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Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

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Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#71

Post by mike_d »

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

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#72

Post by maneesh »

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

I use Google for those pretty often.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#74

Post by b112 »

johnchristopher wrote: post #69
ALittleLight wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google search doesn't include the special symbols, so it's like searching "48 6".

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.

Use verbatim search too. All words must exist without aliasing.

(google aliases ubuntu and debian, john/jon/Johnathan for example)

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#76

Post by evancox100 »

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.

Huh? This was not at all surprising, someone younger than me had a lower life expectancy, while someone older was higher

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#77

Post by [deleted] »

pxx wrote: post #70
BenjiWiebe wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for 'units'. I like it for conversion between millilightseconds and miles, to get the theoretical best-case latency between two places. i.e. if it's x milliseconds ping, it can't be more than m miles away.

You have a missing factor of two.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#79

Post by primitivesuave »

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 enabled these people to do interesting analysis that they couldn't have done otherwise.

(source: conjecture, but I did work at WR for 3 years and on the initial Wolfram|Alpha release)

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

#80

Post by fisian »

dotancohen wrote: post #54
david_allison wrote: post #9

They put their "step-by-step" explanations behind a [login/pay]wall which made it significantly less useful. Out of sight, out of mind. It's still there

> They put their "step-by-step" explanations behind a [login/pay]wall which made it significantly less useful. Maybe, but what else can do step-by-step explanations? Perhaps octave?

SymPy Gamma, for example: https://www.sympygamma.com/input/?i=diff%28a**%285*x**2%29%2...
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