
Happy 1st Birthday, Wolfram Alpha - shawndumas
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2010/04/28/happy-1st-birthday-wolframalpha-blog/
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abstractbill
From their (estimated) first year of traffic, it looks like Wolfram Alpha is
in the "trough of sorrow" right now:

<http://abstractnonsense.com/w_alpha.png>

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

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PostOnce
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.

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jacquesm
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.

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PostOnce
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

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jacquesm
That test question is just sad.

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

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

~~~
LiveTheDream
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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loboman
[http://duckduckgo.com/?q=sin+x+cos+x&v=](http://duckduckgo.com/?q=sin+x+cos+x&v=)

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elblanco
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.

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techiferous
Does DuckDuckGo have a following outside of the tech crowd?

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

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

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

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LiveTheDream
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_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_of_everything.html)

For the answer
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+answer+to+the+ultim...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+answer+to+the+ultimate+question+about+life,+the+universe,+and+everything)

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

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andrewvc
Fun conversion, convert carrots / Hr to Horsepower:#

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=((1+carrot+calories+in+...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=\(\(1+carrot+calories+in+btu\)+/+1+hour))

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miked123
Oh wolfram|alpha, have a little fun.
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Happy+Birthday>

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

