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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

I like Wolfram Alpha, but despite being way towards the top of the "people most likely to find a use for Wolfram Alpha" list, I've only found a use for Wolfram Alpha a couple of times. I use Google Calculator all the freaking time, and only resort to Wolfram Alpha on the odd occasion that Google Calculator fails me.

Does anyone use it regularly?

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Yes, I use it regularly. Most common is for the kinds of things you might find in the CIA Factbook, or any number you'd expect to be buried in a Wikipedia page.

The most recent thing I was impressed by was this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+to+sunburn

I also tried creating a widget with WolframAlpha that seemed potentially useful: http://beeminder.com/agename.html (ie, getting a probability distribution on a person's age based on their first name)

The sunburn one is a cool concept, but most of the data I put in tells me that sunburn is unlikely in Phoenix, AZ.

Or that a sunburn is unlikely in Miami, Florida (which is where I am).

That's because it was night time. :) You can actually include a time and date.

Another handy heuristic: worry about sunburn when your shadow's shorter than you.

It says my name is not a valid input, that's pretty harsh.

So did Renren, the China-based Facebook clone.

Characters in the Latin alphabet do not count as names when one tries to sign up there :(

Not regularly but I used it recently at work to compute symbolically the sum of a non-trivial series. Turned out the sum has a closed form, which allowed me to replace an O(n) for loop with an O(1) bunch of additions, multiplications and divisions. Felt nice.

Can you give an example?

Sure, here's one: given a list of n items, compute the sum of pairwise distances between every pair of items.

The first item has distance 1 from the second, 2 from the third, ..., n-1 from the last. Similarly, the second item has distance 1 from the third, 2 from the fourth, ..., n-1 from the last. And so on until the (n-1)-th item.

Expressed as a finite sum, this amounts to:

  sum (sum j, j=1 to n-i), i=1 to n-1

Paste this to Wolphram Alpha and you get the answer in a closed form: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+%28sum+j%2C+j%3D1+t...

All the time - use it to check my answers to pretty much every calculus question I do, then if I get any wrong just use the Steps to work out better approaches in future. Never really looked into Google Calc though.

I do. I like to think and walk. Being able to whip up my phone and say something like plot d/dxdydz of [some equation in 3 terms] or maximize f(x) or solve some differential equation in a mix of english and symbols is very convenient.

On chrome, I also use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/acgimceffoceigocab....

What wolfram alpha is not good for is the trivia natural language stuff that they touted. Its very hit and miss, awesome when it works but often doesn't. Stuff like trying to find a list of countries orderable by gdp,average income, democratic index, crime is easier to put together using google. Its not just about comprehension, a lot of the data just is not there. A query that I was surprised it didn't get was "basketball player with highest field goal percentage". google got that easy.

I use it for unit conversions sometimes, but its parser and its understanding of Gaussian electromagnetic units leave a lot to be desired.

It's also good for a quick Taylor series when I don't feel like firing up Sage.

I use it for pretty much all calculations, solving and rewriting equations, currency conversions, and basic stock comparisons. It's way better than google calculator for those things. Just add it to your bookmarks bar.

I used it to create the graphs and compute the solutions for my recent blog post:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/AnOddityInTennis.html?HN

I found it really useful to have a facility on-line that let me do those calculations and draw those graphs.

I'm interested - what would you use instead?

But that's not an on-line solution. I have half a dozen desktop solutions. I don't (yet) use R, although it's on my "To Do" list for my Copious Free Time(tm)

When I was moving/job hunting I used it a lot for cost of living adjusted comparison of salaries.

I use it regularly for nutrition (calorie counting) and comparing foods, e.g. 100g of salmon, 100g chocolate etc. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100g+salmon+100g+chocol..., or http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=potassium+in+1+cubic+li....

I'd say that this is where Wolfram falls down the most: even those of us who /probably/ are smack dab in the middle of the farther audience don't really understand the use cases. If Wolfram can figure that out, or (more specifically) if I could figure it out for me, then I'd use it much more often. But until I get that handle on it...

I use it for conversions and as the go to calculator on my iPad.

I use it for time calculations (timezones, differences, etc.)

Yeah, love the google calculator. I wished it had support for high precision numbers.

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