win32 where it's the apps' responsibility), rather than leaving the user staring at a screen with nothing happening for several seconds (and maybe thinking it's the OS's fault for being unresponsive)

for UWP apps the OS shell is in charge of creating and managing apps' window frames, unlike Win32 where it's the apps' responsibility

Sounds like the linux ecosystem moved to client-side-decorations, and Windows moved to a window manager model.

Regardless of whether it is or isn't part of the calculator's UI, the presence of a loading screen for a calculator is a symptom of a deeply-rooted problem.

It's funny what people tell you about themselves if you just listen.

> The purpose of this is to keep the OS feeling responsive, since it allows it to bring up the window immediately, rather than leaving the user staring at a screen with nothing happening for several seconds

Wait, you only get one of those? As of about a month ago on my computer, launching calc.exe takes 5-6 seconds for anything to happen and I'm then greeted 1-2 seconds of a loading screen after the window appears.

I've taken to just leaving an IDLE shell open at this point.

Open sourcing it seems to be working. Several of the open pull requests fix bad math: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/pulls

Seems there are 4 pull requests open to fix various math issues, all of them opened in 2019. Most PR merges seems to be about minor changes like translations and version bumps. Not sure we can call it a success just yet.

It's very cool it's open source in the first place though, don't get me wrong. And MS doesn't have to merge fixes if they don't want to of course.

A loading screen and telemetry? For a fucking calculator?

What happened to software...

But what about growth and engagement? I wouldn't be surprised if some idiot's performance metrics are tied to how many people "engage" with the calculator.

Next step: contextual ads. “Looks like you are trying to calculate your taxes. Click here for $10 off of Turbo Tax!”

At least it’s not a subscription model for £6.99/month like almost all of the apps you find on the app stores that used to be either free or a one-time £X.

You get the addition and subtraction for free, but you have to upgrade via in app purchase for multiplication or division. It makes sense because those are advanced features the average user wouldn’t need anyway.

Yes, and if the average user really needs it from time to time, they can use + several times.

Besides you can multiply for free, just add N number of times. Multiplication is a quality of life improvement, not a necessity

I see that you tried to look for a calculator app for iPad (no, there is still no built-in one).

That's because you're supposed to pull out your iPhone to use as a calculator.

Try this:

https://apps.apple.com/ae/app/rpn-30/id1451413517

Calcbot does a pretty good job of Not Sucking. I think it's a couple bucks, I don't know, I paid for it ages ago.

Did you find PCalc?

I still cannot get over that. A calculator with ads.

I defs paid for the ti-calc emulator, but that gets me my ti-89 experience, and the emulator didnt cost me 200 bucks

Sqrt() is a subscription service if you want more than 2 decimal points

There are now cars where the heated seats are a subscription service. https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2020/07/bmw-wants-to-tur...

I would say, "unbelievable!", but sadly, yeah this garbage is only going to grow like a cancer.

So, no. Not for me.

That gives me the feeling there's good business in modifying BMWs to connect the heated seats wires to a physical switch with a light on it

That's piracy. You wouldn't download a car [seat]!

i don't want to live on this planet anymore.gif

They give the seats for free, they must monetize them somehow, understandable

math obsessed kid bankrupts parents by purchasing digits of pi.

Need more than 5 decimal points? Contact us for pricing.

They stopped charging for it. At least for the upgrade when it launched.

The user became the product.

Windows collects user behavior and sells ads.

You can still buy whatever they call Windows LTSB this week if you hate this.

Buying LTSB is extremely difficult and annoying. It's not just a matter of entering card details and getting back a product key + ISO.

folders in Windows have loading bars now. Folders with nothing but text files in them. It's insane.

Explorer UI is capable of showing loading animation for folder contents since it was first publicly released. It makes sense not only in context of potentially slow devices, but also because "Folder" is not an "Directory" but an somewhat arbitrary COM object and thus showing contents of folder can lead to a lot of potentially slow operations.

IIRC somewhere along the line of all the Win32 windows versions the loading animation got somewhat broken and explorer window was more likely to get simply unresponsive instead of displaying loading animation, but that is another story.

