insect
pqm
Our great sponsors
insect | pqm | |
---|---|---|
24 | 3 | |
3,153 | 15 | |
- | - | |
4.9 | 1.3 | |
2 months ago | about 1 year ago | |
PureScript | JavaScript | |
MIT License | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
insect
-
Show HN: Numbat – A programming language with physical dimensions as types
Apparently this replaces https://github.com/sharkdp/insect
- Insect – high precision scientific calculator with support for physical units
- The Icculus Microgrant is giving out 250 dollar grants to open source projects, please brag about your project(s) in this thread so I can see them!
-
What projects do you wish there was a self hosted version of
You might like https://insect.sh/ ;)
- Show HN: I made a web-based notepad with a built in unit calculator
-
ka: a calculator language for the command line
For the record I use insect.
-
Looking to build a plugin for logseq. Your problems needed!
https://github.com/sharkdp/insect seems to be somewhat similar, but it's mostly for physical units. However, it's the only opensource one that is embeddable.
-
Ask HN: Do you use a physical calculator in your day job, and why?
Insect: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect
It is a bit slow but has decent features, including some physical units support.
I set up Tilda (or another Guake equivalent; I tried a bunch of them and can’t remember on which I settled in the end) to run it automatically when a terminal is opened, when pressing Scroll Lock. It’s quite neat: when I need to do a quick calculation, I just hit Scroll Lock, which spawns a drop down terminal with the focus; then type whatever I want to calculate; then control-D to dismiss the drop down terminal and I am back in whatever I was doing without moving either hand off the keyboard.
I do more or less the same thing on my Mac with Alfred.
-
Kagi Search – Public Beta
I'm in the same boat and will pay for Kagi, though I have a different interaction with a search engine and thought you might like the counterpoint. Notably, I don't use Google for most of what you described:
Translation: I use DeepL instead (google is doing poorly on Asian languages)
Conversion: not having much need for imperial but I use this for all unit conversion (though usually directly in my terminal): https://insect.sh/
Wikipedia: if I type Wikipedia+something my browser automatically use the wiki engine (chrome can do that too)
Word definition: on OSX I long press on the trackpad and the definition pops up (across languages, translation too for single words)
Lyrics: Spotify show them now! (admittedly that's a recent feature)
-
anyone know a calculator that can count to unreasonably high numbers? I'm talking x*10^1000 and stuff??
insect.sh goes up to about 109 × 1015.
pqm
- A better/faster JavaScript library for physical math
-
Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
I made a spreadsheet add-on similar to the pint library for python (dimensional analysis) based on my own open source JS library (https://github.com/GhostWrench/pqm). Website is still up: https://ghostwrench.net/convertplus.html.
To me it seemed like the perfect way to get a solo app up and running because Google was going to run all the sever stuff and I could just cash in. The app never really got off the ground and by the time I realized that Big G really doesn’t want to make it easy for any schmuck to run a profit generating app using their servers and their technology and it wasn’t worth the maintenance effort to keep up with the constant requests to update the app. I think it is no longer available on the GSuite store as of a few months ago. I think my biggest mistakes were as follows:
1) I needed a business/marketing oriented co-founder. I underestimated how difficult that job is and overestimated my ability to do it.
2) I wanted to charge too much for the app. I didn’t want to undersell myself and get caught in a trap of not making enough to keep up with maintenance. I went too far the other way. I think maybe a $50-$60 on time charge would have been appropriate, instead of requiring a subscription. This is an easy fix, but I would had to re-do my marketing effort and see #1
3) Built before I tested the market. I convinced myself that just asking a few of my engineering friend would use it was enough. Again, this is probably a symptom of #1
4) I was mentally unprepared to deal with failure and I lost motivation to keep working on the project when things didn’t go as I expected.
5) I underestimated how much people actually use spreasheet add-ons. There really isn’t a thriving market and most of the really popular apps are a utility attached to another popular standalone project.
6) Probably should have targeted Excel rather than Sheets, because the market is simply bigger.
I think if the stars align, I would like to give this project another go. I don’t think it has totally failed rather than just gone dormant, but I need a better strategy for round 2!
-
GNU Units
There are heaps of libraries for all languages because it is a fairly fun and straight forward project. I personally created this one because I was frustrated with how slow and clunky the existing javascript libraries were:
https://github.com/GhostWrench/pqm
Also, I open sourced just the unit database (in JSON format) for anyone interested in making their own version:
https://github.com/GhostWrench/unitdb
What are some alternatives?
kalk - Scientific calculator with math syntax that supports user-defined variables and functions, complex numbers, and estimation of derivatives and integrals
unix-v6 - UNIX 6th Edition Kernel Source Code
TRex - Copy any text on your screen, stop retyping.
Ruby Units - A unit handling library for ruby
uom - Units of measurement -- type-safe zero-cost dimensional analysis
lasercrabs - Abandoned hybrid singleplayer/multiplayer shooter project formerly known as DECEIVER
Copyfish - Copy, paste and translate text from images, videos and PDFs with this free Chrome extension
boltstream - Boltstream Live Video Streaming Website + Backend
macOCR - Get any text on your screen into your clipboard.
Unitful.jl - Physical quantities with arbitrary units
calc - C-style arbitrary precision calculator
gnu-units - GNU Units (mirror)