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Comment by Affric | Hacker News Reader

I have never used a phone calculator I didn’t hate

I love the Free42 app. The Plus42 app is also great, but the buttons are too small on my 5" phone screen.

JRPN15C and JRPN16C are also awesome, even more so in landscape mode.

I love free42 as well. Mostly as a tribute to the HP42S that got me through engineering school 30 odd yrs ago. The RPN muscle memory never completely went away.

HIPER is the best one I have found. Not having been railroaded into HP calculators by the American education system, and thus not being very familiar with them, I've always found the HP clones a bit clunky on phones. But I still much prefer the RPN option.

The free version does have an ad banner, which I have to tolerate although I paid for it ages ago because this phone doesn't have Google play on it.

A unit-aware calculator is what I really crave, however, and I keep going back to Google for that which is pretty shameful. E.g. (1GWh/ 1 year)/2 km^2 in W/cm^2

> Not having been railroaded into HP calculators by the American education system

Did you mean TI calculators? I have never seen anyone use an HP calculator in the American education system, much less one being required.

Oh yes. Derp! No one really uses graphic calculators in UK schools, so they're all the same to me to me to be honest. A £10 Casio was all that was ever needed at school, and I didn't need one at university either. So I never got any kind of deep connection with any model in the way that some people seem to live and breathe their favourite models.

A sad side effect of this is few get suckered into accidentally learning to write software by trying to pay games in their maths lessons.

This is a bit ironic, but have you tried the Numworks simulator app or any of its forks.

I usually have excel sheets or python/matlab scripts. However, this simulator felt self-consistent enough to develop muscle memory for quick back-of-the-envelope work.

https://github.com/UpsilonNumworks/Upsilon

https://www.numworks.com/simulator/download/

Desmos

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