Many thanks to WA for getting me through high school and college calculus.
Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
121–130 of 281 posts
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#122Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#123What do you mean? I used it to solve a nasty impedance network for the real and imaginary components yesterday and the solutions were accurate. Edit: Maybe it's just good enough that people treat it as a tool and see no need to market it. It consistently has worked fine-ish for years and is useful at what it does.
Could please share your query / code to do this? Seems like it would make a good Example. Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Google search doesn't include the special symbols, so it's like searching "48 6".
I don't know, I was looking for "how to configure cors for specific vhost in nginx" and all I got was Apache SO links. Had to use -apache.
I get increasingly frustrated by the spammy SO mirroring spam sites getting into the top 3 results.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
My meaning was just that I saw it sometimes referenced on HN, but I haven't seen it mentioned for a while now. Hence my search and results showing 8 years since. I guess what I should be doing is looking at the Alexa ranking of Wolfram Alpha.
You should search comments, rather than stories. It's very regularly referenced in HN comments, often for calculations, sometimes in other contexts. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Fair enough. I was definitely searching comments (not stories), but I might not have filtered by Date, hence the lack of recent results.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#126I use it semi-regularly; once a week or so. It's a genuinely useful tool that was just greatly oversold on launch. Things I use it for: - Converting units while cooking. I prefer to cook by weight, and for most ingredients, you can do something like "2 cups of flour in g" - Stuff I'd have used a scientific calculator in an earlier era: simple systems of equations, plots, etc. - Comparing stats on countries, e.g. GDP…
The issue with recipe weight unit conversions might be that the author literally had a cup or spoon or whatever with a specific capacity which would not equal the standard units, therefore you are converting one inaccurate amount to an other one.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't work so good for times but I often use Google search to multiply numbers with units together and get a result in the units I want without having to worry about screwing up unit conversions. Example: 4 atomic mass units * (1000 nm/sec)^2 Google Result: 6.64215616 × 10-39 joules I use this all the time. I use wolfram alpha for solving equations or systems of equations but I use google for unit conversions be…
... Seriously, though, if you’re actually need this type of calculation regularly and didn’t just pick a random example, atomic-scale calculations are absolutely miserable to do in SI (and this is not a problem, it’s a human-scale, engineering system, after all; and its metrological aspects, which were the actual advance originally, are completely unimportant here). If I had to do this in my head or with a desk calcu…
Yes, I am familiar with this system. If anything, being a physicist is all the better reason to want a computer to deal with the units though...
My example was entirely contrived of course, a less contrived one would be estimating how long a gas cylinder will last. The tank name plate might say it has 200 cubic feet (sigh) and you need to flow at 10mL/min. How many months does the tank last? I'm talking about quick engineering tasks, not theory.
BTW, the answer is about 13 months, whatever that is in eV^{-1}:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=200%20cubic%20feet%20%...
Which took me about 15 seconds to type. Just different use cases.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#1281. It's slow, even for simple microsecond computations like log(2). Takes about 5-20 seconds to load a page on my 1Gb fiber connection. Opening Python/SymPy Gamma is much faster for most things. https://gamma.sympy.org/input/?i=log%282%29 2. Every time I use it, a box saying NEW: Use textbook math notation to enter your math. TRY IT pops up over the result, and clicking the X doesn't hide it the next time I search. T…
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Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know, I was looking for "how to configure cors for specific vhost in nginx" and all I got was Apache SO links. Had to use -apache.
Use verbatim search too. All words must exist without aliasing. (google aliases ubuntu and debian, john/jon/Johnathan for example)
>google aliases ubuntu and debian,
WHAT the FUCK. Is there a more convenient way to bypass this than "quoting" "every" "word?"
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#130As someone who just signed up for an open university this semester, I'd love to hear opinions about Octave and Maxima for general purpose use. Especially for study, such as replacing Wolfram Alpha's step-by-step solutions. I'm a Linux user and prefer an open-source solution. But I have no objection to paying a reasonable amount of money for a good commercial solution. Maybe Maple is worth looking at?
I prefer Python to Octave and Maxima. Numpy, scipy, and matplotlib for numerical stuff, and sympy for symbolic stuff. Having them together in the same general purpose language is really convenient, and Jupyter notebooks are fantastic. Sage is also good, but I've moved on to sympy. I don't know a way to get step-by-step working from a library, but sympy gamma can do some, so it's probably possible to some extent.
My experience suggests avoiding Maple like the plague. Sympy (and Sage) can do everything I ever used it for much nicer and easier.