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Comment by jxcole | Hacker News Reader

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jxcole

Sadly, google's cannot be used to calculate 3D plots, though wolfram's can:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x%5E2%2By%5E2

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On the other hand, google doesn't appear to take the extreme copyright stance that Wolfram Alpha does.

Read their TOS: http://www.wolframalpha.com/termsofuse.html, specifically their Attribution and Licensing section.

If you incorporate results from Wolfram Alpha in any work without attribution meeting their standards you will have breached your TOS and they suggest you also will have committed copyright violations and academic plagiarism. If your work is not personal (unshared?) or academic, then they demand you negotiate a license.

Google seems happy to let you know sin(x) is wiggly and send you on your way.

Well they have very different business models, neither company's licensing here seems unreasonable.

No polar graphing either: https://www.google.com/search?q=r+%3D+sin%282%CE%B8%29

Google also can't be used to make noises.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=play+sin%28440+pi+t+%2B...

(If you don't see the "play sound" link, refresh the page.)

Cool! The first thing I thought of when I looked at the Google one was that it'd be sweet if I could play that as a wave form. Anyway to make it play longer?

you know you're on hacker news when the most upvoted comment has found something negative to nitpick out of a cool story.

You know you're on hacker news when the most upvoted comment is a link to a bunch of stuff about paraboloids.

You know you're on hacker news when a repetitious meme gets voted down to oblivion. Oh, wait...

Edit: Phew, -2 and dropping. I was worried there for a second.

In summary, this is Hacker News.

You know you're on Hacker News when meme threads die before they got obnoxiously long... as they should.

Adding positive comments doesn't usually add as much information. The story itself was a positive comment. Critical discussion is best done not by saying "hey, cool story" - that's what upvoting is for. There are some cases where a non-negative comment is great, like pointing other readers to an interesting piece of related information, but if all it does is confirm what the original submission said, it's less informative.

"It stinks!"

http://media.onsugar.com/files/2011/04/14/2/1437/14373728/a0...

First iteration.

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