Stephen Wolfram does an AMA | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Wolfram does an AMA

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119 pointsinstakill30 comments

I didn't know that Alpha can tell you what planes are currently visible overhead, holy crap, that's awesome!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=planes%20above

Ran the query and looked at the sky like an idiot, only birds! And it's pretty clear today, too. Can the flight schedules be that off?

Also learned how many calories a cubic light-year of milk chocolate is: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/qisot/im_stephen_wolfr...

You can do the same thing for satellites and stars (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=satellites+overhead)

You can answer a lot of cool questions with Alpha. Nutritional information for 1/2 an avacado? It can do that. Number of kilobytes in a petabyte? Yup.

Overall, very cool tool.

I use it occasionally for word finding, like a friend who wanted a clever .me domain I pointed to: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=words+ending+in+me

Also, you can use that same idea to cheat at Scrabble (or any variant), though I would never condone such a thing ;)

If you like that, try http://morewords.com.

  grep me$ /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
  1699

(WolframAlpha: 210)

It can also do "satellites above": http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sattelites+above Make sure you enable interactivity (if you have Pro) on that last graph, it's pretty amazing.

Jesus, that needs to be a mobile app "Whats above [x] Planes, [x] Satellites [ ] Stars"

That's awesome!

They exist for the iPhone, not sure about Android

I will be interested to see if he answers any questions about reviews like this about ANKS: http://www.amazon.com/review/RUGSCP3XBNBUV/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt?...

From past experience at lectures, he tends to avoid questions about NKS. His magnum opus turned laughing stock is kind of a touchy subject.

He does address NKS at least once, here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/qisot/im_stephen_wolfr...

Disappointing that the top voted 'questions' in these AMAs end up being scandalous statements and conjectures while the actual questions get pushed down to the bottom.

I'm more disappointed in the "I'm an X major and I love you so much!" comments. I'd like more questions regarding Alpha pro. It's a tempting purchase for a lot of people, myself included, but so much of it seems like nifty stuff I'll play around with from time to time, but never actually use.

That's my question, HattoriHanzo is my name on Reddit. I tried reaching him a year ago when that happened. But sadly, nothing came of it. It's not my fault everyone else wants to know :/ I still use and suggest other to use WA against my better judgement.

Looking at the Android app page, they may have gotten confused because the screenshot has WA in it. That is, it's using your app to input math symbols into WA. That may have triggered a simple policy of "issue takedown for anything that is not ours that has WA in it."

The app Stephen listed isn't mine. You won't find it in the market because it's "suspended". It was literally a fork of the system keyboard with the symbols page having math related symbols.

Worse. According to the Market blurb, it goes further:

"Bonus: Launcher icon opens a quick dialog box with input box to query the WolframAlpha Computational Knowledge Engine and launch your web browser. *Wolfram Alpha is a trademark of Wolfram Alpha LLC"

https://market.android.com/details?id=net.schwiz.wolfram.ful...

Somewhat unrelated, but does anyone know the cost of the Wolfram Alpha API is after the free 2000 calls? No website seems to give the pricing (except for the old 2009 pricing scheme), and the Wolfram Alpha API site just says to contact them -- quite frustrating (yes I sent an email, but got no response)

I think it's dependent on the type of project you do, for instance a school's math program whatever might get charged less where a fortune 500's x project gets charged more.

Looks like he's getting preemptively skewered by the Redditerati.

I often wonder what kind of thought goes through a person's head before they do an IaMa on reddit. You need to be either crazy, stupid, crazy stupid, or Neil Degrasse Tyson to think "Hey this is gonna be awesome!"

I disagree vehemently. The vast majority of AMAs by celebs go very, very well. There've been a few well-known trainwrecks (I'm looking at you, Woody Harrelson), but for the most part they're quite successful and a good way to engage with fans.

I used to subscribe to IaMa a while back and yes they were and to some extent are still a fantastic opportunity for the unwashed masses to quiz celebrities of all walks of fame.

Still considering what happened to Woody, I would think that incident would give a few celebs and PR managers a moment of pause to think "Is this really worth the risk?"

On the other hand, generally the dark side comes out of Reddit only when people are obviously (ab)using r/IaMa soley to benefit their current PR campaigns.

The failure of Harrelson's AMA was in a mismatch of expectations between him/his PR people and the reddit community. Whereas the longstanding tradition on reddit is a back-and-forth dialogue between the users and the OP, with the users deciding which conversations gain prominence, Harrelson/his PR person approached it like a late-night talk show.

Honestly, as harshly as reddit came down on Harrelson for that, it was entirely avoidable with even the most basic preliminary research. It's hard to feel bad for Harrelson, and it's similarly difficult to imagine that savvy PR types would be put off by the response. It's pretty easy to see what leads to a successful AMA, and not particularly difficult to prime your client for it.

The problem with Woodys AMA was that it wasnt an 'Ask Me Anything'

It was 'Ask Me Anything About Rampart'

Oh that's why posters are saying the Wolfram AMA "ramparted". I had thought they meant that people were ambushing Wolfram (with "ramparts").

Interesting link provided by Wolfram, and funded by his company: http://www.computerbasedmath.org/

Seems to be an awful lot of asking and not a lot of answering.

Did you read the story? 3pm-5pm ET is when it happens.

He stated he's going to be answering questions from 3pm to 5pm ET, so should start seeing some responses shortly.

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