Folders in Windows can be network locations or internet locations without any guarantees on their access speed, makes sense to show to the user that it's still doing something.

A big part of that loading bar, outside of network ops and slow drives (and remember, today you don't have floppy drive noise to know if it works or got hung), is for things like sorting and getting file icons and other attributes right. This can take non-trivial amount of time.

Someone did repackage the old Win7/Prior version of calc.exe here: https://win7games.com/#calc

They still have the old calc.exe from Windows 7 in the source tree. You get it if you the LTSC version of Windows. I wish there was a way to get it on regular Windows.

They seem to be going the other direction; notepad.exe is now updated from the App Store in the Dev channel.

You can also get the old calc on other versions of Windows if you use Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org/packages/oldcalc

This code is MIT licensed, it should be possible for someone to re-create the old UI and still use this calculator's modern calculation engine (with all the bugfixes)?

I did a casual browse of the repo and likely keep overlooking the windows 7 build.

Hoping you could point out how to build it or where it is hiding.

I don't think they meant "this released source tree" but as in "microsoft's source tree" since it is still actively maintained for the LTSC release channel.

This is for the new calculator only.

Thanks for that link. The forum thread is perhaps the most perfect example of how terrible technology forums tend to be that I've ever seen: if you report a problem, some fanboy with over 10,000(!) posts will immediately show up to tell you it's your fault and not really a problem:

> Do you really think it is going to make much difference to the final answer?

> Even the algorithms used are probably only accurate to so many significant figures.

Beautiful. (Keep in mind the issue referred to here only requires five decimal digits to show up.)

A loading screen?

You're probably better off just using a REPL at that point.

Eh, if you launch python in powershell there is still a loading delay, since powershell for some crazy reason takes like 30s to launch on a default win10 installation.

You must have something very wrong; neither Windows Powershell nor Powershell 7 takes 30s to launch.

But anyway, for a quick calc, is there anything faster than Spotlight (for mac)/Gnome shell (for linux)/Powertoys Run (for windows)? Instead of app name you are going to launch, just punch in your expression.

Not the person you responded to but I have the same experience with Powershell as them. I just checked again to be sure and it takes 20s to start and become usable on my laptop. CMD.EXE, in comparison, starts instantly.

I'll be the next to confirm this, and on multiple machines.

Maybe 1 in 5 that I try will be a reasonable startup time.

That's interesting, it seems quite widespread.

I'm getting 1-2s on my machines, both just plain powershell and powershell inside windows terminal. No enterprise crap running though, just Defender.

It got bad enough I wrote a (now unused) script in batch instead of Powershell. Also having to explicitly enable scripting for each machine was a pain, though understandable.

All this time I've been launching calculator and I could have just done it in spotlight...

Why don't they tell you that after you've launched calculator for the 20th time in an hour.

Probably very slow disk (VM?) or Windows Defender ? Or too much modules ?

I shudder to think what you're running Windows 10 on because it only takes 2 seconds to come up on this Celeron 2957U I'm using to browse the internet.

I'm running Windows 10 on a Ryzen 5 with 16GB of RAM and an NVMe drive. Powershell takes something between 0.5 to 1 second to start. The first ~20-30 seconds after the start it feels sluggish when doing simple tasks like listing directory contents. It makes it very unpleasant to use.

Sluggish behavior during and just after Windows startup is sometimes caused by mapped network drives that no longer resolve. Worth checking if you haven't already.

I'm talking about Powershell startup, not Windows startup.

If it's a corporate system like my (presently only) Windows machine then I wouldn't be surprised. They manage to configure these things so they're as fast as a Pentium 133MHz processor from 25 years ago, even though you've got an 8-core i7 with 32GB of RAM.

I wouldn't either, our devs were given the standard issue Lenovo T480 which would have been mostly fine were it not for the fact that we had Raytheon ForcePoint DLP, LANDesk, Trend Micro Apex, WebSense, Cisco Amp, Cisco Umbrella, and who knows what else watching everything we did.

It took upgrading to i9s to get something that could run Teams and Outlook at the same time without audio stuttering during a voice call.

why would you launch powershell to launch python? you can just launch python directly?

powershell is slow, just use a console window.

