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Ask YC/HN: What Should I Ask Dr. Wolfram?
I'm interviewing Dr. Wolfram in a few hours, so I wanted to reach out to the HN community and see what questions you'd like to have answered, technical or non.
Most of my interview is going to be straightforward, but I'd love to throw at least one tech Q in somewhere.
- ieatpaste 17y agoI would be interested in: - if they're leveraging any new algorithms (categorical, semantic, or otherwise) and hopefully he could briefly explain the new ideas involved. - any shifts in research and development regarding semantic search algorithms, semantic web and how Wolfram|Alpha plans to contribute to these trends. - specific types of research information (DNA, relevant research information) and use cases for businesses (i find that the service is novel, but not particularly useful to businesses) - how frequent they will be updating the existing data, and how frequenty they will be adding data - shout out to U of I? btw - can you guys focus more on the startups instead of how-to's? i miss the days when sites actually reported on new startups and not about gossip or top 10 lists.
- Mystalic 17y agoI agree with you on the more startup reviews part. Part of it though is startups getting our attention - sending emails to news[at]mashable.com consistently work, since we read that account religiously. Also, weekends.
- brg 17y agoHas ANKoS had the impact you envisioned? If so, what are the most significant results that have come as an outgrowth of its thesis.
- vaksel 17y agoI'd like to know whose idea it was for hyping Wolfram Alpha as a Google Killer
- paulgb 17y agoDid they, or did the press take that on all by themselves? I mostly avoided the hype about it so I could well have missed something, but the only article I saw quoting Wolfram as having said anything about search was miss-attributed. Most of the direct quotes seemed to downplay any comparisons to Google.
- vaksel 17y agoyeah thats what I'm asking...was this their idea, their PR company's, or just the press chasing a story
- paulgb 17y agoAh, sorry. I thought you meant who within the company is responsible.
- falien 17y agoI dont think I saw wolfram (the company) hyping alpha as a google killer anywhere, but all their material about it definitely over-hypes it for what it does right now. Alpha definitely does some interesting things, but all the material I've seen from them is either complete fluff (we don't just index, we compute knowledge) or not anywhere near production ready (natural language processing). Also the part about having reviewed information becomes completely useless when they refuse to cite where specific information came from and instead cite a cloud of fuzzy sources.
- sgibat 17y agoHis take on the singularity might be interesting.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- moonpolysoft 17y agoWhy does he insist on taking sole credit for most of the innovations of his employees and underlings?
- alexitosrv 17y agoYes, I also think he seems too much egocentric.
- req2 17y agoMaybe Edison is his role model.
- bravura 17y agoWhat living persons he admires.
- jlhamilton 17y agoBesides himself, of course.
- Donald 17y agoSearch is a particularly disruptive technology. Traditional search engines, e.g. Google, have made searching for certain types of information phenomenally effective. This has resulted in interesting privacy ramifications ("Google-stalking") and issues with research (easy access to bad information). Wolfram|Alpha works by way of a new search paradigm: rather than simple data-mining it seeks to construct /new/ information based on a query. What do you foresee as the social consequences of a computational search engine?
- barleyman 17y agoHis Atlas of Simple Programs has excited me since I first heard mention of it. Now with Mathematica 7 and Alpha out, will there be a little more free time to take the Atlas to the next level?
- fauigerzigerk 17y agoI gather that he employs lots of people to manually enter rules and factual information. If cellular automata are the foundation of all higher level complexity and even of the human mind, as he claims, why does he not build a learning algorithm instead? My hunch is that his approach to knowledge engineering doesn't scale very well in terms of breadth and depth of knowledge and its rate of change. Not even considering very far reaching inferencing capabilities. Of course it's difficult to know that without knowing how exactly he does it. It's just a hunch.
- ntoshev 17y agoWolfram Alpha's relationship with Mathematica is pretty obvious, would he care to explain its relationship with NKS (he says W|A it's an offspring of both projects)?
- macmac 17y agoWhy he insists on applying draconian terms and conditions to all his ventures (NKS: http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-iv?firstview=1 http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-iv?firstview=1 WolframAlpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com/termsofuse.html http://www.wolframalpha.com/termsofuse.html)
- Create 17y agoIs Mathematica a just clone of Macsyma?
- olegp 17y agoAsk him about "his new network theory of fundamental physics, related to cellular automata" - http://twitter.com/novaspivack/status/1815527180 http://twitter.com/novaspivack/status/1815527180
- Mystalic 17y agoThanks everyone for your input. I'll be sure to post the interview hopefully tomorrow (well, technically today).
- zouhair 17y agoWhen Mathematica will be freed?
- noamsml 17y agoAsk him about the population of japan divided by the population of china in the year 2000.
- HouseTrip 17y agoAsk him why claims on his website that they have 5.4M unique visitors (http://tinyurl.com/pwobdf http://tinyurl.com/pwobdf) when Compete shows they have 70'000 :)