Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Shameless plug, I just launched an overhaul to a side project today (https://instacalc.com).

The biggest impetus was having a friend using the old version who pinged me with some feature requests. It reminded me that the service can help people I know directly and gave me a huge boost of motivation. If friends and family are using it, you'll want to help them out :).




InstaCalc is great! Love the natural language oriented input for calculations.

Tangentially related to the article, did BetterExplained itself start out as a side project, or did you double-down from the start?


Thanks! BetterExplained started as a collection of notes on my university website:

Sadly after a decade the CS department shut down my alumni account :(. But I have a cached backup here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150708043012/http://www.cs.pri...

https://betterexplained.com/~kazad/

I started BetterExplained about 10 years ago exactly (wow), just taking some of the notes online. Thankfully they were on evergreen math topics (divergence, flux, gradients... stuff I desperately wanted intuitions for) and it grew from there.

I had been thinking of doing a decade year retrospective on what's worked/not worked in terms of keeping motivation and momentum for the projects (so far, so good). Thanks for the reminder!


Looking forward to the retrospective post! Motivation tends to be highly fluctuating. Perseverance is the key to success. Would love to hear how you maintained a decade long streak.


Super awesome. You can save Calcs.

Ways to 1Million in Yearly Recurring Revenue: https://instacalc.com/50021


Thanks! Yes, I wanted to make the "pastebin of calculators" :).


Does it have an API? I'd like to plug it into Alfred.


No API yet but that's a great suggestion, thanks.


Doesn't seem to work on Safari (9.1.3 on macOS).


Found and fixed the bug, should be working now. (For what it's worth, I was using fat arrow functions in javascript, which aren't supported in all browsers yet. Forgot to compile it down to ES2015.)


Ack, I've seen rendering issues on certain browsers. Thanks for the version number, it's really helpful for debugging.




Consider applying for YC's W25 batch! Applications are open till Nov 12.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: