[HN Gopher] Wolfram Cloud
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Wolfram Cloud
Author : itchyjunk
Score : 122 points
Date : 2021-12-14 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wolframcloud.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wolframcloud.com)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Is this _new_???? or is it just the root domain they host alot of
| their other product info pages /data sites on.
|
| I'm thinking it's at least 5 years old maybe more with some
| variations between public and enterprise products along the way.
|
| You just found this randomly?
| throwaway950q wrote:
| I've always found Wolfram Alpha surprisingly unhelpful and
| impossible to integrate into an enterprise application in a
| meaningful way in practice. This is an interesting paradox, I
| sometime call it the Wolfram paradox, here is what I mean:
|
| Their platform is so sophisticated that it produces output in a
| non-deterministic format depending on your search terms.
| Therefore, if you want to consume their service by leveraging the
| full smartness and cleverness of their platform, your consuming
| application needs to be equally smart and clever if you want to
| do anything more useful than displaying their raw output in an
| iframe. This means that you'd have to re-implement non-trivial
| parts of their platform.
|
| The only way to solve this problem would be to restrict your
| input to a fix format to make their output more predictable. But
| at that point you'd in practice rather use a more specialized
| (and much less expensive) solution. The only use case I can see
| for this is either very complex computations for which either no
| other vendor exists, or requiring so much resources to run that
| their platform is the most convenient option. Or alternatively
| the interactive use case to iterate on a solution as part of R&D,
| which I believe is the main way people use their products.
|
| This is not a shocking limitation per se, but their marketing
| messaging has long been suggesting that they have a vision where
| developers will heavily use the power of their platform to build
| a wide range of real world applications both in the consumer and
| enterprise space. My point is that this will never happen because
| of the aforementioned paradox. They have built an incredibly
| smart solution, but it sorts of have a curse by design preventing
| it from moving out of the interactive niche.
| searke wrote:
| So I feel like you're right in that we can do a better job of
| explaining how to do this (I obviously work at Wolfram
| Research).
|
| But I think it's very possible and a strength of ours.
| Wolfram|Alpha is used by many services, including now MS Excel
| which I think is a counter example to the paradox you
| mentioned.
|
| If you're interested in NLP applications, you can build APIs in
| WolframLanguage using the Interpreter
| (https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Interpreter.html)
| or PLI framework
| (https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/GrammarRules.html)
| that give a finer grain control that doesn't require the full,
| overwhelming "full smartness" of Wolfram|Alpha. They're both
| pretty unique technologies and I think that also has affected
| adoption.
| maliker wrote:
| Data expiration: "With a Cloud Basic plan, any files will expire
| 60 days after their creation." I've lost a couple notebooks due
| to this. Kind of like ransomware, yeah?
|
| Then I looked at their pricing[1] to maybe get those notebooks
| back. 3 different product lines, 4 different tiers per product,
| then 5 or so prices depending on student/home/professional/govt.
| No idea how to navigate all this.
|
| I used to be a big Mathematica user about a decade ago, but with
| everyone in industry using Jupyter now and Wolfram's weird new
| product strategy, I don't think I'm going back.
|
| [1] https://account.wolfram.com/upgrade/wolfram-
| cloud?theme=wolf...
| elliekelly wrote:
| So when they say your files expire they aren't deleted? You've
| only lost access to them until you subscribe again? Am I
| understanding that correctly?
| maliker wrote:
| Yes. You can see them but can't access them until you pay up.
| temp8964 wrote:
| The pricing link doesn't work. I guess you have to login first.
| atilimcetin wrote:
| I think this is amazing. I'm using wolfram alpha a couple times a
| day but sometimes I need to use proper wolfram language instead
| of wolfram alpha query. Even if they allow a single notebook for
| the free tier, I would be more than happy.
|
| (I still couldn't find more information about what basic/free
| tier includes.)
| htk wrote:
| "The Wolfram Cloud combines a state-of-the-art notebook interface
| with the _world 's most productive programming language_"
|
| Quite the statement there, does anyone here have more info on
| this claim?
| elliekelly wrote:
| Puffery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery
| carry_bit wrote:
| If Python is a "batteries included" language, then Wolfram
| Language might be a "nuclear reactor included" language. Its
| functionality covers a broad range of domains, and keeps
| growing. The principle behind much of it is "maximum
| automation", so you have so-called "hyperfunctions" to, for
| example, build a classifier using machine learning. You just
| give it the example data, and it'll by default pick the method,
| etc. for you and perform the training. You can still go in and
| control the options if needed.
|
| The language itself has its quirks, like any 30 year old
| language would, but you can do a lot with a little if you know
| what you're doing. It's similar to Lisp in that way.
|
| The downside is that once you need to go beyond the "standard
| library" things are a lot more sparse, but they've been working
| to make it easier to get 3rd party functionality.
|
| It's the kind of language that if it was free 15 years ago
| would probably be all over the place today.
| fault1 wrote:
| the other cool thing about wolfram functions is that they
| really embrace the whole "content addressed function" idiom
| (like unison). code is data is a networked resource.
| dsizzle wrote:
| One weird thing about the language, which seems contrary to
| this "most productive language" claim, is that it seems a bit
| complicated to use normal version control https://mathematica
| .stackexchange.com/questions/26174/what-a...
| Smaug123 wrote:
| Version control is very easy as long as you're not
| versioning notebooks. A `.m` file is just plain text.
| gdelfino01 wrote:
| The language is version control friendly, the notebooks are
| not. You explore and document using notebooks (.nb) and if
| your stuff get serious you should move the source code to a
| package (.wl or .m) which is just plain text file which is
| nice for version control.
| dsizzle wrote:
| Right, but I mean it's a notebook-based
| language/environment so they seem hard to uncouple. Just
| looking at the link I posted it seems a little
| complicated. Have you used Mathematica in a team
| situation?
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| You'd run into the same problem with Python notebooks.
| For a lot of data scientists out there, Python is a
| notebook based language.
|
| The Stackoverflow thread had a few other interesting
| ideas beyond discarding the notebooks entirely.
| l0b0 wrote:
| The Mathematica showcase on Code Golf[1] is by far the most
| impressive showcase of any language I've ever seen. (Start
| reading from the bottom.)
|
| [1] https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/44683/9570
| ReidZB wrote:
| It really is amazing. I spent loads of time fiddling with
| Mathematica in college, thanks to the cheap(ish) student
| license. I solved problems 1 and 2 of the 'Substitute' xkcd (
| https://xkcd.com/135/ ) using it, for example, including a
| little `Manipulate[]` bit that let you pick a starting run
| angle dynamically and plotted how far you'd get.
|
| There's something really, really powerful about good
| interactive tools and learning math. I'm convinced my success
| in subjects like calculus and diff. eq. were driven by toying
| with programs like Mathematica.
|
| Anyway, I still find myself reaching for it occasionally. I
| recently used Mathematica for some FFXIV raid group
| statistics. Once you get accustomed to it, it's incredible
| how productive you can be at solving specific problems.
| "Nuclear reactor included" is a great turn of phrase (from
| above).
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| This is fascinating, thank you. It seems like it might be
| worthwhile to learn Mathematica for use in coding interviews;
| many coding problems would be significantly simplified.
| IiydAbITMvJkqKf wrote:
| Stephen Wolfram is highly regarded, but it's not due to his
| humbleness.
| johnhenry wrote:
| The claim "world's most productive programming language" might
| be accurate in that it has such a huge standard library --
| sooooo many built-in functions.
| maltalex wrote:
| What does the _Basic plan_ include? How does it compare to a paid
| plan?
| aq3cn wrote:
| You can you use Mathematica for free if you have spare
| Raspberry Pi laying around. please check:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6775330
|
| https://twitter.com/WolframResearch/status/10519497450302177...
