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Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

340 points by zandorg 5y ago

I did a search on comments on HN for Wolfram Alpha. Most posts are 8 years old, none newer, some older. What's going on? Did Wolfram Alpha stop being useful, or did people just forget about it?

neltnerb 5y ago
What do you mean? I used it to solve a nasty impedance network for the real and imaginary components yesterday and the solutions were accurate. Edit: Maybe it's just good enough that people treat it as a tool and see no need to market it. It consistently has worked fine-ish for years and is useful at what it does.
- zandorg 5y ago
  My meaning was just that I saw it sometimes referenced on HN, but I haven't seen it mentioned for a while now. Hence my search and results showing 8 years since. I guess what I should be doing is looking at the Alexa ranking of Wolfram Alpha.
  - pvg 5y ago
    You should search comments, rather than stories. It's very regularly referenced in HN comments, often for calculations, sometimes in other contexts. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=wolfram%20alpha&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
    - asxd 5y ago
      I appreciate the conversation around WA this Ask HN has started, but yeah you've basically completely answered the original question by pointing this out.
    - zandorg 5y ago
      Fair enough. I was definitely searching comments (not stories), but I might not have filtered by Date, hence the lack of recent results.
      - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 5y ago
        Sorting by popularity has been broken for years because comment scores aren't public any more.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    They're just serving up answers which is boring to HN readers. Where's the drama in collecting data privately? Where's the drama from censoring results? No drama == No interest? Gawd, I have become cynical.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- GeorgeTirebiter 5y ago
  Could please share your query / code to do this? Seems like it would make a good Example. Thanks!
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    This is for two pairs of R/C in series ( R||C + R||C ). Real: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Real%28+%281%2F%281%2FR1+%2B+%28i*2*pi*f*C1%29%29+%2B+1%2F%281%2FR2+%2B+%28i*2*pi*f*C2%29%29%29%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Real%28+%281%2F%281%2F... Imaginary: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Imaginary%28+%281%2F%281%2FR1+%2B+%28i*2*pi*f*C1%29%29+%2B+1%2F%281%2FR2+%2B+%28i*2*pi*f*C2%29%29%29%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Imaginary%28+%281%2F%2... Edit: Sorry, I don't know how to make the search query text show up since it has special characters, probably best to just use the links to see the query.
bawolff 5y ago
I imagine it just stopped being new.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  The name makes it seem like pre-beta test software. I'm waiting for the final release, and then I'm waiting some more for it to be declared stable, and then I'm waiting some more for it to catch on and be declared popular. Not really, but that's what the name suggests to me. I just tried it here because of TFA and it's good.
david_allison 5y ago
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
- sva_ 5y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=Mathematica_12.3.1 https://www.google.com/search?q=Mathematica_12.3.1 https://github.com/metowolf/mathematica-keygen/blob/master/index.js https://github.com/metowolf/mathematica-keygen/blob/master/i...
- vadfa 5y ago
  I think they've always been like that. Good thing is, they have a montly cost, but the mobile app you just buy once and it works forever. And it's not that expensive iirc.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - david_allison 5y ago
    Step by step solutions were free around 9/10 years ago
- dotancohen 5y ago
  > 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?
  - fisian 5y ago
    SymPy Gamma, for example: https://www.sympygamma.com/input/?i=diff%28a**%285*x**2%29%2Cx%29#diffsteps https://www.sympygamma.com/input/?i=diff%28a**%285*x**2%29%2...
antattack 5y ago
"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+pack+in+15mm+circle https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+3mm+circles+p...
- pugworthy 5y ago
  Curiously it can't calculate it if you change 15mm circle to 15mm square.
- germanjoey 5y ago
  You're severely underselling Google's incapability, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/UoIZSU2.png https://i.imgur.com/UoIZSU2.png
  - dylan604 5y ago
    WTactualF? When has * ever been anything other than multiplication? Why would the resulting links all be discussing division?
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      I think Google search doesn't include the special symbols, so it's like searching "48 6".
      - johnchristopher 5y ago
        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.
        b112 5y ago
        Use verbatim search too. All words must exist without aliasing. (google aliases ubuntu and debian, john/jon/Johnathan for example)
fzzzy 5y ago
I still use it frequently for any random calculations.
woranl 5y ago
I use it to solve differential equations.
diebeforei485 5y ago
I think students these days use it for math/calculus, but it isn't seen as something special because they've always had it. It wasn't novel like for us.
- mkl 5y ago
  My students seem to prefer Symbolab now.
orzig 5y ago
I was enthusiastic, but for medium complexity questions I spend more time footing with syntax then it would take to do it myself. I probably use it for a high complexity question once every few months. I’m happy that it exists, on balance
_game_of_life 5y ago
It's still around but I imagine it is experiencing a bunch of competitors biting chunks out of it. A lot more people can script now, so open source packages of computer algebra systems (Sage, numpy, scipy etc.) Probably take a small bite. And then you have closed source ones to consider like Matlab. The second largest chunk probably being bitten out of it is its web and app competitors (desmos, symbolab, etc.) Alexa rankings show that these see a lot more traffic and engagement (2 - 3 times). Finally, a small portion of its functionality is now covered by search engines. I imagine they'll continue to gobble things up. There are also a few good Web tools, I used one for a linear algebra course I found a lot better than the freeware version of WolframAlpha that came with my Raspberry Pi. I can't find any reports on its revenue or net income. I would be super curious who uses it. Maybe it's growing... who knows? I also remember it being recommended a lot in the early 2010s.
- dna_polymerase 5y ago
  You are mixing things up here. The headline is about Wolfram Alpha. You are talking about Mathematica.
  - _game_of_life 5y ago
    I'm talking about both. When I was comparing them to competitors like Symbolab I was using the Alexa ranking for alpha. I find it faster and more accurate to use a specific package in an interpreter than query Wolfram Alpha or use Mathematica. And for the simpler things a search engine will do!
yorwba 5y ago
> I did a search on comments on HN for Wolfram Alpha. Most posts are 8 years old, none newer, some older. You searched wrong. Excluding today, the most recent comment was 7 days ago, and there were quite a few more in the past month. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1636070400&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1604620800&page=0&prefix=false&query=wolframalpha.com&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1636070400&dateRange=custom&...
lelandbatey 5y ago
I still use it all the time fore unit conversions, odd time based questions, etc. I find it's way better than the Google results because if I think of something after the fact I can tack it on and WA figures it out better than Google. E.g. "12 ft to meters * 3" is not handled right by Google but is handled how I want by WA.
deleted 5y ago
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tshaddox 5y ago
It’s still there, and I use it regularly, probably several times per week.
zorked 5y ago
Used a lot by math students to check answers.
ketan0 5y ago
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gus_massa 5y ago
I use it regularly, like twice a week. When I'm making exercises to explain to my students in the math class, I use W.A. to double check the answer. I also use it for calculation for comments in HN. Sometimes I need to make a back of the envelope calculation, and W.A. can convert the units and other boring stuff.
fxtentacle 5y ago
I bought Mathematica and I'm using its free text input instead. But I guess behind the scenes, it's WA again.
ncmncm 5y ago
It just can't answer the questions I have. Last time I tried it, I was looking for buoyancy of various gases, but it insisted any such question necessarily referred to stuff on water. It did OK figuring the fake "temperature" of LHC beams that fusion people like to quote because they sound more impressive than GeV.
primitivesuave 5y ago
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)
- gfodor 5y ago
  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?
  - primitivesuave 5y ago
    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.
isoprophlex 5y ago
I use it exclusively when I'm drunk, to calculate how drunk I am "4 drinks in 3 hours at 64 kg"
- cx42net 5y ago
  I'm unable to try to compute something similar by indicating the quantity and the percentage of alcohol, such as : "2 beers (composition of 8% alcohol, 44cl) in 1 hour at 80kg" I tried with or without parenthesis and with varying query. Never worked. Any ideas? (I'm interesting on knowing the level of blood alcohol percentage and the duration it takes to go under the limit, depending on the percentage of alcohol and quantity)