Or maybe starting anything on modern windows is slow.

Huh? I use powershell every single day at work and it loads instantly for me.

I've started using the browser console window more and more as a calculator. The only downsides are the a longer syntax (eg can't do 3^2) and that it is a tab in the browser. Variables and other such things are very useful.

Why the console window? For basic math things that I sometimes need, I just enter stuff in the search/address bar, and it pops DDG or Google or whatever with the answer; and even your own example of "3^2" works there as-is.

I also often use the browser console for this as well. Just as a quick tip, you can use ** for exponentiation (e.g. 3**2 === 9)

I just have a hotkey that opens a Node CLI. I know some people who do a similar thing with Python, but I think JS is better at composing quick one-liners.

To bad it's the new one. I still recall the Win3.1 (or possibly 3.11 WFW) calc.exe returning 0 when calculating 2.11 - 2.1 . I've always been curious to know what could have triggered that error since it was too big to remain unnoticed for so much time.

I tried it in the "Archive.org Windows 3.11 in a browser" and it returns "0.01".

https://archive.org/details/win3_stock

Ah, now confirmed...exists in Windows 3.1, fixed in 3.11

You can try Windows 3.1 here: https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/3.10/

And, indeed, 2.11 - 2.1 = 0.00

But, if you then add 1.0, you get 1.01. So the right value is there somewhere.

There was a dead comment from another HN person that was actually quite helpful here. Not sure why it was dead, so here's a copy/paste:

"It was fixed in this update for Windows 3.1, which switched away from floating point: https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/124/Q124345/"

It was fixed in this update for Windows 3.1, which switched away from floating point: https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/124/Q124345/

Here's another test I do with calculator apps (in radians): Pi - 4 * ATAN(1)

These apps really should produce 0 for this and avoid floating point issues. Most of us understand why it wouldn't. To me it's an experience/quality issue.

For what it's worth, the default Android calc app produces 0 (as well as nice RPN apps like Droid48).

My go to calculator is spotlight search on my mac. Pleased to announce that it gives 0 for this.

The macOS calculator, on the other hand, has a totally ridiculous bug: it displays "Not a number" for any negative number that you try to take e^x of. 2^x and 10^x work fine, as does using the x^y button with base e. Typing "e^(-whatever)" on the Spotlight search works, as does e^x of -whatever in the iOS calculator app.

I just use a wolframalpha for everything these days. It uses symbolic computation so there's no possibility for problems like this, and it's a lot more powerful than any built-in calculator app. Almost anything can be typed in one line with natural English directives like "300mi/14mpg * $2.7/gal to Euros". Especially convenient with a browser keyword.

Check out Qalculate![1] for a program that does that and much more (though obviously not as much as WA).

1: http://qalculate.github.io/

I usually use Google for quick calculations but get annoyed when it only returns large results in scientific notation. WolframAlpha gives results in just about every conceivable way, e.g. "7 trillion" or "7 000 000 000 000" instead of 7e+12. Much nicer for someone like me who isn't used to scientific notation.

But Spotlight is just cmd-space away at all times. My only complaint is that I can't get results for date-based queries like "days since 17 Jan 2021" or "50 days from today" and I have to go to Google for those although I can at least just hit return after entering the query to have the result pop up in Safari.

My biggest complaint after switching to Windows is how poorly the start menu does math. Half the time it tells me "results are unavailable" for simple arithmetic... I don't know if it makes a web query or something to calculate but it's frustrating.

Alfred also computes it to 0

Another comment suggested they switched from floating point to rational number representations after that version. Since 2.11 and 2.1 can't be represented exactly in floating point, it's possible that the issue was the difference was too small (smaller than just .01) and was being rounded off (or was below the limit for number of digits to display).

Try 2.11 - 2.1 here: http://weitz.de/ieee/ . I don't think they used 32-bit floating point, otherwise there should clearly be a large enough number to display.

in that era, you might or might not have had FPU hardware; where it didn't exist or was off there were a variety of libraries with their own quirks that got used.

How many lines of code is it?

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