Many years ago, ~2009ish, a friend pointed out that Calculator.app was giving the wrong sign when raising a positive number to a negative exponent. It turned out to be a bug in CFNumber affecting virtually every app.
I noticed the other day that you can type "1+1 sq ft in sq in=" and macOS will helpfully autocomplete the answer: 1,694.0031 square inches. Which is completely wrong. 2 square feet is 288 square inches. It took a few minutes to solve the puzzle of what the hell it is doing.
So take caution trusting Apple's math, which naturally is up to 2x better³—for some value of x.
OptionOfT•4mo ago
Thank you for posting this.
I had the same issue with a different calculation. The answer was wrong.
I thought it looks weird because I put a space after the = and the autocomplete does not add that.
handsclean•4mo ago
> 1+1 sq ft in sq in=
Fun puzzle. Spoilers ahead:
It seems it’s considering the first 1, and not the second, to be in square meters. “(1+1) sq ft in sq in” works.
puce•4mo ago
1+1 sq ft = 11.76 feet^2
jb1991•4mo ago
"1+1 sq ft in sq in="
The order of operations here is quite ambiguous. It’s not obvious even to a human reader how you would expect this to be interpreted.
mulmen•4mo ago
I honestly can't tell what this would mean other than 2 square feet in inches. What's the other option?
fluidcruft•4mo ago
Another option could be that it's ill-posed and should just return an error.
fzzzy•4mo ago
(1 sq ft in sq in) + 1?
vrighter•4mo ago
Which sort of unit is a "sq ft in sq in" and why would they have coded it in the parser as one? It's only ambiguous if it's explicitly coded badly to induce ambiguity.
rgovostes•4mo ago
There is a perfectly cromulent grammar for a unit-aware calculator:
<expression without units> [<unit> [in <unit>]]
<expression with units> [in <unit>]
"1+2 feet in meters" and "1 foot + 1 meter" are both unambiguous. There is no order of operations in terms of how the units bind. The expression "1 foot + 1" is appropriately invalid.
Of course the appropriate care must be paid to interpreting "in" correctly as either a unit or a keyword.
ycui1986•4mo ago
The apple’s calculator is so bad, I cannot believe it that tech website used praise this.
If you type too quick, it misses numbers.
If you type too many times “+” it add too many times
If you try to use it as old standalone calculator, things does not calculate right.
It is hard to clear numbers.
Just so stupid.
smallstepforman•4mo ago
Its been missing touch input for over 6 years now, still cannot believe their dev teams do not have professional pride to fix such an embaressing flaw.
TZubiri•4mo ago
Jobs is dead
lukeinator42•4mo ago
I don't know if xcancel is getting hugged to death or blocks all of Canada or something, but I've been getting connection refused every time I've clicked on one of their links here.
Marsymars•4mo ago
Works in Canada here, but it’s probably just getting rate-limited by Twitter; I’m surprised any Nitter instance works at this point.
LeoPanthera•4mo ago
I have fond memories of the Windows 3.1 calculator being unable to calculate 2.01 - 2. (It gives the answer 0.00)
abnercoimbre•4mo ago
Can we just say thank you for the xcancel link? I hope HN continues that trend for those of us without Twitter/X accounts.
supernes•4mo ago
Apple can save some memory by rewriting it as an Electron app.
pjmlp•4mo ago
That is a lot of calculations, how can a plain calculator leak so much memory to reach 32 GB?
rgovostes•4mo ago
I noticed the other day that you can type "1+1 sq ft in sq in=" and macOS will helpfully autocomplete the answer: 1,694.0031 square inches. Which is completely wrong. 2 square feet is 288 square inches. It took a few minutes to solve the puzzle of what the hell it is doing.
So take caution trusting Apple's math, which naturally is up to 2x better³—for some value of x.
OptionOfT•4mo ago
I had the same issue with a different calculation. The answer was wrong.
I thought it looks weird because I put a space after the = and the autocomplete does not add that.
handsclean•4mo ago
Fun puzzle. Spoilers ahead:
It seems it’s considering the first 1, and not the second, to be in square meters. “(1+1) sq ft in sq in” works.
puce•4mo ago
jb1991•4mo ago
The order of operations here is quite ambiguous. It’s not obvious even to a human reader how you would expect this to be interpreted.
mulmen•4mo ago
fluidcruft•4mo ago
fzzzy•4mo ago
vrighter•4mo ago
rgovostes•4mo ago
Of course the appropriate care must be paid to interpreting "in" correctly as either a unit or a keyword.