- gadrev 5y ago
  I can't beleive this works.
  - huhtenberg 5y ago
    I don't think it's accurate though. It says I'd be at around half of the DUI limit after 2 glasses of wine in one hour. That's certainly not right.
    - m0zg 5y ago
      And it can't ever be accurate. Thing is, how drunk you're going to get within some time frame depends on what (and how much) you're eating, and whether your stomach had some food in it before you started drinking. If there's stuff in your stomach, its sphincter is closed while it's digesting it. Stomach itself absorbs alcohol (and nutrients) much slower than the intestine. TL;DR: don't rely on this calculator to determine if you're too hammered to drive. If there's any doubt whatsoever, call an Uber or use public transportation.
      - chadcmulligan 5y ago
        Oh wow, so there is a reason for the old "Don't drink on an empty stomach"
tdeck 5y ago
Since nobody is mentioning it, around that time Wolfram Alpha started paywalling a lot of the more useful features. I used to use it in school and stopped when that happened. I'm not sure if they changed course since then.
erikig 5y ago
I still use it regularly too - even more so after listening to Stephen Wolfram’s 3 part podcast [1] with Lex Fridman where he discussed the latest developments in Wolfram, Mathematica etc [1] https://youtu.be/ez773teNFYA https://youtu.be/ez773teNFYA
portpecos 5y ago
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. Usually it was some dumb mistake, but by identifying the dumb mistake, I could remember to double check that similar step in future problems. I had a hard time using it for Classical Physics to check my work.
- nprz 5y ago
  Same, helped me quite bit back when I was taking Calc 1 and 2 for that same reason.
- mejutoco 5y ago
  Same. It also has a problem generator to practice different kinds of problems (https://www.wolframalpha.com/problem-generator/?scrollTo=Calculus https://www.wolframalpha.com/problem-generator/?scrollTo=Cal...). Note the step-by-step solution is paid.
- kragen 5y ago
  Have you tried using Sympy? It's not as sophisticated as Mathematica but it's a lot more usable than Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha.
- aj7 5y ago
  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.
JanMa 5y ago
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 solutions if you can't afford the pro subscription.
- gspr 5y ago
  > It's ability to solve almost any mathematical formula Let's not go wild here ;)
darthvoldemort 5y ago
I think Siri gets some of its results from Wolfram Alpha.
spike021 5y ago
I used it a lot more often back in college compared to now. Usually now it's for random one-off calculations I'm too lazy to do myself, like "how many weeks since 4/28" (my puppy's birthday).
plaidfuji 5y ago
Still the go-to when I need to solve a complex integral or even diff EQs. Amazing how well it parses that type of entry.
animal_spirits 5y ago
Awww ;) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=i+love+you https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=i+love+you
amha 5y ago
I teach high school math. My kids use it all the time! This isn't entirely a bad thing. It's a very, very useful (and natural language) symbolic integrator for them.
deleted 5y ago
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airflow 5y ago
There is no 'DOT' for a mathematical calculator. So confusing!
tonmoy 5y ago
What do you mean? I use wolfram alpha for math question, plots, solving integral etc all the time
aaron695 5y ago
It 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+a+ton%3F 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.
presto8 5y ago
For certain types of queries, Wolfram Alpha gives wonderful answers that are superior to almost every other general purpose search engine: distance to the moon https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+the+moon https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+the+moon W.A. shows the actual current distance to the moon (as of right now, 224,520 miles). Google shows this as 238,900 miles, presumably an average value, but it has no explanation at all of what the number is. W.A. also includes a graph showing the variance. And a lot of other info.
warrenm 5y ago
This? https://www.wolframalpha.com/ https://www.wolframalpha.com/ It's alive and quite healthy
p2t2p 5y ago
I needed to plot something real quick to see if I’m picking correct function. I had don’t remember how many data points but no much, under 200 I believe. W.A. told me to piss off and pay for it. So obviously I went and spent an hour more to learn how to do that with Gnuplot and did it with Gnuplot. Now I always go for Gnuplot right away.
DiabloD3 5y ago
I use WA for complex math at least once a week.
onedognight 5y ago
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%2055%20lbs http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=8%20year%20old%20female... I wanted to know the nutrition content of an egg sandwich. 1 egg, two slices whole wheat bread, one slice of cheddar, two pieces of bacon http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%20egg%2C%20two%20slices%20whole%20wheat%20bread%2C%20one%20slice%20of%20cheddar%2C%20two%20pieces%20of%20bacon http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%20egg%2C%20two%20slic... I was curious about the relative usage of two names over time. Michael, Henry http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Michael%2C%20Henry http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Michael%2C%20Henry
- skinkestek 5y ago
  The sandwich example was brilliant! I never expected that to be possible (the example of packing smaller circles in a larger one in another comment is also brilliant but less useful for me today I think.)
- ISL 5y ago
  Yeah; I use it for the occasional repeating specialized query, but have never broadened my usage to anything more-general.
- mike_d 5y ago
  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
  - maneesh 5y ago
    I use Google for those pretty often.
ivansavz 5y ago
For me, I never got into using it much (due to lack of experience with Mathematica syntax). I had some niche uses like "how many work days between <date1> and <date2>" but that's hardly so important. Instead I use the SymPy Live shell https://live.sympy.org/ https://live.sympy.org/ which does most of what I need in terms of math calculations. I'm a big fan of the sharable links (the thumbtack button below the prompt) that you can post in comments to show an entire calculation encoded in the URL querystring, e.g., https://live.sympy.org/?evaluate=factor(x**2%2B5*x%2B6)%0A%23--%0A https://live.sympy.org/?evaluate=factor(x**2%2B5*x%2B6)%0A%2... (factoring a polynomial), or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158095 (linear algebra helper function).
- dmlerner 5y ago
  Sympy live shell is decent, and the latex rendering is pretty sweet. But, it's on ancient versions of everything, runs slowly, and has a C- UI. Instead, I use Colab with Sympy + latex output and matplotlib (and most other things you could want to import, pre-installed). It's running new versions of things, and backed by more power, with an option to pay for even more. The latex rendering took a bit of poking around stackoverflow, but works just fine. Feel free to copy: https://colab.research.google.com/gist/dmlerner/23543255fdde8e70f4dd3d2be2ad247e/copy-of-collab-demo.ipynb https://colab.research.google.com/gist/dmlerner/23543255fdde...
Ansil849 5y ago
Honestly, Google can now do most of the basic things that WA could do. And the more complex things WA could do oftentimes require a bunch of trial and error to figure out the correct syntax/phrasing to use to get correct results, to the point where it was just easier to either do the calculation manually or find a dedicated site for it. So it has just lost utility for me.
- WA 5y ago
  WA not perfect, noted.
lousken 5y ago
I used to use it a lot but google now provides most answers as well and much faster. Wolframalpha performance is still sluggish and 6 second loading for a bunch of text (simple queries like `6cet to pst` is frustrating)
- sebow 5y ago
  I doubt the target audience is the same. WA is way more powerful than google(which on the other hand has more data, not always exactly accurate), but we're comparing apples to peaches here.The problem with WA i would say is the fact that people who would use it(hobbyists, students, researchers, etc) probably don't always have internet connection or are fans of the "cloud".I used to love having WA when i was studying math, even though it is limited in the capacity of showing different methods of achieving a result, it is useful in that you can check yourself. In academia sphere the last time i checked internet speeds & latency are still an issue, but i might be wrong about that, also google has probably the most & fastest servers, so we're talking about a performance issue and not necessarily a lack of features.
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
Nothing. It's still solving my homework. (Sometimes.)
pxx 5y ago
I use it whenever I have something mildly annoying to convert, especially dates. e.g. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1636221900+unix+time+in+warsaw https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1636221900+unix+time+i... Probably an incredibly trivial use-case but still useful regularly for me...
- kragen 5y ago
  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.
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    > 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.
ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