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/21/5130394/raspberry-pi-inc...
| racingmars wrote:
| Yeah browsing around their web site and product pages I
| couldn't find anything. _After_ I signed in to Wolfram Cloud
| for the first time, I got an email with a little bit of
| explanation of the Basic plan:
|
| With this introductory Wolfram Cloud plan, you get:
|
| * 200 MB of cloud storage
|
| * 5,000 Cloud Credits per month
|
| * Temporary cloud deployments, allowing you to publish Wolfram
| Notebooks in the cloud and deploy APIs for up to 60 days
|
| No idea what a "cloud credit" gets me, and still have no idea
| what functionality is available compared to, say, a WolframeOne
| or Mathematica or Wolfram Notebook subscription (which if you
| upgrade from the basic Cloud account you need to pick one of
| those three upgrade paths, which then each have different
| tiers).
| [deleted]
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Has anyone here used Wolfram Alpha for something meaningful?
| _jal wrote:
| A few years ago it was the only tool I could find that could
| answer questions like "show me every college within 100 km of
| this point".
|
| I haven't needed to do anything like that since. But it is yet
| another example of how I think Google maps and similar are weak
| junk only good for finding coffee shops.
| loufe wrote:
| It helped me learn calculus in university. It could take a
| given integration or derivation question and show the path to
| the solution in steps with plain English explaining what was
| done to achieve each. I like learning via examples and got a
| lot out of being able to consult more examples than our
| textbooks provided.
| Mandelmus wrote:
| So did I but since they changed the input field on their
| website to the weird new "Math Input" UI, most inputs that
| would just work perfectly fine a year or so ago now don't get
| parsed correctly anymore. It's made WolframAlpha virtually
| unusable for me. No idea what happened there.
| bhussai20 wrote:
| Generating z-scores for weird probability distributions
|
| Spoilers: Turns out `c * (ax + b)^-(ax + b) + d` has some
| really nice numerical shortcuts/ratios for z-score calculations
| akdor1154 wrote:
| What scenario gave rise to that distribution?!
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Designing periodic procedural textures for 3D graphics. The WA
| interface is more straightforward than the software I was
| using. I still like it for that purpose.
| safaci2000 wrote:
| Wait you mean asking: "how many turkeys are in turkey doesn't
| count as meaningful?"
| oefrha wrote:
| WolframAlpha is behind a lot of Siri answers.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Maybe not in any meaningful way for our species or our
| industries, but I find it meaningful to me.
|
| I use it to read scientific articles on subjects I don't know
| much about. For example, an article talks about a percentage of
| the population, but I don't know how big that population is. I
| can simply go into Wolfram and get the missing data. I can also
| use it to make comparisons with other countries or time periods
| and, with a few basic queries, quickly explore ideas.
|
| I'm not a scientist, just a programmer with too much time and
| curiosity on her hands. For me, it gives me a better
| understanding of topics I was not trained in.
|
| I also use it almost daily to find out the nutritional value of
| foods. "Foods ranked by vitamin A", "Proteins in 100g of
| broccoli", etc.
| fbn79 wrote:
| Using it when estimating with query like "today plus 30 working
| days"
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Same here, I uses it for hours and minutes.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I use it to do random calculations like how much something
| weighs/costs that is combining units in various fields and
| pulling data from static and dynamic sources for commodity
| materials, e.g. microns * inches * yards * density of iron *
| cost of iron
| paulpauper wrote:
| Good for simple stuff, but anything too complicated will
| generate one of the following two messages:
|
| "computation time exceeded"
|
| "does not understand your input"
| emteycz wrote:
| It helped me go through all highschool math exams
| faut_reflechir wrote:
| I use it for computing integrals / solving ODEs when I don't
| have access to one of the CAS's I know how to use. It's nice to
| get a quick answer and not have to remember syntax, since I
| only have this problem about once every six months or so.
| paulpauper wrote:
| are you sure you are not referring to Mathematica or taking
| derivatives? ODEs and integrals are hard to solve for even
| simple cases, I cannot imagine wolfram alpha being able to
| solve anything even remotely complicated without throwing an
| error.
| andruby wrote:
| I use it for a bunch of small questions:
|
| 1. Calculations wrt inflation: "$1000 1975 in 2021"
|
| 2. Draw a mathematical equation: "(x^2 + y^2 -1)^3 -x^2y^3 <0"
|
| 3. Computations with visualisation: "area under y=x^2 from 1 to
| 3"
|
| 4. Bitrate calculations: "1.5TB at 10mbps"
|
| 5. Compare weather/climate between cities: "compare weather
| brussels and cape town"
|
| I use ddg as search engine, so can just add !wa to the query
| and ddg will redirect it to Wolfram Alpha. I don't use it very
| often but love how quickly it can answer most problems.
