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Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

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Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#191

Post by scythe »

thro1 wrote: post #94
onedognight wrote: post #4

I use it regularly. Sometimes it’s broken, and maybe nobody notices but me? :) Their natural language queries for things that I know they know about are amazing. Here are some that I have used recently. You really need to see these results to appreciate them. I wanted to know how tall my daughter might be. 8 year old female 55 lbs http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=8%20year%20old%20female... I wanted to know the nu…

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…

>protein assimilability from bread is 40%

This is wrong; the digestibility of gluten is 80-90%. Your friend was probably thinking of the PDCAAS, which is more like 45 for gluten. But this is nutritional quality vs an egg white equivalent as defined by the bioavailability and concentration of essential amino acids (egg = 100 by definition; the score is based on the lowest fraction of any EAA, so gelatin — no tryptophan — has PDCAAS 0), not the fraction absorbed or utilized. For an idea of what utilization looks like see e.g.:

https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/nutrients/nutrients-10-001...

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#192

Post by still_grokking »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #180
hawkjo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazing! The rest of this thread completely buried the lead. Delightful.

Hope I'm not sounding like a grammar nazi but its "buried the lede" I only recently discovered - the reason is really interesting - https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...

As a non-native speaker I would welcome more "grammar nazis" in places where well educated native speakers can be found.

One of the reasons children learn new languages quite rapidly is because they get corrected the whole time.

Not correcting people hinders actually their progress in language learning… Even if it might seem impolite it's the one thing that helps a lot, if not even most, in mastering a foreign language!

So thanks for being a "grammar nazi". We need people like you.

(No, that doesn't apply to the causal typo. But I guess most people can differentiate such a thing form true grammar and spelling mistakes; especially if that are "typical" mistakes).

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#193

Post by varenc »

antattack wrote: post #17

"how many 3mm circles pack in 15mm circle" WA offers answers with drawings. Google cannot do that. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+3mm+circles+p...

Of course if you try the query with spheres you see Wolfram Alpha's typical catatrophic failure.

I love WA and use it all the time, but it's so hard to know when a query will work and when it won't. When it fails it fails hilariously.

Here's some of my favorite queries:

- https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2.2+bagels%2Fday+*+ave...

- https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+dilation+given+v+...

- https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=400+miles+%2F+20mpg+*+...

- https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+unemployment+rate+v...

- https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=warp+speed+6+in+deep+s...

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#194

Post by marcinzm »

moron4hire wrote: post #187
marcinzm wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is something that actually annoys me immensely when people say "you eat too much!" to fat people. Two people can have the exact same diet and the exact same exercise regime, and if one assimilates particular foods more effectively they'll be getting more calories, and put on weight. Food intake is far more complex than many people believe. I don't see why that statement is inaccurate. It's not "you eat more tha…

The problem is that it is usually presented as a "simple" solution. "Just eat less. Reduce your food intake until you're at a calorie deficit". For some people, that can mean eating three small, but satisfying meals a day. For others, it can mean eating extremely strict rations for only two meals a day, leaving the person constantly hungry and cranky. Then it becomes a will power issue, which as we all know is a func…

Except it is as I see it. The goal is to eat less and to achieve that you need figure out what you can eat less of that will make you still feel fed. Sure it doesn't apply to everyone but nothing does.

For example, for me, 600 calories worth of chips will keep me feeling fed for an hour or two. 600 calories worth of pure brisket can keep me feeing fed for 8 hours. You can guess which I tend to eat more of when I'm trying to lose weight.

edit: Also if you're at a stable weight then we're talking 10% less food per day and not 50% less.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#195

Post by Invictus0 »

moron4hire wrote: post #187
marcinzm wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is something that actually annoys me immensely when people say "you eat too much!" to fat people. Two people can have the exact same diet and the exact same exercise regime, and if one assimilates particular foods more effectively they'll be getting more calories, and put on weight. Food intake is far more complex than many people believe. I don't see why that statement is inaccurate. It's not "you eat more tha…

The problem is that it is usually presented as a "simple" solution. "Just eat less. Reduce your food intake until you're at a calorie deficit". For some people, that can mean eating three small, but satisfying meals a day. For others, it can mean eating extremely strict rations for only two meals a day, leaving the person constantly hungry and cranky. Then it becomes a will power issue, which as we all know is a func…

It's a willpower issue for 3 days, the time it takes for your stomach and appetite to readjust to a lower volume of food intake. Anyone who's fasted knows how easy skipping meals is--it's certainly not the agonizing test of willpower you and many nonfasters seem to think it is.

And by the way, if diet and exercise are not the path to weight loss, then what is?

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#196

Post by AussieWog93 »

still_grokking wrote: post #186

The pricing seems random to me. (Even it seems cheaper than last time I've checked). It's ~20% more expensive in Euro than in Dollar. (And Poland, which I checked for curiosity as it's in the EU but does not use Euro, has a price in Pound with is even higher; Poland is not a rich country). Also I don't think charging for example people in countries in Africa as much as for example US people makes any sense. The servi…

>It's ~20% more expensive in Euro than in Dollar.

Keep in mind US prices don't include sales tax (VAT).

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#198

Post by upbeat_general »

dotancohen wrote: post #61

As 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 think it highly depends on what kind of math you're expecting (and how heavily you want to rely on a CAS). If most of your work is just simplifying equations and computing numerical solutions, basically any system will do whether that's Octave, Sympy + Numpy, etc.

I haven't used Maple for a while so can't speak to it's current functionality but there's been several times I've wanted to do something in Sympy/Octave and haven't found it whereas I can almost always get Mathematica to do what I want with a quick search. I tend to rely heavily on it for some more complicated/specific symbolic operations (e.g. symbolically transforming probability distributions) and for that use case, I haven't found anything better.

I'll also say that if your use case if more numerical/programming oriented, the language used might be an important factor. I personally don't like Wolfram Language and use very few of its language features and prefer Python for anything that Mathematica isn't suited for out of the box.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#200

Post by marcinzm »

Invictus0 wrote: post #195
moron4hire wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it is usually presented as a "simple" solution. "Just eat less. Reduce your food intake until you're at a calorie deficit". For some people, that can mean eating three small, but satisfying meals a day. For others, it can mean eating extremely strict rations for only two meals a day, leaving the person constantly hungry and cranky. Then it becomes a will power issue, which as we all know is a func…

It's a willpower issue for 3 days, the time it takes for your stomach and appetite to readjust to a lower volume of food intake. Anyone who's fasted knows how easy skipping meals is--it's certainly not the agonizing test of willpower you and many nonfasters seem to think it is. And by the way, if diet and exercise are not the path to weight loss, then what is?

You also don't need to eat that much less if you're at a stable weight. 10% less a day means you lose a pound every 1-2 weeks. In my experience people seem to not like it when you tell them, after they ask, that you lost weight simply by eating a bit less every day consistently for a year.
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