I mainly use it as an english dictionary of math terminology. Although for the basics of differential geometry like the Weingarten equations and the Dupin indicatrix WA is lacking - as is Wikipedia except for the articles in the german Wikipedia. And I haven't found a way to get to the 'Weingarten equations' searching for 'Weingarten', you only find him by the full name 'Julius Weingarten'. :( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weingartenabbildung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weingartenabbildung https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weingarten+equations https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weingarten+equations https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indikatrix https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indikatrix https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=dupin+indikatrix https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=dupin+indikatrix
- peheje 5y ago
  If only there was some way to contribute to the english wiki (article or search) when you are lucky enough to understand the (better) german one... :-)
  - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
    That's a bit recursive. I'd have needed english translations of the german articles to get to know the english math terms to be able to write about them in english :)
    - peheje 5y ago
      Maybe the German wiki pages on the specific math terms are already translated to English. If not maybe google can help. Not saying it's easy.
osrec 5y ago
Used it a bit at university to compute some complex integrals if I was stuck or feeling lazy. That was 11 years ago. Don't think I've even visited the website in the past 6 years.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  It did about a lot of the heavy lifting in my master's thesis, not gonna lie.
m-p-3 5y ago
I still use it once in a while when I don't want to bother converting non-base10 units, like to know the date in 90 days, or how many hours in x days, etc.
tlholaday 5y ago
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.
- evancox100 5y ago
  Huh? This was not at all surprising, someone younger than me had a lower life expectancy, while someone older was higher
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    This sounds bad for the state of the world?
    - pedro2 5y ago
      No, people die. A 99 year old can't have a life expectancy of 70 years. You want life expectancy at birth, by year of birth, for proper comparison.
- kragen 5y ago
  I wrote https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/toki.c https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/toki.c to display my current remaining life expectancy as a clock, counting down.
vortico 5y ago
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 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. This adds ~3 seconds to the result time. 3. I'm a long-term Mathematica user, but typing literal Mathematica syntax usually never works, except for simple expressions. 4. Results are PNGs, and copy-pasting a numerical result takes a few unnecessary clicks. "Plain Text" > Copy.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  > Opening Python/SymPy Gamma is much faster for most things. Is there a way to make it plot multivariate functions? I tried but whenever I enter two variables it says "Cannot plot multivariate function." I've seen many Python packages plotting multivariate functions so I'm convinced it should be possible.
  - vortico 5y ago
    I don't think so. You'd need to run it in a terminal with something like from sympy.plotting import plot3d x,y=symbols('x y') plot3d(x*y, (x, -10,10), (y, -10,10))
- _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
  I usually use python for math stuff also, however I think the log(2) example is maybe the wrong example. I basically got an instant result for that (just recorded this): https://imgur.com/a/g5slHsR https://imgur.com/a/g5slHsR
- quotemstr 5y ago
  > 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 lower-level language like C, Java, or Python." [1] Sure, there's something to be said for implementing logic in high-level code, but without a plan for lowering that high-level logic to machine code in a way that performs well, you're setting yourself up for long-term pain. [1] https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/01/the-secret-behind-the-computational-engine-in-wolframalpha/ https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/01/the-secret-behind-t...
upbeat_general 5y ago
My guess is that it’s a bit too complicated/slow for a lot of ordinary people and too finicky for a lot of technical people. I’m a frequent Mathematica user and I find almost all of my use cases require several different attempts to get the desired result w/wolfram alpha. Meanwhile, most people who don’t get the right result the first time will probably just give up and not think to rephrase the query.
Ros2 5y ago
I only ever use it for date math For whatever reason, I like keeping track of 1000 day anniversaries https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+days+after+today https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+days+after+today Shortly before any kind of 3rd anniversary or birthday I try to remember to check this.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  You might like this little toy website I made a couple of years ago: https://interesting-anniversaries.com/ https://interesting-anniversaries.com/ From my readme: “Have you ever wanted to know when you turn 2 billion seconds old? How about 33,333,333 minutes old? When do you get to celebrate your 555,555th hour of life? As it turns out, all three of those milestones occur in the same 24-hour period!”
  - Ros2 5y ago
    Wow Hackernews never ceases to amaze me, I enjoyed this. TIL I missed my 1 billionth second. You should also make a programmer mode, one that shows you powers of 2 (like 1024 days old)
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      That’s a good idea, and would probably help fill out the calendar a bit more!
nerevarthelame 5y ago
Siri and Alexa pass a lot of questions to Wolfram Alpha. When Apple first started using it, they were responsible for 25% of all WA traffic. With Alexa, I assume that the majority of WA's queries are coming from smart assistants at this point. (https://9to5mac.com/2012/02/07/four-months-in-siri-represents-about-a-quarter-of-all-wolfram-alpha-queries/ https://9to5mac.com/2012/02/07/four-months-in-siri-represent..., https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/20/18150654/alexa-wolfram-alpha-integration-math-science-amazon https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/20/18150654/alexa-wolfram-a...)
dotancohen 5y ago
As someone who just signed up for an open university this semester, I'd love to hear opinions about Octave and Maxima for general purpose use. Especially for study, such as replacing Wolfram Alpha's step-by-step solutions. I'm a Linux user and prefer an open-source solution. But I have no objection to paying a reasonable amount of money for a good commercial solution. Maybe Maple is worth looking at?
- upbeat_general 5y ago
  I think it highly depends on what kind of math you're expecting (and how heavily you want to rely on a CAS). If most of your work is just simplifying equations and computing numerical solutions, basically any system will do whether that's Octave, Sympy + Numpy, etc. I haven't used Maple for a while so can't speak to it's current functionality but there's been several times I've wanted to do something in Sympy/Octave and haven't found it whereas I can almost always get Mathematica to do what I want with a quick search. I tend to rely heavily on it for some more complicated/specific symbolic operations (e.g. symbolically transforming probability distributions) and for that use case, I haven't found anything better. I'll also say that if your use case if more numerical/programming oriented, the language used might be an important factor. I personally don't like Wolfram Language and use very few of its language features and prefer Python for anything that Mathematica isn't suited for out of the box.
- zoomablemind 5y ago
  It depends on what your need is. I used Maxima (wxMaxima) for a quick prototyping of handwritten formulations and as a reference for some simplifications, roots etc. Of course, its CAS capabilities are still useful. But I find that simplifications done on paper are often more straighforward, than making some expressions transform into the expected form in Maxima. Also, it's somewhat handy to have the ability to output the formulas in TeX format. I vaguely remember Maple being more apt at expected simplifications. Either way, I believe that Sage, Octave, Maxima etc. should be rather supplemental to textbook-based learning. In such way their results won't appear as pure magic, but as somewhat expected outcome of analysis.
- mkl 5y ago
  I prefer Python to Octave and Maxima. Numpy, scipy, and matplotlib for numerical stuff, and sympy for symbolic stuff. Having them together in the same general purpose language is really convenient, and Jupyter notebooks are fantastic. Sage is also good, but I've moved on to sympy. I don't know a way to get step-by-step working from a library, but sympy gamma can do some, so it's probably possible to some extent. My experience suggests avoiding Maple like the plague. Sympy (and Sage) can do everything I ever used it for much nicer and easier.
wheels 5y ago
I use it semi-regularly; once a week or so. It's a genuinely useful tool that was just greatly oversold on launch. Things I use it for: - Converting units while cooking. I prefer to cook by weight, and for most ingredients, you can do something like "2 cups of flour in g" - Stuff I'd have used a scientific calculator in an earlier era: simple systems of equations, plots, etc. - Comparing stats on countries, e.g. GDP growth in various countries
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  The issue with recipe weight unit conversions might be that the author literally had a cup or spoon or whatever with a specific capacity which would not equal the standard units, therefore you are converting one inaccurate amount to an other one.
  - wheels 5y ago
