I just used it recently to plot weather data, population density, crime rate, and average home price of cities I was thinking of living in
Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
131–140 of 281 posts
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#132I 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.
I'm not arguing in this case that it's more accurate, just that it's sometimes easier: if I've got a mixing bowl on a scale, I find it easier to pour things in by weight rather than to measure them all out. On recipes I often cook, I edit / write in the weight in grams to speed things up.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#133Earlier 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.
I get increasingly frustrated by the spammy SO mirroring spam sites getting into the top 3 results.
Oh yeah there's that too and now I also get them in other languages than English but they are just Google translate version of SO.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#134I think students these days use it for math/calculus, but it isn't seen as something special because they've always had it. It wasn't novel like for us.
My students seem to prefer Symbolab now.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#135I used to use it extensively during my early PhD work for back of the envelope calculations. Unfortunately it became steadily harder to enter queries and have them understood. About half a decade ago they broke about 70% of what i used it for by refusing to show results for modestly complex calculations and instead throwing up nag messages for the paid version. The paid version last i saw was not available through an institutional license.
Last time I tried to use retrieval features for nuclear data there was absolutely no citation info or documentation whatsoever, just numbers from who knows where. WA had so much potential but peaked about 3 years after it came out as far as i can tell. That being said it's still vastly superior to doing calculations with google.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also a frequent WA user. I use it for things I could calculate, but are much faster to just ask in plain text. How much that cloud instance really costs $0.03/hr * 1 month Bandwidth calculations for hosting providers 10 TB per month in Mbps
you might want to try units(1). https://www.gnu.org/software/units/units.html the input language is less flexible than wolframalpha/google, but i quickly got used to it. it's nice to have something local and reliable. you can also define custom units. i prefer using it in terse mode: $ units -t 0.03$/hr*1month 21.914532 US$ $ units -t 10TB/month Mbps 30.421214
For calculator problems like that, I use J:
*/ 0.03 24 30 1e6 %~ (10e12 * 8) % */ 30 24 3600Usually requires some massaging, but still takes seconds.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#137I 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.
If that’s the case, then the issue is immaterial
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#138Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Google for those pretty often.
I do the same for basic calculations. I was surprised things like 9:00 EST in CET don‘t work in google search, but do in WA.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?"
click tools -> show all results -> verbatim