What do you mean? I use wolfram alpha for math question, plots, solving integral etc all the time
Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
211–220 of 281 posts
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#212Earlier 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…
I mean, I could say the same thing about quitting cigarettes. I absolutely realize it’s hard to do, and that’s why so many people still smoke. But my advice would be the same...
... and that is also extremely bad advice. There is very wide variability in how nicotine addiction affects different people. Some people can quit after a pack-a-day habit and have no problems. Some people have trouble with getting off a pack-a-week habit.
Someone who is having extreme difficulty quitting smoking could benefit from working with a doctor to discuss quit-smoking aids or even seeing a therapist to work through their addiction.
No shit, the person needs to "just stop". Way to point out the obvious. Most people don't have a "just stop" button.
IDK, maybe you're just bad at giving advice. Maybe you should just stop.
EDIT: this is seriously an article on The Onion in the making. "Nation wakes up to random forum poster telling them to 'just eat less'. Obesity epidemic ends overnight." The proof is in the pudding here. Telling people "just eat less" is shitty advice.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#213I think the strategy of Wolfram Research has shifted from trying to sell Wolfram Alpha as a standalone service, to selling the Wolfram Language with WA functions for retrieving standard datasets. A finance professional, for example, probably did not gain much information from asking WA "would it be better to invest $100 in GOOG or FB in 2013?", but the `FinancialData` function for pulling end-of-day stock prices enab…
What was your experience at WR? I’m curious what the sentiment is towards the new physics work by those who work there, do you stay in touch?
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#214A more important question: what happened to Wolfram? I think they missed an opportunity to have an enormous market by pricing themselves into a niche. They had so much cool stuff that could have played a much larger role in most developers lives. And which would have funneled more users into higher end premium products. Every now and then I go to their site to have a look -- and then realize that I'm not going to go…
Wolfram himself is working on physics and fulfilling a life long dream. (He was just on Lex’s podcast.) Say what you will about his contributions but it is hard to argue he hasn’t been enormously successful at achieving his goals of developing an entire cathedral of work he can use for his own intellectual persuits.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#215It constantly fails on everything.
I even thought it would an interesting project to write a overlay to get it working.
Even Google can do this -
"How many car tires in a ton?" - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+car+tires+in+...
How much simpler can you get?
Anything useful to an adult doing napkin math (or a child) it fails at.
I'm sure it can do integrals and complex math but since it can't even get you started, you'll already using something else.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
You also might want to try google search. They display calculations for these particular queries and quite a few more.
Google is also often wrong. For example, my computer is set to US English, as is my profile. Yet somehow it still gets confused on decimals and commas (they are switched in my current country’s locale).
Also, if you use the Firefox search bar only the first 20 chars are sent to google, so longer calculations are truncated before they're calculated and wrong answers come back with no warning. Not a Google problem per se but a risk of using Google to calculate still.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 21.6 1e6 %~ (10e12 * 8) % */ 30 24 3600 30.8642 Usually requires some massaging, but still takes seconds.
While APL dialects are very nice for this sort of thing, they generally don't understand units of measure or know about physical constants; you have to put those into them yourself. Here are some of my recent units(1) queries:
141 pounds force 30 mm # in joules
1160/4
log(3)/3/(log(2)/2) # how much more efficient is one-hot ternary than one-hot binary?
5V 7 μs / 7.3 A
.0117% half avogadro mol / 1.251e9 years / (potassium+chlorine)g # how radioactive is lite salt?
3.27$/gallon # in $/liter
sqrt(2 2000 electronvolt/electronmass)
18.8 foot pounds force # in joules
163$/(7.9 g/cc * 1500 mm 3000 mm 3.2 mm) # cold rolled steel price is higher than steel sold by weight
m3/4 / 15 cfh
2 pi sqrt(200 um / gravity)Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#218I 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…
> The net protein utilization is profoundly affected by the limiting amino acid content—the essential amino acid found in the smallest quantity in the foodstuff. It is therefore a good idea to mix foodstuffs that have different weaknesses in their essential amino acid distributions.
> The limiting amino acid for wheat is lysine.
From what I gather, you still can process all of the protein from wheat if you get lysine from somewhere else:
> A vegetarian or low animal protein diet can be adequate for protein, including lysine, if it includes both cereal grains and legumes.
This also means that any statements about protein utilization from compound meals are more-or-less bogus if done without calculating the different amino acids.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#219Earlier 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…
I agree that a dramatic change is very difficult and the level of difficulty varies from person to person. However, obesity is probably one of the worst long term health predictors. If it leads to diabetes, almost all outcomes get much worse. The change is worth the difficulty.
For me, I quantified what I was eating and simply reduced it a bit by careful tracking. I also did quite a bit of relatively low heart rate exercise and did do some shift of the calories away from carbs. I also identified some intake that was purely habit and not sustaining, like late evening snacks, and eliminated or modified those. Lost 35 pounds in a few months. It may take a while, but the math works over time. It is relatively simple, but it is not easy. I kind of turned it into a game and that helped a bit. At any rate, I wish anyone who decides to try the best of luck.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?
#220I 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…
You can improve the protein assimilability of bread by combining it with a high-lysine protein (and I'm not sure but I think eggs and cheddar might fit the bill) but you may not care if you're looking for low-glycemic-index low-fat calories rather than amino acids specifically.
I don't know what's wrong with the downvoters.