    I'm not arguing in this case that it's more accurate, just that it's sometimes easier: if I've got a mixing bowl on a scale, I find it easier to pour things in by weight rather than to measure them all out. On recipes I often cook, I edit / write in the weight in grams to speed things up.
  - robbiep 5y ago
    If that’s the case, then the issue is immaterial
  - delecti 5y ago
    It's safe to assume any recipe written in the last 50 years is using the standardized units. It isn't literally 100% true, but close enough that it's not worth worrying about.
orzi 5y ago
How many astronomers does it take to change a light bulb? https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+astronomers+does+it+take+to+change+a+light+bulb%3F https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+astronomers+d... None; astronomers prefer the dark.
sergiomattei 5y ago
At University pretty much everyone I know uses it for homework.
- tata71 5y ago
  WA will give you answers your TA can't!
jawns 5y ago
To understand the state of Wolfram Alpha, you have to understand the guy behind it. Wolfram Alpha was a pet project of Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica. He had grand visions for it. And for the first few years, it seemed like he was doubling down on it. But then he got bored and started tackling a bigger problem: his own solution to the "theory of everything" problem -- something that has eluded the world's best physicists for decades. But he was confident that he could best them all. Because he created Mathematica. The scientific community wasn't having it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-criticize-stephen-wolframs-theory-of-everything/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic...
- katzgrau 5y ago
  I'm not sure you intend it, but your comment kind of makes Wolfram sounds like some sort of crank. He's a leading thinker obsessively interested in this idea that everything around us is the product of a simple, fundamental ruleset. He's sitting on the bleeding edge of human knowledge where, honestly, everyone is at risk of being full of shit. Scientific consensus isn't really any kind of indicator of future breakthroughs. To each their own - let Wolfram be Wolfram.
  - rangodang 5y ago
    His work is very interesting, and much of it novel, but it's the way he presents it that makes him a crank. Claiming he has a grand unified theory of physics and all that.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    They don’t make him sound like a crank, but like a narcissist, which Wolfram definitely is. Not that it’s really a bad thing, most lang devs are a little narcissistic in my experience. Comes with the territory. But the guy named his language after himself. No one does that! Creating a language is already a very ego-driven endeavor, but naming it after yourself is next-level egoist.
  - glenstein 5y ago
    He is both a crank and an innovator, and comments regarding his crankery are perfectly appropriate. I think his "new kind of science" needs to be singled out from Wolfram alpha and Mathematica as especially crank-ish. It appears to be an attempt at a grand foundational philosophical statement, but it doesn't interact with pre-existing literature that covers similar territory, conveys ideas with pictures and informal statements without robust definitions, doesn't have an underlying bedrock of concepts or uniform vocabulary, and doesn't have the focus or clarity of purpose to rise to the level of being right or wrong. And it nevertheless maintains a grandiose tone of establishing an entirely new domain of science It's not necessarily wrong, but it is unfortunately very vague and concerningly childish, even though I think it does have some meaningful things to say. It's a very fair example in favor of crankery.
spindle 5y ago
This question reminds me of the time someone wrote to the letters page of a print publication (I think it was The New Statesman) asking "Whatever happened to the composer of the theme music for Trumpton?" (a popular children's TV series in the 1960s) and the composer wrote back saying "What do you mean whatever happened to me?"
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
For me it stopped working several years ago and wouldn't ever return answers for queries. I futzed about with it to try and make it work; came back a few times over a couple of years as I had been a big fan. Just assumed they'd killed it somehow. Mentioned it on HN and others said it worked. For some reason it works again for me now -- it not working allowed me to discover Geogebra, which was nice and served a lot of my previous uses for WA.
tylermac1 5y ago
Many thanks to WA for getting me through high school and college calculus.
throwaway984393 5y ago
I just used it recently to plot weather data, population density, crime rate, and average home price of cities I was thinking of living in
yummypaint 5y ago
I used to use it extensively during my early PhD work for back of the envelope calculations. Unfortunately it became steadily harder to enter queries and have them understood. About half a decade ago they broke about 70% of what i used it for by refusing to show results for modestly complex calculations and instead throwing up nag messages for the paid version. The paid version last i saw was not available through an institutional license. Last time I tried to use retrieval features for nuclear data there was absolutely no citation info or documentation whatsoever, just numbers from who knows where. WA had so much potential but peaked about 3 years after it came out as far as i can tell. That being said it's still vastly superior to doing calculations with google.
- voldacar 5y ago
  > The paid version last i saw was not available through an institutional license. Does your institution have mathematica? In mathematica you can query WA directly, and it gives you as much (or possibly more, from how it seems to behave for me) computing time as people with WA pro subscriptions. I use it all the time for stuff like graphing complicated implicit 3d surfaces or doing multiple integrals, stuff where I know the relevant mathematica command but I would rather not type it out fully
pkdpic 5y ago
I still definitely use it for teaching big O comparisons in a live / malleable way. Not sure I know of a comparable resource for that but maybe someone out there in the HNstroverse does?
trevcanhuman 5y ago
I use it to check some results from derivative exercises for my calculus class.
kergonath 5y ago
I use it a couple of times a week. Sometimes it’s brilliant, and sometimes I have to find my answer somewhere else. Most of the time it does its job.
bborud 5y ago
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 subscribe to some piece of software I'm unsure I will be using enough to justify the cost.
- gfodor 5y ago
  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.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  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-ed/ https://www.wolfram.com/language/elementary-introduction/2nd...
  - bborud 5y ago
    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.
fdr 5y ago
I use it frequently. Unit conversions, and the solver.
ipunchghosts 5y ago
I also use it regularly. I do remote sensing and fine that and wikipedia indispensable.
ProtoAES256 5y ago
I use it often to calculate... Stuffs. They are great in calculating but I really need to envelope them with at least 6 layers of bracket for it to parse my equation correctly or it will use some weird notations/arrangements.
tammer 5y ago
I still use it regularly. the app is my go-to calculator. it just hasn’t been updated in quite some time. there are a lot of ways the back end could support new UI features etc., but something seems to be holding it back.
still_grokking 5y ago
The pricing seems random to me. (Even it seems cheaper than last time I've checked). It's ~20% more expensive in Euro than in Dollar. (And Poland, which I checked for curiosity as it's in the EU but does not use Euro, has a price in Pound with is even higher; Poland is not a rich country). Also I don't think charging for example people in countries in Africa as much as for example US people makes any sense. The service is really great for some questions but the commercial offer never added up for me. If the software would be OpenSource and run on prem I would consider buying some additional online services for it (even at the current random price point and without having a real use case; it's not more expensive than an average online game, so bearable). It would make also that "Wolfram Language" worth having a look at. But I don't bother even glimpsing at closed source programming languages. That's especially one of the things they do very poorly.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >It's ~20% more expensive in Euro than in Dollar. Keep in mind US prices don't include sales tax (VAT).
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    My fault. I thought digital services like that fall into the reduced VAT category. But it seems not the case. So ~20% more makes actually sense. Thanks for pointing this out!
gcanyon 5y ago
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-google-squared-and-google-wave-reviewed/ 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."
jjk166 5y ago
I've been using it pretty much daily for over a decade now. I don't know how people ever did engineering without it.
rixtox 5y ago
I use their online notebook environment a lot. https://lab.wolframcloud.com/ https://lab.wolframcloud.com/ It's almost a free web version of their Mathematica.
KuhlMensch 5y ago
I use it ~6 times a year. My luck is mixed: * ~33% - It works * ~33% occasions - I mess up syntax and give up * ~33% - I mess up syntax, but believe it SHOULD be possible, and push much longer than I untended. Until finally settling on a partial solution, and wishing I knew more - but also recognising I should used a different tool e.g. excel

