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Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

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Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#241

Post by primitivesuave »

gfodor wrote: post #213
primitivesuave wrote: post #79

I 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?

Overall very positive, Stephen is a brilliant visionary and the software (Mathematica back then) was the best thing for someone early in their career to work on. Some of the ideas I picked up around symbolic computing and functional programming were quite helpful later on, and the whole experience opened some doors that wouldn't have otherwise. It's almost been a decade, so I unfortunately don't have much insight into sentiment these days.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#242

Post by renox »

marcinzm wrote: post #200
Invictus0 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trying currently to lose weight: the reason why I don't 'like' this answer is because I don't track my food intake closely enough to be able to know what removing 10% means.

So I guess that the first step is write everything you eat in a way you can monitor it, to be able to reduce it by a small amount if necessary..

Any advice on how to do it?

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#244

Post by b112 »

_nalply wrote: post #240
b112 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use verbatim search too. All words must exist without aliasing. (google aliases ubuntu and debian, john/jon/Johnathan for example)

Sometimes even this doesn't work. I used verbatim search and got back results which didn't contain the word I looked for. I then just sadly wonder how the heck this could be possible and resignedly slowly shake my head. I could wish for a feature where I double-double quote the word to empathically indicate that this word must exist in the result and not left out under any circumstances. But then again I am sure that…

The + symbol used to mean this, then some lunatic woman from google explained to everyone it had been removed, but it was OK as quotes were the same.

She was either a highly incompetent buffoon, or a liar for PR purposes, as quotes are not the same.

Why the change? Because it caused issues with Google+ searches from their new fancy pants Facebook clone.

Soon after, due to protest, verbatim was introduced.

It was fine for at least 5 years, but someone keeps reducing its effectiveness.

Clowns. All I hear is clown music, when I Google search.

I mean, who rolls out a product so disjointed that the very search for its users is broken, then like a year later, rolls out a broken fix?!

Google, that's who. The product failure king.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#245

Post by jazzyjackson »

bborud wrote: post #148

A 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…

they have plenty of customers and are always hiring so I don’t think there’s much pressure to change their business model… they have a 15 day trial and IMO the ~$200/yr I pay for a dual boot personal license is worth it for the documentation alone, AMA

I think their online book is a very nice intro: https://www.wolfram.com/language/elementary-introduction/2nd...

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#246

Post by lozenge »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #206
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…

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...

Cravings go away, saying to just eat less can be telling somebody they have to be hungry for the rest of their lives.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#247

Post by gspr »

JanMa wrote: post #106

I used it a lot while pursuing my electrical engineering degree. It's ability to solve almost any mathematical formula and to show you the solution step by step is just plain awesome. I guess it's safe to say I would not have passed some algebra and electrical engineering exams without it. One tip I have (not sure if it still works though): Buy the Android or iOS app for a few bucks to get access to the step by step…

> It's ability to solve almost any mathematical formula

Let's not go wild here ;)

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#248

Post by Banana699 »

quotemstr wrote: post #43
vortico wrote: post #35

1. It's slow, even for simple microsecond computations like log(2). Takes about 5-20 seconds to load a page on my 1Gb fiber connection. Opening Python/SymPy Gamma is much faster for most things. https://gamma.sympy.org/input/?i=log%282%29 2. Every time I use it, a box saying NEW: Use textbook math notation to enter your math. TRY IT pops up over the result, and clicking the X doesn't hide it the next time I search. T…

> Takes about 5-20 seconds to load a page on my 1Gb fiber connection Wolfram Alpha is implemented in Mathematica, which --- to understate the situation --- was never intended as a high performance backend server language. I suspect that's the reason for the bad performance. "As a result, the five million lines of Mathematica code that make up Wolfram|Alpha are equivalent to many tens of millions of lines of code in a…

Mathematica is extremely performant for most of the built-ins, the overhead of interpretation is nearly negligible for all but the tiniest operations.

There is also no reason to think that their request-response boilerplate is written in Mathematica, Mathematica is fully integrated with a lot of languages and runtimes.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#249

Post by bborud »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #245
bborud wrote: post #148

A 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…

they have plenty of customers and are always hiring so I don’t think there’s much pressure to change their business model… they have a 15 day trial and IMO the ~$200/yr I pay for a dual boot personal license is worth it for the documentation alone, AMA I think their online book is a very nice intro: https://www.wolfram.com/language/elementary-introduction/2nd...

So the price is right on the limit for something I'd like to play around a bit with at home and "maybe it sticks". This is something I'd like to learn for the programming environment. But I'm not going to write software based on this that actually does something. I don't want to produce software that has a $200/year dependency. So then the amount of time I can invest goes down sharply.

I mean, good for them that they're doing well. They probably don't need the money. But their technology is highly unlikely to ever be part of any software I write. And it isn't because it is a bad fit. I do lots of stuff that would benefit greatly from having Mathematica plugged into it.

Thanks for the tip on the book. I might actually buy the paper edition and read that.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#250

Post by cycomanic »

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…

For that to be true the base metabolic rate would need to be vastly different between individuals. While it is true that there is significant variation (according to Wikipedia more than 100%), most of that variation (60%) seems to be explained by differences in lean body mass, which is the other side of loosing weight, exercise. From those results I would argue the is little evidence that some people would have to cut dien to almost nothing while others could almost continue eating like before
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