This basically blows the Google calculator away | Hacker News Reader

This basically blows the Google calculator away

instacalc.com

21 pointsrms28 comments

Hey guys, this is Kalid from instacalc. Thanks for the link -- please send any feedback/bug reports to kalid@instacalc.com and have fun playing around with it.

I'm actually in YC this summer on another project with some friends, we'll let you know when it's launched :)

http://my.instacalc.com/calc/92299353cf9840adbe298cad39c46b7...

are you aware that you're getting spammed?

why don't have rel=nofollow in place for links?

go go black hat SEO

Nice catch

Thanks for the info. Yeah, I was surprised how quickly the spammers found my little old site. Nofollow is a great suggestion. I may need to add captchas as well.

Cool, I look forward to it.

Instacalc is one hell of a "thing you built" for getting into YC.

PFFT!!!

This silly thing couldn't even calculate this, something that Google calc does perfectly:

http://www.google.com/search?q=the+answer+to+life%2C+the+uni...

Cool.

1) You need more units! Especially physical units, erg, joule, etc.

2) The interface is too slow on my mac camino browser.

3) Play a little with Frink. In terms of calculations, frink is awesome. However, the plotting and the shared aspect of instacalc is very cool... perhaps you can merge the two?

Awesome, thanks for the feedback :)

And it's a great example of the type of design YC prefers. The functionality of the site is clear at first glance.

True, but we didn't have anything to do with this. They'd made instacalc before we funded them, and their YC startup is totally unrelated.

Very nice. But it doesn't have one of my favourite google calculator features: built-in physical constants -- things like "speed of light", "electron mass", "permittivity of free space", "planck's constant" and so forth.

I realize I'm in a bit of a niche here, but that's a very useful feature for me.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll consider adding them in. Ideally I'd like to make a plugin system where people can enter and share their crazy formulae & constants.

Great site. Very self explanatory. I like that it removes all the hassles of creating, saving, and distributing spread sheets. Definately bookmarking this one.

I was able to spook it, but we do tons of back of the envelope calculations at my office all the time and I plan on making this my homepage at work.

Wow, I hope it will be useful for you! Let me know (kalid@instacalc.com) if there's any features you need.

Awesome! I think there's a bug--can anyone else confirm that the bar chart doesn't seem to work in shared spreadsheets: http://my.instacalc.com/calc/1c58eb08760043bfb67924cb5fa1684...

Um, it's a "feature" :)

I purposefully disabled charts on the embedded versions to save bandwidth (about 100kb of javascript), but I plan to add it in.

If you can't tell me how many pints are in a cubic acre, then you can't tell me anything:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pints+per++cubic+ac...

http://instacalc.com/?d=&c=MSBwaW50IGluIGN1YmljIGNtfDEgc...

1 pint in cubic cm, sure. Cubic meters, no problem. Cubic knots, even cubic rods, anything you want.

But cubic acres? Now that's just getting crazy. Acres measure area, so not exactly sure what a "cubic acre" would be. I suppose it could be a cube with 1 acre each side, but man, that's pushing it :).

if you become a millionaire with this calculator i will cut my wrists :)

Ah, c'mon, it provides some value right? What did you do when you saw this? http://milliondollarhomepage.com/ =)

i tried: R7: 384 kbit/sec in GB/month then using the result from R7: R7/1mb the calculation will not use the quantity type of R7 which is GB, but only the number. trying to use: R7 in GB will again not use the right quantity for my result..

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, right now I'm not tracking the type of each result, just the final result. This is a planned feature.

Nice site, though it doesn't work on some of the bandwidth calculations I often do via Google calculator. (eg: "(1TB / 100Mbps) in days")

For the curious, there's a GPL project, 'qalculate', which could be used as the basis for similar calculator services.

Thanks -- you can actually do the calculation above like this:

http://instacalc.com/?d=&c=KDFUQi8xTUIpIHNlY29uZHMgaW4gZ...

I'm not tracking the implicit unit conversion (1TB/ 100 Mbps)... yet :)

Your answer doesn't match Google's, so I think your reformulation is wrong.

It seems like it isn't case sensitive, so can't tell the difference between 1MB and 1Mb (1MB = 8Mb)

Yeah, I decided to make it case insensitive to avoid confusion. It seems most non-techies aren't aware of the GB vs gb distinction (and not to mention the uber-geeks who insist on gibi and kibi and all that :) )

If you want gigabits, you can explicitly write "gbit":

http://instacalc.com/?d=&c=MSBnYiBpbiBtYml0fDEgZ2IgaW4gb...

Thanks again for all the feedback guys!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com