340 points by zandorg 5y ago

I did a search on comments on HN for Wolfram Alpha. Most posts are 8 years old, none newer, some older. What's going on? Did Wolfram Alpha stop being useful, or did people just forget about it?

neltnerb 5y ago

What do you mean? I used it to solve a nasty impedance network for the real and imaginary components yesterday and the solutions were accurate. Edit: Maybe it's just good enough that people treat it as a tool and see no need to market it. It consistently has worked fine-ish for years and is useful at what it does.

zandorg 5y ago
My meaning was just that I saw it sometimes referenced on HN, but I haven't seen it mentioned for a while now. Hence my search and results showing 8 years since. I guess what I should be doing is looking at the Alexa ranking of Wolfram Alpha.
- pvg 5y ago
  You should search comments, rather than stories. It's very regularly referenced in HN comments, often for calculations, sometimes in other contexts. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=wolfram%20alpha&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - asxd 5y ago
    I appreciate the conversation around WA this Ask HN has started, but yeah you've basically completely answered the original question by pointing this out.
  - zandorg 5y ago
    Fair enough. I was definitely searching comments (not stories), but I might not have filtered by Date, hence the lack of recent results.
    - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 5y ago
      Sorting by popularity has been broken for years because comment scores aren't public any more.
- dylan604 5y ago
  They're just serving up answers which is boring to HN readers. Where's the drama in collecting data privately? Where's the drama from censoring results? No drama == No interest? Gawd, I have become cynical.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
GeorgeTirebiter 5y ago
Could please share your query / code to do this? Seems like it would make a good Example. Thanks!
- neltnerb 5y ago
  This is for two pairs of R/C in series ( R||C + R||C ). Real: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Real%28+%281%2F%281%2FR1+%2B+%28i*2*pi*f*C1%29%29+%2B+1%2F%281%2FR2+%2B+%28i*2*pi*f*C2%29%29%29%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Real%28+%281%2F%281%2F... Imaginary: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Imaginary%28+%281%2F%281%2FR1+%2B+%28i*2*pi*f*C1%29%29+%2B+1%2F%281%2FR2+%2B+%28i*2*pi*f*C2%29%29%29%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Imaginary%28+%281%2F%2... Edit: Sorry, I don't know how to make the search query text show up since it has special characters, probably best to just use the links to see the query.

bawolff 5y ago

I imagine it just stopped being new.

wombatmobile 5y ago
The name makes it seem like pre-beta test software. I'm waiting for the final release, and then I'm waiting some more for it to be declared stable, and then I'm waiting some more for it to catch on and be declared popular. Not really, but that's what the name suggests to me. I just tried it here because of TFA and it's good.

david_allison 5y ago

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

sva_ 5y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=Mathematica_12.3.1 https://www.google.com/search?q=Mathematica_12.3.1 https://github.com/metowolf/mathematica-keygen/blob/master/index.js https://github.com/metowolf/mathematica-keygen/blob/master/i...
vadfa 5y ago
I think they've always been like that. Good thing is, they have a montly cost, but the mobile app you just buy once and it works forever. And it's not that expensive iirc.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- david_allison 5y ago
  Step by step solutions were free around 9/10 years ago
dotancohen 5y ago
> 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?
- fisian 5y ago
  SymPy Gamma, for example: https://www.sympygamma.com/input/?i=diff%28a**%285*x**2%29%2Cx%29#diffsteps https://www.sympygamma.com/input/?i=diff%28a**%285*x**2%29%2...

antattack 5y ago

"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+pack+in+15mm+circle https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+3mm+circles+p...

pugworthy 5y ago
Curiously it can't calculate it if you change 15mm circle to 15mm square.
germanjoey 5y ago
You're severely underselling Google's incapability, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/UoIZSU2.png https://i.imgur.com/UoIZSU2.png
- dylan604 5y ago
  WTactualF? When has * ever been anything other than multiplication? Why would the resulting links all be discussing division?
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    I think Google search doesn't include the special symbols, so it's like searching "48 6".
    - johnchristopher 5y ago
      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.
      - b112 5y ago
        Use verbatim search too. All words must exist without aliasing. (google aliases ubuntu and debian, john/jon/Johnathan for example)

fzzzy 5y ago

I still use it frequently for any random calculations.

woranl 5y ago

I use it to solve differential equations.

diebeforei485 5y ago

I think students these days use it for math/calculus, but it isn't seen as something special because they've always had it. It wasn't novel like for us.

mkl 5y ago
My students seem to prefer Symbolab now.

orzig 5y ago

I was enthusiastic, but for medium complexity questions I spend more time footing with syntax then it would take to do it myself. I probably use it for a high complexity question once every few months. I’m happy that it exists, on balance

_game_of_life 5y ago

It's still around but I imagine it is experiencing a bunch of competitors biting chunks out of it. A lot more people can script now, so open source packages of computer algebra systems (Sage, numpy, scipy etc.) Probably take a small bite. And then you have closed source ones to consider like Matlab. The second largest chunk probably being bitten out of it is its web and app competitors (desmos, symbolab, etc.) Alexa rankings show that these see a lot more traffic and engagement (2 - 3 times). Finally, a small portion of its functionality is now covered by search engines. I imagine they'll continue to gobble things up. There are also a few good Web tools, I used one for a linear algebra course I found a lot better than the freeware version of WolframAlpha that came with my Raspberry Pi. I can't find any reports on its revenue or net income. I would be super curious who uses it. Maybe it's growing... who knows? I also remember it being recommended a lot in the early 2010s.

dna_polymerase 5y ago
You are mixing things up here. The headline is about Wolfram Alpha. You are talking about Mathematica.
- _game_of_life 5y ago
  I'm talking about both. When I was comparing them to competitors like Symbolab I was using the Alexa ranking for alpha. I find it faster and more accurate to use a specific package in an interpreter than query Wolfram Alpha or use Mathematica. And for the simpler things a search engine will do!

yorwba 5y ago

> I did a search on comments on HN for Wolfram Alpha. Most posts are 8 years old, none newer, some older. You searched wrong. Excluding today, the most recent comment was 7 days ago, and there were quite a few more in the past month. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1636070400&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1604620800&page=0&prefix=false&query=wolframalpha.com&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1636070400&dateRange=custom&...

lelandbatey 5y ago

I still use it all the time fore unit conversions, odd time based questions, etc. I find it's way better than the Google results because if I think of something after the fact I can tack it on and WA figures it out better than Google. E.g. "12 ft to meters * 3" is not handled right by Google but is handled how I want by WA.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tshaddox 5y ago

It’s still there, and I use it regularly, probably several times per week.

zorked 5y ago

Used a lot by math students to check answers.

ketan0 5y ago

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gus_massa 5y ago

I use it regularly, like twice a week. When I'm making exercises to explain to my students in the math class, I use W.A. to double check the answer. I also use it for calculation for comments in HN. Sometimes I need to make a back of the envelope calculation, and W.A. can convert the units and other boring stuff.

fxtentacle 5y ago

I bought Mathematica and I'm using its free text input instead. But I guess behind the scenes, it's WA again.

ncmncm 5y ago

It just can't answer the questions I have. Last time I tried it, I was looking for buoyancy of various gases, but it insisted any such question necessarily referred to stuff on water. It did OK figuring the fake "temperature" of LHC beams that fusion people like to quote because they sound more impressive than GeV.

primitivesuave 5y ago

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)

gfodor 5y ago
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?
- primitivesuave 5y ago
  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.

