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Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

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Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#261

Post by eric_cc »

moron4hire wrote: post #212
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It really is as simple as “eat less”. Input / Output.

The obesity epidemic is complex but big factors include poor decision making, psychological issues, sugar sugar sugar.

Still, at the end of the day it’s input / output. You can’t gain weight by sucking in too much air.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#262

Post by eric_cc »

pverghese wrote: post #234
moron4hire wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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…

People need to develop agency in actually doing something to lose weight which essentially comes down to eating less. It might be painful in the short term but is a huge benefit in the long term. All I've found online is people giving excuses as to why one body type cannot do this or that, which essentially are the same reasons smokers give when trying to quit(too stressed, can't quit cold turkey etc).

It’s true. Most of us have vices. Psychologically it’s more comfortable to make excuses up. But we are responsible for our own behavior.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#263

Post by Wowfunhappy »

lozenge wrote: post #246
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that true? I was actually under the impression that people's appetites do eventually adjust (especially if you reduce your intake slowly), although it can take years.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#264

Post by [deleted] »

onion2k wrote: post #238
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The problem here is that you think you're giving people advice when really you're just telling them what to do. The difference is that advice comes with kindness, compassion, an understanding of how the advice is affected by someone's situation and context, and deep knowledge of the subject you're advising about. Equating changes to diet for weight reduction to quitting cigarettes shows you probably don't have that.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#265

Post by dylan604 »

wott wrote: post #222
faeyanpiraat wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-(

I absolutely hate this. Scanning a video is so much more difficult than just scanning a written explanation. If these videos are being monetized, I think that's a problem. If they are, someone could just create a channel by converting SO questions into videos.

The question I have is what kind of keywords are people using on these videos that Google feel is more worthwhile than the actual text of a written version of the content? Or is the algo so heavily weighted to pick a youtube link?

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#266

Post by arunix »

Invictus0 wrote: post #254
crdrost wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diet and exercise are indeed not the path to weight loss. This is well known: most fad diets work this way in some fashion or another, and it’s well known that most fad diets fail. Since it touches my field, physics, why people have this misapprehension, (“a calorie is a calorie” is an attempt at a thermodynamic statement) I feel somewhat qualified to talk about part of this even though I am not an endocrinologist or…

> Diet and exercise are indeed not the path to weight loss. This is well known: most fad diets work this way in some fashion or another, and it’s well known that most fad diets fail. I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not suggesting people go on keto or weight watchers. Those fad diets don't necessarily fail because they're ineffective, although they probably are--they fail because they are highly p…

I skipped breakfast (and lunch) for two years. I learned that I could push back against the hunger pain, but I was hungry, and my appetite did not decrease (I was hoping it would).

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#267

Post by abecedarius »

kragen wrote: post #226
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, preten…

> I wish I had a really good calendar math utility

Might be a good learning exercise in machine learning: translating natural-language queries from that domain to whatever standard utility.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#268

Post by kragen »

abecedarius wrote: post #267
kragen wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, preten…

> I wish I had a really good calendar math utility Might be a good learning exercise in machine learning: translating natural-language queries from that domain to whatever standard utility.

Maybe, and it wouldn't have to be as slow and unresponsive as Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha or obscure your answers as an attempt to upsell you, but I think it would still tend to have the same kinds of essential usability problems: a gulf of execution in figuring out how to phrase a query so the system would understand it, and a gulf of evaluation in figuring out whether the calculation it had carried out was the calculation you wanted.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#269

Post by vinodkd »

mike_d wrote: post #71
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…

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

or frink [1], which started off as a tool like the others mentiond here, but is now a full fledged units-based programming language. See some examples of them here [2]

1: https://frinklang.org/ 2: https://frinklang.org/#SampleCalculations

Its been on HN before.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#270

Post by aj7 »

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…

Having someone, or a program, show you where you went wrong is a good way to learn nothing. All the learning comes with struggling when you almost have the answer.
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