Happy 1st Birthday, Wolfram Alpha | Hacker News Reader

Happy 1st Birthday, Wolfram Alpha

blog.wolframalpha.com

63 pointsshawndumas34 comments

From their (estimated) first year of traffic, it looks like Wolfram Alpha is in the "trough of sorrow" right now:

As much as your statement is true, its invaluable for checking homework, quickly pulling together figures and truly a great resource for students.

Oh, I didn't mean it as an insult actually - justin.tv was firmly in the trough of sorrow when I started working there, and we stayed in that phase for at least my first year at the company. It's quite depressing, but not (always) fatal.

And just outright not doing your homework. I used to have Maxima do my homework for me, then I had Wolfram Alpha do it, then I started rolling my own homework solvers. Now I think of the time non-programmers spend on math homework, and it's just jarring. Statistics is especially scary without programming ability.

If you have online homework (e.g. coursecompass.com) and it's due in 25 minutes because you, like me, are a legendary procrastinator, you learn to cut a few corners.

Site-specific (coursecompass.com): you get an unlimited number of attempts to solve a problem, and there seem to be a finite number of variations on each problem, so combining a list of known answers (obtained by purposely failing a few attempts with some educated guessing (or just brute-force guessing in many cases), you can get a 100% average on your homework without ever actually having done any real work.

Ok, I'm done ranting about homework.

The idea behind homework is not that you deliver the right answers but that you learn something from it. As long as you're confident that you learn as much from the programming as you would from doing the homework there is probably no issue, but some day after doing a bunch of homework there are the final examinations, and you won't be using the 'solver' then.

I can learn anything I want for free. College is just for getting a degree.

And as for the finals with no solvers: In other countries, they make you stand in front of the proctor and clear the memory of your calculator. Not so here, at least not from what I've seen. If they tell you you're allowed a TI-83 and not a TI-86, then by god, you should wring the absolute maximum amount of utility from that TI-83 that you possibly can. Extensive notes, other operating systems, magical apps, whatever. I've thought that, if I did live in another country, I'd just write an app that displays the memory cleared screen without actually clearing the memory.

Really, school is just a backup plan to earn money if my entrepreneurial endeavors fail. I don't intend to throw away potential earnings because I was too stupid to take advantage of everything I possibly could.

I've found complete question/answer keys to exams on the internet that my teachers had ripped off of websites/out of teaching manuals. They were meant to be example exams, to be modified, but they were reproduced to us verbatim. I'd be stupid not to memorize something like that.

In some cases, my instructors were literally too stupid to allow me to succeed in their classes by honorable means. They had tests with wrong answers. In such situations, you have one choice: cheat or fail, because the answer can't be learned.

Case in point: In an IP address, ____ defines how pages transfer on the Web.

a. FTP

b. http

c. TCP/IP

d. SMTP

The answer is B and the class was mandatory in community college. And that's a gentle example. There were some outrageous ones.

I become more misanthropic with every passing day :P

That test question is just sad.

I hope your entrepreneurial endeavors succeed, it looks like the education is less than interesting.

Sadly, it is strongly to blame for my not buying mathematica---most of what I would want to do there I can do (with some contortions) on wolfram alpha. I even have a firefox keyword for it (wa).

I guess it should be taken with a grain of salt but, Wolfram Alpha itself reports 480k daily visitors [1]. Though the graph [2] roughly matches your graph.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=www.wolframalpha.com

[2] http://www4c.wolframalpha.com/Calculate/MSP/MSP236219abb6ff1...

If I read that graph correctly they're actually pulling out of it. (much to my surprise)

Cuil has an almost identical graph, except they're coming up to 2 years.

That is a wide damn trough.

Wolfram Alpha's failure to get much traffic tells you something about how useful advanced math is to the average person.

It can be an incredible research tool as well. For example, you can calculate cost-of-living differences between different cities, or compare crime rates, or see how your SAT score compares to the national average.

The examples pages are rich (there are visual examples too), but would really benefit from some deep mashup-like examples. Wolfram|Alpha is really cool but I don't personally have much of a use for it; I'd like to be able to browse through it like Wikipedia.

How would I know what it can do without spending enormous amounts of time going through the examples?

Well, you wouldn't. I agree that there is a barrier to acceptance because it's hard to realize the full potential.

Powerful tools require a significant investment in time. It takes longer to learn how to use a lathe compared to say a hammer.

The problem is that what Wolfram Alpha can do beyond mathematics is rather arbitrary.

Wolfram Alpha was launched on the 15th. This post is about the launch of the blog.

I put in a request for a Wolfram Alpha API developer ID last year, but never heard back. Is anyone here using the API?

I could have sworn DuckDuckGo had it integrated, but I can't find it now.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=sin+x+cos+x&v=

duck duck go is rapidly becoming a new goto search engine. It hasn't quite replaced google, but it's farther along in doing so than any other engine.

Does DuckDuckGo have a following outside of the tech crowd?

I'm not sure, but it's growing fast.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/duckduckgo.com

I spoke to someone at Wolfram about using the API about 6 months ago and they said they would try and get me access to their "Pioneer Grant" which is the free version of the API. No word since then. The pricing for the regular API is prohibitively expensive. How did you intend to use it?

Maybe they don't want to lose brand identity.

I didn't want to use it for anything terribly sophisticated; I wanted to make a lightweight web application for people to track their dietary history. WolframAlpha would make it pretty simple: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+slice+pizza,+2+cups+g...

I find Wolfram Alpha better than most desktop softwares for quick checks on formulas, equations or random mathematical curiosity.

Stephen Wolfram had an interesting TED talk that was just posted, about computing the theory of everything: http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_...

For the answer http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+answer+to+the+ultim...

or this http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=theory+of+physics

Fun conversion, convert carrots / Hr to Horsepower:#

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=((1+carrot+calories+in+...)

Oh wolfram|alpha, have a little fun. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Happy+Birthday

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+old+are+you%3F

ask it what the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is.

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