isoprophlex 5y ago

I use it exclusively when I'm drunk, to calculate how drunk I am "4 drinks in 3 hours at 64 kg"

cx42net 5y ago
I'm unable to try to compute something similar by indicating the quantity and the percentage of alcohol, such as : "2 beers (composition of 8% alcohol, 44cl) in 1 hour at 80kg" I tried with or without parenthesis and with varying query. Never worked. Any ideas? (I'm interesting on knowing the level of blood alcohol percentage and the duration it takes to go under the limit, depending on the percentage of alcohol and quantity)
gadrev 5y ago
I can't beleive this works.
- huhtenberg 5y ago
  I don't think it's accurate though. It says I'd be at around half of the DUI limit after 2 glasses of wine in one hour. That's certainly not right.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    And it can't ever be accurate. Thing is, how drunk you're going to get within some time frame depends on what (and how much) you're eating, and whether your stomach had some food in it before you started drinking. If there's stuff in your stomach, its sphincter is closed while it's digesting it. Stomach itself absorbs alcohol (and nutrients) much slower than the intestine. TL;DR: don't rely on this calculator to determine if you're too hammered to drive. If there's any doubt whatsoever, call an Uber or use public transportation.
    - chadcmulligan 5y ago
      Oh wow, so there is a reason for the old "Don't drink on an empty stomach"

tdeck 5y ago

Since nobody is mentioning it, around that time Wolfram Alpha started paywalling a lot of the more useful features. I used to use it in school and stopped when that happened. I'm not sure if they changed course since then.

erikig 5y ago

I still use it regularly too - even more so after listening to Stephen Wolfram’s 3 part podcast [1] with Lex Fridman where he discussed the latest developments in Wolfram, Mathematica etc [1] https://youtu.be/ez773teNFYA https://youtu.be/ez773teNFYA

portpecos 5y ago

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. Usually it was some dumb mistake, but by identifying the dumb mistake, I could remember to double check that similar step in future problems. I had a hard time using it for Classical Physics to check my work.

nprz 5y ago
Same, helped me quite bit back when I was taking Calc 1 and 2 for that same reason.
mejutoco 5y ago
Same. It also has a problem generator to practice different kinds of problems (https://www.wolframalpha.com/problem-generator/?scrollTo=Calculus https://www.wolframalpha.com/problem-generator/?scrollTo=Cal...). Note the step-by-step solution is paid.
kragen 5y ago
Have you tried using Sympy? It's not as sophisticated as Mathematica but it's a lot more usable than Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha.
aj7 5y ago
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.

JanMa 5y ago

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 solutions if you can't afford the pro subscription.

gspr 5y ago
> It's ability to solve almost any mathematical formula Let's not go wild here ;)

darthvoldemort 5y ago

I think Siri gets some of its results from Wolfram Alpha.

spike021 5y ago

I used it a lot more often back in college compared to now. Usually now it's for random one-off calculations I'm too lazy to do myself, like "how many weeks since 4/28" (my puppy's birthday).

plaidfuji 5y ago

Still the go-to when I need to solve a complex integral or even diff EQs. Amazing how well it parses that type of entry.

animal_spirits 5y ago

Awww ;) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=i+love+you https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=i+love+you

amha 5y ago

I teach high school math. My kids use it all the time! This isn't entirely a bad thing. It's a very, very useful (and natural language) symbolic integrator for them.

deleted 5y ago

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airflow 5y ago

There is no 'DOT' for a mathematical calculator. So confusing!

tonmoy 5y ago

What do you mean? I use wolfram alpha for math question, plots, solving integral etc all the time

aaron695 5y ago

It 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+a+ton%3F 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.

presto8 5y ago

For certain types of queries, Wolfram Alpha gives wonderful answers that are superior to almost every other general purpose search engine: distance to the moon https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+the+moon https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+the+moon W.A. shows the actual current distance to the moon (as of right now, 224,520 miles). Google shows this as 238,900 miles, presumably an average value, but it has no explanation at all of what the number is. W.A. also includes a graph showing the variance. And a lot of other info.

warrenm 5y ago

This? https://www.wolframalpha.com/ https://www.wolframalpha.com/ It's alive and quite healthy

p2t2p 5y ago

I needed to plot something real quick to see if I’m picking correct function. I had don’t remember how many data points but no much, under 200 I believe. W.A. told me to piss off and pay for it. So obviously I went and spent an hour more to learn how to do that with Gnuplot and did it with Gnuplot. Now I always go for Gnuplot right away.

DiabloD3 5y ago

I use WA for complex math at least once a week.

onedognight 5y ago

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%2055%20lbs http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=8%20year%20old%20female... I wanted to know the nutrition content of an egg sandwich. 1 egg, two slices whole wheat bread, one slice of cheddar, two pieces of bacon http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%20egg%2C%20two%20slices%20whole%20wheat%20bread%2C%20one%20slice%20of%20cheddar%2C%20two%20pieces%20of%20bacon http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%20egg%2C%20two%20slic... I was curious about the relative usage of two names over time. Michael, Henry http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Michael%2C%20Henry http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Michael%2C%20Henry

skinkestek 5y ago
The sandwich example was brilliant! I never expected that to be possible (the example of packing smaller circles in a larger one in another comment is also brilliant but less useful for me today I think.)
ISL 5y ago
Yeah; I use it for the occasional repeating specialized query, but have never broadened my usage to anything more-general.
mike_d 5y ago
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
- maneesh 5y ago
  I use Google for those pretty often.

ivansavz 5y ago

For me, I never got into using it much (due to lack of experience with Mathematica syntax). I had some niche uses like "how many work days between <date1> and <date2>" but that's hardly so important. Instead I use the SymPy Live shell https://live.sympy.org/ https://live.sympy.org/ which does most of what I need in terms of math calculations. I'm a big fan of the sharable links (the thumbtack button below the prompt) that you can post in comments to show an entire calculation encoded in the URL querystring, e.g., https://live.sympy.org/?evaluate=factor(x**2%2B5*x%2B6)%0A%23--%0A https://live.sympy.org/?evaluate=factor(x**2%2B5*x%2B6)%0A%2... (factoring a polynomial), or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158095 (linear algebra helper function).

dmlerner 5y ago
Sympy live shell is decent, and the latex rendering is pretty sweet. But, it's on ancient versions of everything, runs slowly, and has a C- UI. Instead, I use Colab with Sympy + latex output and matplotlib (and most other things you could want to import, pre-installed). It's running new versions of things, and backed by more power, with an option to pay for even more. The latex rendering took a bit of poking around stackoverflow, but works just fine. Feel free to copy: https://colab.research.google.com/gist/dmlerner/23543255fdde8e70f4dd3d2be2ad247e/copy-of-collab-demo.ipynb https://colab.research.google.com/gist/dmlerner/23543255fdde...

Ansil849 5y ago

Honestly, Google can now do most of the basic things that WA could do. And the more complex things WA could do oftentimes require a bunch of trial and error to figure out the correct syntax/phrasing to use to get correct results, to the point where it was just easier to either do the calculation manually or find a dedicated site for it. So it has just lost utility for me.

WA 5y ago
WA not perfect, noted.

lousken 5y ago

I used to use it a lot but google now provides most answers as well and much faster. Wolframalpha performance is still sluggish and 6 second loading for a bunch of text (simple queries like `6cet to pst` is frustrating)

sebow 5y ago
I doubt the target audience is the same. WA is way more powerful than google(which on the other hand has more data, not always exactly accurate), but we're comparing apples to peaches here.The problem with WA i would say is the fact that people who would use it(hobbyists, students, researchers, etc) probably don't always have internet connection or are fans of the "cloud".I used to love having WA when i was studying math, even though it is limited in the capacity of showing different methods of achieving a result, it is useful in that you can check yourself. In academia sphere the last time i checked internet speeds & latency are still an issue, but i might be wrong about that, also google has probably the most & fastest servers, so we're talking about a performance issue and not necessarily a lack of features.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

Nothing. It's still solving my homework. (Sometimes.)

pxx 5y ago

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

kragen 5y ago
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.
- abecedarius 5y ago
  > 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.

