Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xanderlewis 697 days ago
Cue the comments about criticism of this calculator being unfair as thinking, for example, that 88*10 = 888 is a ‘very human’ mistake to make.
2 comments

I got 883, which is also very human. They just forgot to write one of the halves of 8
You can only get an 8 in the rightmost digit of the result by multiples of the rightmost digits, but 08 obviously gets you a 0, so fairly easy to see this is wrong.

(10a+b)(10c+d) = 100ac+10(ad+bc)+bd

Well… I was joking. Even more generally, multiplication by b in base b gives a zero at the end.
… and, in fact, ‘b in base b’ always looks like 10 anyway!