| ReidZB wrote:
| I find myself doing unit queries like 4 all the time. "80
| bytes / second * 1 year" results in ~2.5 GB. Etc etc. It's
| very convenient for making sure that you're handling units
| correctly.
|
| It's also really good for random facts. For example, "75 kWh
| at California electricity price". Or if you know something
| takes 20W to run continuously and you want to know how much
| it costs... "20 W * 1 year at california electricity price".
| eli wrote:
| I think it's the backend for a bunch of Alexa queries.
| jaytaylor wrote:
| It appears you are correct, this was revealed in 2018:
|
| https://voicebot.ai/2018/12/27/wolfram-alpha-makes-alexa-
| sma...
| larrywright wrote:
| Siri uses it for answers to some questions (or used to). For
| example if you ask Siri what planes are overhead it used
| WolframAlpha to get that information.
| a-dub wrote:
| yep. endless fun at parties!
|
| "oh, your phone has siri? watch this: hey siri! what's the
| distance between the earth and the sun divided by the
| population of new zealand?"
| miohtama wrote:
| I do time zone queries for scheduling meetings. I have
| DuckDuckGo as the search engine for my browser.
|
| Typing
|
| !wa 2pm Berlin time in New Delhi
|
| Is super useful and answered by Wolfram.
| electroly wrote:
| FWIW, Google can answer this exact query faster than Wolfram
| Alpha can. Google will have the answer before Wolfram Alpha
| even loads.
| hestefisk wrote:
| Today I had to quickly compare trade import and export as
| percentage of GDP in two countries. I could basically
| write: (country) export and import as percentage of
| (country) GDP vs [repeated for country 2]. It worked in
| first go in WA, no issues, even produced a beautiful graph.
| That runs rings around Google.
| electroly wrote:
| Definitely, Wolfram Alpha can do way, way more than
| Google can. I just mean that the simple time zone
| conversion is one of the things Google can do; it's not a
| super ringing endorsement for Wolfram Alpha to be doing
| time zone conversions with it. Also not a ringing
| endorsement for DDG -- if he had used Google it would
| have just answered his query inline without having to use
| a special exclamation point query.
| BrazzVuvuzela wrote:
| Taking google's answer for things they're calculating with
| math is probably safe, but if you get into the habit of
| reading google's answers to queries it will have you
| believing a lot of nonsense because many of the answers
| google offers are not calculated at all, but instead are
| regurgitated nonsense that google read on the internet and
| took at face value (example from Technology Connections:
| https://youtu.be/TbHBHhZOglw?t=58)
| azinman2 wrote:
| I assume the GP is referring to the instant answers it
| gives you in a white box separate from search results. In
| this instance it is calculated by google and not crawled
| from the web.
| BrazzVuvuzela wrote:
| Those instant answers are the ones I'm talking about.
| Sometimes they're calculated, but often they're
| regurgitated from web crawls and the UI doesn't clearly
| differentiate the two.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I mostly use it for unit conversions in equations. It's very
| handy, though sadly requires access to the internet and is
| sometimes rather slow.
|
| `units` works too, but doesn't do the same job of solving
| equations.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| You want `qalc`. :)
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Has anyone here used Wolfram Cloud? Itchy junk, have you? What
| was your experience?
|
| I have some experience from a few years ago with the self hosted
| version but I haven't had anyone to compare notes with since
| then. Ultimately it was more cost-effective for us to migrate to
| Python and jupyter lab.
| svat wrote:
| I briefly tried using it a couple of weeks ago, when there was
| a post here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29406322)
| about it. I took a small notebook I had made in Colab:
|
| https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1FqJomu3MAWLz_Dc2y15...
|
| and tried converting it to Wolfram Cloud:
|
| https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/shreevatsapublic/Published/...
|
| Pros: The Wolfram / Mathematica language, once you learn it, is
| likely to be consistent and powerful. (Browse some questions on
| https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/)
|
| Cons: Mostly around familiarity and ubiquity, versus a closed
| ecosystem. For example, it took me a long time to figure out
| how to put everything into the Wolfram language (imperative
| things are awkward to do; had to figure out how `Do` and
| `Module` work), there are fewer resources for learning it, etc.