ReleaseCandidat 5y ago

I mainly use it as an english dictionary of math terminology. Although for the basics of differential geometry like the Weingarten equations and the Dupin indicatrix WA is lacking - as is Wikipedia except for the articles in the german Wikipedia. And I haven't found a way to get to the 'Weingarten equations' searching for 'Weingarten', you only find him by the full name 'Julius Weingarten'. :( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weingartenabbildung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weingartenabbildung https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weingarten+equations https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weingarten+equations https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indikatrix https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indikatrix https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=dupin+indikatrix https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=dupin+indikatrix

peheje 5y ago
If only there was some way to contribute to the english wiki (article or search) when you are lucky enough to understand the (better) german one... :-)
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  That's a bit recursive. I'd have needed english translations of the german articles to get to know the english math terms to be able to write about them in english :)
  - peheje 5y ago
    Maybe the German wiki pages on the specific math terms are already translated to English. If not maybe google can help. Not saying it's easy.

osrec 5y ago

Used it a bit at university to compute some complex integrals if I was stuck or feeling lazy. That was 11 years ago. Don't think I've even visited the website in the past 6 years.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
It did about a lot of the heavy lifting in my master's thesis, not gonna lie.

m-p-3 5y ago

I still use it once in a while when I don't want to bother converting non-base10 units, like to know the date in 90 days, or how many hours in x days, etc.

tlholaday 5y ago

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.

evancox100 5y ago
Huh? This was not at all surprising, someone younger than me had a lower life expectancy, while someone older was higher
- saagarjha 5y ago
  This sounds bad for the state of the world?
  - pedro2 5y ago
    No, people die. A 99 year old can't have a life expectancy of 70 years. You want life expectancy at birth, by year of birth, for proper comparison.
kragen 5y ago
I wrote https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/toki.c https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/toki.c to display my current remaining life expectancy as a clock, counting down.

vortico 5y ago

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 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. This adds ~3 seconds to the result time. 3. I'm a long-term Mathematica user, but typing literal Mathematica syntax usually never works, except for simple expressions. 4. Results are PNGs, and copy-pasting a numerical result takes a few unnecessary clicks. "Plain Text" > Copy.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
> Opening Python/SymPy Gamma is much faster for most things. Is there a way to make it plot multivariate functions? I tried but whenever I enter two variables it says "Cannot plot multivariate function." I've seen many Python packages plotting multivariate functions so I'm convinced it should be possible.
- vortico 5y ago
  I don't think so. You'd need to run it in a terminal with something like from sympy.plotting import plot3d x,y=symbols('x y') plot3d(x*y, (x, -10,10), (y, -10,10))
_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
I usually use python for math stuff also, however I think the log(2) example is maybe the wrong example. I basically got an instant result for that (just recorded this): https://imgur.com/a/g5slHsR https://imgur.com/a/g5slHsR
quotemstr 5y ago
> 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 lower-level language like C, Java, or Python." [1] Sure, there's something to be said for implementing logic in high-level code, but without a plan for lowering that high-level logic to machine code in a way that performs well, you're setting yourself up for long-term pain. [1] https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/01/the-secret-behind-the-computational-engine-in-wolframalpha/ https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/01/the-secret-behind-t...

upbeat_general 5y ago

My guess is that it’s a bit too complicated/slow for a lot of ordinary people and too finicky for a lot of technical people. I’m a frequent Mathematica user and I find almost all of my use cases require several different attempts to get the desired result w/wolfram alpha. Meanwhile, most people who don’t get the right result the first time will probably just give up and not think to rephrase the query.

Ros2 5y ago

I only ever use it for date math For whatever reason, I like keeping track of 1000 day anniversaries https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+days+after+today https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+days+after+today Shortly before any kind of 3rd anniversary or birthday I try to remember to check this.

tshaddox 5y ago
You might like this little toy website I made a couple of years ago: https://interesting-anniversaries.com/ https://interesting-anniversaries.com/ From my readme: “Have you ever wanted to know when you turn 2 billion seconds old? How about 33,333,333 minutes old? When do you get to celebrate your 555,555th hour of life? As it turns out, all three of those milestones occur in the same 24-hour period!”
- Ros2 5y ago
  Wow Hackernews never ceases to amaze me, I enjoyed this. TIL I missed my 1 billionth second. You should also make a programmer mode, one that shows you powers of 2 (like 1024 days old)
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    That’s a good idea, and would probably help fill out the calendar a bit more!

nerevarthelame 5y ago

Siri and Alexa pass a lot of questions to Wolfram Alpha. When Apple first started using it, they were responsible for 25% of all WA traffic. With Alexa, I assume that the majority of WA's queries are coming from smart assistants at this point. (https://9to5mac.com/2012/02/07/four-months-in-siri-represents-about-a-quarter-of-all-wolfram-alpha-queries/ https://9to5mac.com/2012/02/07/four-months-in-siri-represent..., https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/20/18150654/alexa-wolfram-alpha-integration-math-science-amazon https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/20/18150654/alexa-wolfram-a...)

dotancohen 5y ago

As someone who just signed up for an open university this semester, I'd love to hear opinions about Octave and Maxima for general purpose use. Especially for study, such as replacing Wolfram Alpha's step-by-step solutions. I'm a Linux user and prefer an open-source solution. But I have no objection to paying a reasonable amount of money for a good commercial solution. Maybe Maple is worth looking at?

upbeat_general 5y ago
I think it highly depends on what kind of math you're expecting (and how heavily you want to rely on a CAS). If most of your work is just simplifying equations and computing numerical solutions, basically any system will do whether that's Octave, Sympy + Numpy, etc. I haven't used Maple for a while so can't speak to it's current functionality but there's been several times I've wanted to do something in Sympy/Octave and haven't found it whereas I can almost always get Mathematica to do what I want with a quick search. I tend to rely heavily on it for some more complicated/specific symbolic operations (e.g. symbolically transforming probability distributions) and for that use case, I haven't found anything better. I'll also say that if your use case if more numerical/programming oriented, the language used might be an important factor. I personally don't like Wolfram Language and use very few of its language features and prefer Python for anything that Mathematica isn't suited for out of the box.
zoomablemind 5y ago
It depends on what your need is. I used Maxima (wxMaxima) for a quick prototyping of handwritten formulations and as a reference for some simplifications, roots etc. Of course, its CAS capabilities are still useful. But I find that simplifications done on paper are often more straighforward, than making some expressions transform into the expected form in Maxima. Also, it's somewhat handy to have the ability to output the formulas in TeX format. I vaguely remember Maple being more apt at expected simplifications. Either way, I believe that Sage, Octave, Maxima etc. should be rather supplemental to textbook-based learning. In such way their results won't appear as pure magic, but as somewhat expected outcome of analysis.
mkl 5y ago
I prefer Python to Octave and Maxima. Numpy, scipy, and matplotlib for numerical stuff, and sympy for symbolic stuff. Having them together in the same general purpose language is really convenient, and Jupyter notebooks are fantastic. Sage is also good, but I've moved on to sympy. I don't know a way to get step-by-step working from a library, but sympy gamma can do some, so it's probably possible to some extent. My experience suggests avoiding Maple like the plague. Sympy (and Sage) can do everything I ever used it for much nicer and easier.

wheels 5y ago

I use it semi-regularly; once a week or so. It's a genuinely useful tool that was just greatly oversold on launch. Things I use it for: - Converting units while cooking. I prefer to cook by weight, and for most ingredients, you can do something like "2 cups of flour in g" - Stuff I'd have used a scientific calculator in an earlier era: simple systems of equations, plots, etc. - Comparing stats on countries, e.g. GDP growth in various countries

faeyanpiraat 5y ago
The issue with recipe weight unit conversions might be that the author literally had a cup or spoon or whatever with a specific capacity which would not equal the standard units, therefore you are converting one inaccurate amount to an other one.
- wheels 5y ago
  I'm not arguing in this case that it's more accurate, just that it's sometimes easier: if I've got a mixing bowl on a scale, I find it easier to pour things in by weight rather than to measure them all out. On recipes I often cook, I edit / write in the weight in grams to speed things up.
- robbiep 5y ago
  If that’s the case, then the issue is immaterial
- delecti 5y ago
  It's safe to assume any recipe written in the last 50 years is using the standardized units. It isn't literally 100% true, but close enough that it's not worth worrying about.

