What do Hacker News users use it for? I use it to solve mathematics problems when my rusty skills fail me. Best example:
I needed to see what a pulse, f(t), specified as ten coordinates looked like after passing it through a transfer function:
as^2 + bs + c
H(s) = ---------------------
ds^3 + es^2 + gs + m
a,b,c,d,e,g,m are constants.
I haven't dealt with that sort of problem since university, about two decades ago. Reading a couple of wikipedia articles about transfer functions and laplace transforms reminded me of what needed doing, but I kept getting stuck in a thicket of terms.
I then tried feeding the problem to Wolfram Alpha. That worked for a simplified version of the problem, but I couldn't give it the full problem because Wolfram Alpha limits the query length.
I ended up installing a trial copy of Mathematica. That did exactly what I wanted. It was enormously satisfying, but Mathematica has a high price tag and I only need to do this sort of thing once every few years. Next time, I'll take a look at the price and be tempted.
But maybe Wolfram Alpha pro is enough of a step closer to Mathematica to deal with my next problem. That would be great.
(There are other ways to solve the above problem, e.g. with a Z transform. But doing it analytically was far more satisfying and gave me confidence in the result.)
I needed to see what a pulse, f(t), specified as ten coordinates looked like after passing it through a transfer function:
a,b,c,d,e,g,m are constants.I haven't dealt with that sort of problem since university, about two decades ago. Reading a couple of wikipedia articles about transfer functions and laplace transforms reminded me of what needed doing, but I kept getting stuck in a thicket of terms.
I then tried feeding the problem to Wolfram Alpha. That worked for a simplified version of the problem, but I couldn't give it the full problem because Wolfram Alpha limits the query length.
I ended up installing a trial copy of Mathematica. That did exactly what I wanted. It was enormously satisfying, but Mathematica has a high price tag and I only need to do this sort of thing once every few years. Next time, I'll take a look at the price and be tempted.
But maybe Wolfram Alpha pro is enough of a step closer to Mathematica to deal with my next problem. That would be great.
(There are other ways to solve the above problem, e.g. with a Z transform. But doing it analytically was far more satisfying and gave me confidence in the result.)