I hate generic name-text-submit-forms as the only method of contact. Somehow the article makes them the definition of not a "f** off contact page" - why?

I think such forms are a direct downgrade from providing an email address.

- Responding to the submissions likely requires email anyway

- Impersonation/spam is even less difficult

- Sender isn't guaranteed to get a record of sending the message

- A faceless form with unknown machinery feels like sending messages in a bottle

Even worse, dry heaping spoonfuls easily get 2-4x the volume of liquids fitting the same spoon.

We can't just guess the recipe's teaspoon standard and blindly convert everything to mL.

I don't think data leak extortioners have any incentive to even pretend they won't keep asking further payment.

Why not just offer a monthly subscription "service"?

And the best part? The ransomware startup can now mark the income as MRR extending to infinity, thereby significantly increasing the startup's valuation! If you want to learn more about B2B sales, hit that like button and click on this .exe file to subscribe for more updates.

thanks for the laugh, gave me a good chuckle by ".exe file"

At that point, the company should just pay for an actual security team.

Security is not a binary state. You can pay as much as you want but there’s no assurance that you won’t be hacked.

Great, now even crime groups are following consultancy advice. \s

Measuring pasta with calipers is prime HN material, thank you for posting this!

Nice page.

I do see this type of versioning as an indictment of such a technology for production scenarios, it's all a house of cards if that's what you are building upon.

It's a liability disclaimer versioning schema

For tracking to be at all effective, this requires the user to log all of their transactions thoroughly and accurately. Personally I'd never remember to update the logs immediately after a purchase during the day.

Logging transactions on the go demands the interface to be rapidly accessible. Touch screen typing is error-prone and slow. I'd prefer a dedicated interface where I could just tap one of the available categories and enter the sum with a large number pad.

It'd make sense to primarily synchronize data from their online bank account and then ask the user to clarify/categorize unknown events. Obviously an online sync is hard to implement for all banks, so a TSV import would be a bare necessity. My bank has integrated financial tracking nicely in their mobile application.

That’s a great point — I totally get that typing out expenses on a touchscreen every time isn’t realistic for most people. The core idea behind what I’m building is that it’s voice-first. You just open the app, tap the mic, and say something like “Spent 250 on chai” or “Paid 12,000 for rent yesterday.” It uses GPT on the backend to parse that and log it.

The goal is to make it feel as effortless as sending a quick voice note.

That said, I love your idea of having a quick-access number pad + category buttons as an alternative. Could be great for when you’re in a rush or want to log multiple expenses fast.

And yeah, syncing with banks would be ideal, but pretty tough to pull off across all providers — especially here in India. A TSV/CSV import option sounds like a solid workaround for now. Definitely noting that.

Really appreciate your input — this kind of feedback is exactly what I need at this stage.

Nobody’s gonna dictate all their financial transactions into an app. Why not use something like Plaid, like the mature companies in this space (rocket money, mint, empower etc)

3rd-party browser implementation: https://qalculator.xyz/

Qalculate handles physical units seamlessly, which makes everyday calculations an absolute breeze. It definitely has an overkill amount of features, but they're not a distraction.

We read and write so much more English than Finnish when working with software, so the English terms bubble up naturally.

I have a strong dislike against setting the language of my OS, or most applications, to Finnish. Application translations are extremely inconsistent, sometimes even nonsensical. The absolute worst case is seeing only translated error messages without error codes. It's nearly impossible to search help or follow step-by-step guides.

I definitely should improve my knowledge of "proper" Finnish IT terms. Some of them have very intuitive meanings:

- hashing -> hajautus: (chaotically) splitting, scattering things away from each other

I constantly forget my food in the microwave for hours at a time.

Let it beep 3 times maximum(!), if you keep forgetting, you probably weren't very hungry.

And yet you are still miraculously alive, despite not being alarmed of the terrifying situation

I really enjoyed spending a bit of my morning with these two implementations of the concept.

I prefer your idea of treating the question as a proper puzzle with a 1-submission limit. The "calculator" UI took a whole 2 minutes to understand initially, but I really liked seeing the chain instead of having to mush all the factors in my head.

It's really nice to see the correct answer broken down to get a feel about the real numbers!

The current question's answer seems to contain big errors in magnitude in its factors:

"How many kilograms of skin does a human shed in their lifetime?"

    Skin cells shed per day: 5e8 / day
    Mass of one skin cell: 3e-6 g
    Years in a lifetime: 80 yr
    Grams to kilograms conversion: 1 kg / 1000 g

The final "correct" result is displayed as 44 kg, but these values result in 44,000 kg. It's also odd to show a conversion factor for kg/g, but not day/year.

The first two factors correspond to shedding 1.5 kg/day, which is definitely unrealistic!

Thanks for trying it and sorry about those errors. All fixed now.

You're very much not alone on the UX friction-- that's what most people have said. My gut says that what is fun about Fermi estimation is chaining the factors, (which OP's clone doesn't have), but it's not a trivial thing to package into an intuitive UI. So I'll have to think about it a bit more. If you've got any more ideas or suggestions, I'm all ears!