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Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

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Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#161

Post by dylan604 »

utopcell wrote: post #155
dylan604 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is that google sucks at context clues

It clearly understands enough to trigger displaying the calculator.

What we'll discover is there is a team dedicated to determining when to display the calculator. Then there will be another team entirely that picks how to interpret the query for website results. The two teams will never have met, spoken, exchanged information between the two. The team searching websites will mysteriously have never thought that someone might search a webpage for a math equation.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#162

Post by dylan604 »

emmelaich wrote: post #140
ghostly_s wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

i just tried this for: 48 * 6

the results after choosing verbatim are even worse

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#163

Post by ksaj »

chihuahua wrote: post #160
thro1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just asked a friend about this: > 1 egg, two slices whole wheat bread, one slice of cheddar, two.. leaves of lettuce .. and he said it's wrong and useless (!) - giving me examples and numbers as: protein assimilability from bread is 40% etc. Is there a way to get correct answers from Wolfram regarding this ? ( assimilability of doesn't work) Edit: Excuse me, what's wrong with you downvoters - it's a legit question. O…

It seems that Wolfram Alpha also has some difficulty figuring out whether I'm talking about raw oats or cooked oats, even when I use the word raw in my query. As a result, it can be off by a factor of 3. I agree that it's not useful if you have to carefully check the output every time.

I would expect it to work properly with the word oatmeal.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#165

Post by barabba »

onion2k wrote: post #147
thro1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just asked a friend about this: > 1 egg, two slices whole wheat bread, one slice of cheddar, two.. leaves of lettuce .. and he said it's wrong and useless (!) - giving me examples and numbers as: protein assimilability from bread is 40% etc. Is there a way to get correct answers from Wolfram regarding this ? ( assimilability of doesn't work) Edit: Excuse me, what's wrong with you downvoters - it's a legit question. O…

Wolfram isn't reporting how much protein you'll get from eating something; it's reporting how much there is in the bread. Protein assimilation depends on a huge range of factors, and varies significantly between individuals (based on everything from gut microbiome to health factors to how much you chew your food to your saliva production to... Well, it's a long list). There's no way a website could report the amount…

So you're saying that "fat people eat too much" is a statistically inaccurate statement?

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#166

Post by ksaj »

stevage wrote: post #114
dylan604 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTactualF? When has * ever been anything other than multiplication? Why would the resulting links all be discussing division?

I'm not certain but in this context * may be a wildcard.

It is. Try searching for 16*9 for the good reason it shows both the calculator, and then links to 16:9 and 16x9 aspect ratio content.

It's reasonable to think that the calculator already answered the question, and I'm not looking for pages on the simple multiplication once I've already seen the answer.

Imagine the uproar if those results didn't come up because a bunch of children's math quizzes were found instead.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#167

Post by aliswe »

thro1 wrote: post #156
LordOfWolves wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might help to explain what your friend says is “wrong and useless” so others could provide feedback. It also might help to avoid insinuating things about strangers online in order to promote discussion and not stifle it.

Downvotes start to happen before my excuse. I've payed with karma and got an answer. Thanks for your human feedback.

its not karma, its hn community conformity points

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#169

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu »

zandorg wrote: post #125
pvg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorting by popularity has been broken for years because comment scores aren't public any more.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#170

Post by every »

5- wrote: post #101
mike_d wrote: post #71

Earlier 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

Units advises there are 118.20896 smoots per furlong..
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