orzi 5y ago

How many astronomers does it take to change a light bulb? https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+astronomers+does+it+take+to+change+a+light+bulb%3F https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+astronomers+d... None; astronomers prefer the dark.

sergiomattei 5y ago

At University pretty much everyone I know uses it for homework.

tata71 5y ago
WA will give you answers your TA can't!

jawns 5y ago

To understand the state of Wolfram Alpha, you have to understand the guy behind it. Wolfram Alpha was a pet project of Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica. He had grand visions for it. And for the first few years, it seemed like he was doubling down on it. But then he got bored and started tackling a bigger problem: his own solution to the "theory of everything" problem -- something that has eluded the world's best physicists for decades. But he was confident that he could best them all. Because he created Mathematica. The scientific community wasn't having it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-criticize-stephen-wolframs-theory-of-everything/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic...

katzgrau 5y ago
I'm not sure you intend it, but your comment kind of makes Wolfram sounds like some sort of crank. He's a leading thinker obsessively interested in this idea that everything around us is the product of a simple, fundamental ruleset. He's sitting on the bleeding edge of human knowledge where, honestly, everyone is at risk of being full of shit. Scientific consensus isn't really any kind of indicator of future breakthroughs. To each their own - let Wolfram be Wolfram.
- rangodang 5y ago
  His work is very interesting, and much of it novel, but it's the way he presents it that makes him a crank. Claiming he has a grand unified theory of physics and all that.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  They don’t make him sound like a crank, but like a narcissist, which Wolfram definitely is. Not that it’s really a bad thing, most lang devs are a little narcissistic in my experience. Comes with the territory. But the guy named his language after himself. No one does that! Creating a language is already a very ego-driven endeavor, but naming it after yourself is next-level egoist.
- glenstein 5y ago
  He is both a crank and an innovator, and comments regarding his crankery are perfectly appropriate. I think his "new kind of science" needs to be singled out from Wolfram alpha and Mathematica as especially crank-ish. It appears to be an attempt at a grand foundational philosophical statement, but it doesn't interact with pre-existing literature that covers similar territory, conveys ideas with pictures and informal statements without robust definitions, doesn't have an underlying bedrock of concepts or uniform vocabulary, and doesn't have the focus or clarity of purpose to rise to the level of being right or wrong. And it nevertheless maintains a grandiose tone of establishing an entirely new domain of science It's not necessarily wrong, but it is unfortunately very vague and concerningly childish, even though I think it does have some meaningful things to say. It's a very fair example in favor of crankery.

spindle 5y ago

This question reminds me of the time someone wrote to the letters page of a print publication (I think it was The New Statesman) asking "Whatever happened to the composer of the theme music for Trumpton?" (a popular children's TV series in the 1960s) and the composer wrote back saying "What do you mean whatever happened to me?"

pbhjpbhj 5y ago

For me it stopped working several years ago and wouldn't ever return answers for queries. I futzed about with it to try and make it work; came back a few times over a couple of years as I had been a big fan. Just assumed they'd killed it somehow. Mentioned it on HN and others said it worked. For some reason it works again for me now -- it not working allowed me to discover Geogebra, which was nice and served a lot of my previous uses for WA.

tylermac1 5y ago

Many thanks to WA for getting me through high school and college calculus.

throwaway984393 5y ago

I just used it recently to plot weather data, population density, crime rate, and average home price of cities I was thinking of living in

yummypaint 5y ago

I used to use it extensively during my early PhD work for back of the envelope calculations. Unfortunately it became steadily harder to enter queries and have them understood. About half a decade ago they broke about 70% of what i used it for by refusing to show results for modestly complex calculations and instead throwing up nag messages for the paid version. The paid version last i saw was not available through an institutional license. Last time I tried to use retrieval features for nuclear data there was absolutely no citation info or documentation whatsoever, just numbers from who knows where. WA had so much potential but peaked about 3 years after it came out as far as i can tell. That being said it's still vastly superior to doing calculations with google.

voldacar 5y ago
> The paid version last i saw was not available through an institutional license. Does your institution have mathematica? In mathematica you can query WA directly, and it gives you as much (or possibly more, from how it seems to behave for me) computing time as people with WA pro subscriptions. I use it all the time for stuff like graphing complicated implicit 3d surfaces or doing multiple integrals, stuff where I know the relevant mathematica command but I would rather not type it out fully

pkdpic 5y ago

I still definitely use it for teaching big O comparisons in a live / malleable way. Not sure I know of a comparable resource for that but maybe someone out there in the HNstroverse does?

trevcanhuman 5y ago

I use it to check some results from derivative exercises for my calculus class.

kergonath 5y ago

I use it a couple of times a week. Sometimes it’s brilliant, and sometimes I have to find my answer somewhere else. Most of the time it does its job.

bborud 5y ago

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 subscribe to some piece of software I'm unsure I will be using enough to justify the cost.

gfodor 5y ago
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.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
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-ed/ https://www.wolfram.com/language/elementary-introduction/2nd...
- bborud 5y ago
  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.

fdr 5y ago

I use it frequently. Unit conversions, and the solver.

ipunchghosts 5y ago

I also use it regularly. I do remote sensing and fine that and wikipedia indispensable.

ProtoAES256 5y ago

I use it often to calculate... Stuffs. They are great in calculating but I really need to envelope them with at least 6 layers of bracket for it to parse my equation correctly or it will use some weird notations/arrangements.

tammer 5y ago

I still use it regularly. the app is my go-to calculator. it just hasn’t been updated in quite some time. there are a lot of ways the back end could support new UI features etc., but something seems to be holding it back.

still_grokking 5y ago

The pricing seems random to me. (Even it seems cheaper than last time I've checked). It's ~20% more expensive in Euro than in Dollar. (And Poland, which I checked for curiosity as it's in the EU but does not use Euro, has a price in Pound with is even higher; Poland is not a rich country). Also I don't think charging for example people in countries in Africa as much as for example US people makes any sense. The service is really great for some questions but the commercial offer never added up for me. If the software would be OpenSource and run on prem I would consider buying some additional online services for it (even at the current random price point and without having a real use case; it's not more expensive than an average online game, so bearable). It would make also that "Wolfram Language" worth having a look at. But I don't bother even glimpsing at closed source programming languages. That's especially one of the things they do very poorly.

AussieWog93 5y ago
>It's ~20% more expensive in Euro than in Dollar. Keep in mind US prices don't include sales tax (VAT).
- still_grokking 5y ago
  My fault. I thought digital services like that fall into the reduced VAT category. But it seems not the case. So ~20% more makes actually sense. Thanks for pointing this out!

gcanyon 5y ago

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-google-squared-and-google-wave-reviewed/ 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."

jjk166 5y ago

I've been using it pretty much daily for over a decade now. I don't know how people ever did engineering without it.

rixtox 5y ago

I use their online notebook environment a lot. https://lab.wolframcloud.com/ https://lab.wolframcloud.com/ It's almost a free web version of their Mathematica.

KuhlMensch 5y ago

I use it ~6 times a year. My luck is mixed: * ~33% - It works * ~33% occasions - I mess up syntax and give up * ~33% - I mess up syntax, but believe it SHOULD be possible, and push much longer than I untended. Until finally settling on a partial solution, and wishing I knew more - but also recognising I should used a different tool e.g. excel