| Can't use standard Markdown, nor TeX syntax for math[1] AFAIK.
| There may be an alternative way to typeset mathematics; I never
| got around to it. The UI is unfamiliar to me (harder to see
| where the cells are, deleting a cell was nontrivial to figure
| out).
|
| Maybe with time it will become easier, but overall, I expect to
| continue to use Jupyter / Colab notebooks when they work well
| enough, and try Wolfram Cloud again when I want something
| _really_ nontrivial that sympy / Sage / etc can't do
| cleanly... which is probably unlikely, as the Python ecosystem
| continues to close the gap.
|
| ([1]: Aside: Did you know that MathML came into existence, with
| impetus from Wolfram, to make it _harder_ to use TeX /LaTeX
| syntax for math on the web? See
| https://www.mathmlcentral.com/history.html#:~:text=To%20head...
| )
| searke wrote:
| (disclaimer, I work at Wolfram Research)
|
| I'd love more tools for using TeX and markdown. There are a
| few but they're not really given as a first choice anywhere.
|
| About MathML... I mean I'm also not a fan. I'm not sure
| anyone really is. I've been cursed to work with it in some
| legacy pages. I love using mathjax. I'm not familiar at all
| with the two people who from the company who worked on it or
| that project. But I think it's going a bit far to think that
| MathML was nefarious corporate plot to manipulate the W3C.
| (0) MathML doesn't interoperate with WolframLanguage in any
| particularly great or exclusive way. (1) MathML makes more
| sense for the time period it was introduced than it does now.
| Mathjax is technology I don't think people foresaw at the
| time (Reparsing the DOM and injecting some kind of formatted
| math notation?!) People really thought math notation would
| need to be expressed in an XML like format. The other option
| at the time afaik was static images you'd generate from LaTeX
| and insert into your document. (2) TeX is a language for
| typesetting math in a paper and people thought we'd need
| something that went deeper, representing something closer to
| the intended semantics of the notation. This was probably a
| mistake.
|
| Afaik MathML didn't make it harder for people to use TeX on
| the web.
| piannucci wrote:
| I use it from time to time for work. It lacks some of
| Mathematica's typographic flair (can't ctrl-^ to get a
| superscript box or / to get a fraction) but IIRC has better
| undo support on desktop and satisfactory performance as long as
| your output expressions don't get too big. The web layout
| engine chokes pretty badly for medium-to-large expressions,
| although there is an automatic transition to pre-rendered
| images at a certain level of complexity.
|
| I use it when I want an industrial-grade CAS for some nasty
| integral or when I want to do something LISPy.
| stblack wrote:
| Wolfram Cloud keeps getting better. It's streets ahead of where
| it was a year or two ago.
|
| Best feature is the ability to share files with notebooks
| created in the desktop version.
|
| My workflow is: create and refine using the desktop version or
| Mathematica or Wolfram Desktop. Then access the notebook from
| anywhere, anytime, even on mobile devices.
|
| Some downsides: you can mess-up a notebook on mobile there's
| effectively no "undo" capability to fix botched steps.
|
| Presently I'd say, if you are using the cloud version only,
| best to create and iterate on a desktop computer browser first.
| Creating and iterating on a tablet or phone browser isn't going
| to be a good experience. That said, it's getting there.
| itchyjunk wrote:
| I started using it yesterday since I realized it was free. I am
| kind of using it like a scripting language for a smart search
| engine. I don't know if that's the right mentality but it seems
| to have some features i kind of want from a search engine to
| quickly do research with. Find some data, show me a graph of
| it. Use the last search result to do some other stuff kind of
| stuff. That is partially why I posted it to HN, hoping to see
| what other people are using it for.
|
| The community forum thingy that's built in seems to have a lot
| of people using it for very mathy things like visualizing
| particular solutions to say PDE or somesuch.
| throwaway59553 wrote:
| I don't think I ever saw someone using any wolfram product
| professionaly or at least it doesn't reach my bubble, besides
| some professors in my University who used it, specially to
| compose notebooks with the course material.
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