Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#221

Post by kragen » Sun, Nov 07, 2021, 4:07 AM UTC

portpecos wrote: post #92

I used it for Calc 1 and 2. It helped me check my work for Limits, derivatives, integrals, Reimann Summs, Series, Sequences. I love the part that says "Show Step By Step" because I can figure out which step I made an error. The answers in the back of the book didn't tell me step-by-step how I solved the problem. It just gave me the answer and there are many times I couldn't figure out which step I made the error. Usu…

Have you tried using Sympy? It's not as sophisticated as Mathematica but it's a lot more usable than Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#222

Post by wott » Sun, Nov 07, 2021, 4:08 AM UTC

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #124

johnchristopher wrote: post #69

Earlier 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.

I recently noticed that a number of SO questions have even been turned into Youtube videos containing a slide-show of the answers, now :-(

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#223

Post by stonogo » Sun, Nov 07, 2021, 4:14 AM UTC

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-...

No it isn't. "Lede" is a neologism arising from people convincing themselves they had inside information. It's been "burying the lead" as long as the phrase has existed. Your own link explains that.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#224

Post by kragen » Sun, Nov 07, 2021, 4:14 AM UTC

varenc wrote: post #193

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.wol…

For most of these, Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha seems to give reasonable results. However, for the third one, because I'm in Argentina, it helpfully converts US$79.80 into Argentine pesos, getting an answer that's off by about a factor of 2: AR$7969.44. As https://preciodolarblue.com.ar/ explains, the current bid and ask prices for the dollar are AR$195 and AR$199. Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha is apparently using the "official" rate of AR$99.45 or so; this is the rate at which the government converts your dollars into pesos if you are an exporter, but you cannot convert your pesos into dollars at this rate without special permission, granted, for example, if you are going on vacation to Disney World.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#225

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Nov 07, 2021, 4:20 AM UTC

mejutoco wrote: post #118

maneesh wrote: post #72

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#226

Post by kragen » Sun, Nov 07, 2021, 4:23 AM UTC

pxx wrote: post #16

I use it whenever I have something mildly annoying to convert, especially dates. e.g. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1636221900+unix+time+i... Probably an incredibly trivial use-case but still useful regularly for me...

I use GNU date(1) for this:

    $ TZ=Europe/Warsaw date --date=@1636221900
    sáb 06 nov 2021 19:05:00 CET
    $ TZ=Europe/Warsaw date --date=2021-11-06T19:05 +%s
    1636221900
    $ echo $(( ($(TZ=Europe/Riga date +%s --date=2021-11-05T17:00) - $(TZ=America/New_York date +%s --date=2021-12-05T09:00)) / 3600 ))
    -719

However, this is super dangerous, because for whatever reason date(1) lies if you give it a nonexistent timezone, pretending that it understands you but actually giving you UTC:

    $ TZ=Mars date --date=@1636221900
    sáb 06 nov 2021 18:05:00 Mars

There's a list of valid timezones that you can conveniently browse with tab-completion after you spend 14 keystrokes to navigate there:

    $ TZ=/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/
    Amsterdam    Berlin       Chisinau     Isle_of_Man  Lisbon       Mariehamn    Paris        San_Marino   Stockholm    Vaduz        Zagreb
    Andorra      Bratislava   Copenhagen   Istanbul     Ljubljana    Minsk        Podgorica    Sarajevo     Tallinn      Vatican      Zaporozhye
    Astrakhan    Brussels     Dublin       Jersey       London       Monaco       Prague       Saratov      Tirane       Vienna       Zurich
    Athens       Bucharest    Gibraltar    Kaliningrad  Luxembourg   Moscow       Riga         Simferopol   Tiraspol     Vilnius      
    Belfast      Budapest     Guernsey     Kiev         Madrid       Nicosia      Rome         Skopje       Ulyanovsk    Volgograd    
    Belgrade     Busingen     Helsinki     Kirov        Malta        Oslo         Samara       Sofia        Uzhgorod     Warsaw       
    $ TZ=/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Riga date
    dom 07 nov 2021 06:50:44 EET

I wish I had a really good calendar math utility program that handled this sort of thing properly.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#227

Post by kragen » Sun, Nov 07, 2021, 4:24 AM UTC

neltnerb wrote: post #98

mananaysiempre wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reminder that GNU Units still exists, e.g. $ units Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2021-01-17 3677 units, 109 prefixes, 114 nonlinear units You have: 4 amu * (1000 nm/s)^2 You want: joules * 6.6421563e-39 / 1.5055352e+38 You have: ^D It’s slightly less DWIMish (you have to say “atomicmassunits”, “atomicmassunit”, “amu”, or “u”, not “atomic mass units”) and somewhat awkward as a separate tool,…

Thanks for the reminder =) Alas, I often have to do these kinds of calculations on a random publicish computer or my phone and Google's converter is platform-independent. But not using Google services when feasible is certainly net good. And of course my TI-89 had equally good unit conversion for practical purposes (since you can define your own units) so somehow the world is still playing catchup to a calculator fro…

There's an Android GUI for a units(1) calculator in F-Droid. I have it on my phone.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#228

Post by kragen » Sun, Nov 07, 2021, 4:26 AM UTC

neltnerb wrote: post #127

mananaysiempre wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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 e…

units(1) can handle this but by default it gives you the answer in seconds.

    You have: 200 ft**3 / (10 mL/min)
    You want: months
     * 12.921493

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#229

Post by kragen » Sun, Nov 07, 2021, 4:28 AM UTC

tlholaday wrote: post #29

It's fun for life expectancy. Step one: Ask for your own life expectancy. Step two: Ask for the life expectancy of someone years' younger. Step three: What. Step four: Oh.

I wrote https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/toki.c to display my current remaining life expectancy as a clock, counting down.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#230

Post by gcanyon » Sun, Nov 07, 2021, 4:33 AM UTC

The problem WA is attempting to address is nearly impossible: to trust WA as a reliable source of information, you have to be confident it will be able to answer the question you're asking. If you work in a specific problem space, you can probably know that, but even if WA does know your particular area, you likely know even better ways to answer your questions.

Putting it another way, it's too hard to know what WA knows and doesn't know. I alluded to this in a post I wrote back when WA first came out: https://gcanyon.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/bing-wolfram-alpha-... "As Alpha grows and adds new problem domains it will become more and more useful, but it will continue to be necessary to understand what it can and can’t do, and how to get it to divulge what it knows."