Hacker News Reader

That was me. Algebra clicked for me so I found the pace of the class to be slow. Ended up creating a few programs to solve tedious things like the quadratic formula incrementally while displaying the intermediate steps so I could write them down on tests.

Authoring programs using the buttons on the calculator was not fun.

View on HN

> so I could write them down on tests.

We had show our calculator had been memory wiped before any tests.

Although in retrospect we only had to show the wipe screen which we probably could have coded up as its own program.

Most teachers were not good at checking this. There was an archive mechanism which would compress the file and IIRC, prevent it from showing up in the program list. You could of course just unarchive it.

Even though I never cheated, I never wanted my programs to get erased... I just created an image of the "memory erased" screen and showed that to the teachers.

It was OK, just needed to memorize the commands, they are all reachable via a combination of number keys :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com