Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure | Hacker News Reader

Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

blog.stephenwolfram.com

1,308 pointsperardi393 comments

Some pretty cool things:

- He's a CEO who dogfoods his own software! Not only that, he seems to be one of its most prolific users. That's amazing.

Having worked for over a decade at Google, I sometimes wonder if the founders still use the products. Larry Page used to always harp on latency (rightly), and now Google products are slower than ever.

- He's a remote CEO, and supports remote working! It sounds like the company was ahead of the curve in this respect.

- He's grown his company to 800 employees over 28 years, and it's still relevant today. And I believe he never took funding. Also amazing! Most tech companies that are 28 years old have gone through a ton of turmoil.

I've heard all the bad stories about Wolfram's personality. Combined with NKOS, that made me think poorly of him.

But maybe has mellowed with old age. People forget how insufferable Bill Gates was 20 years ago too. Gates really rehabilitated his image and maybe Wolfram will too. Despite the ego, he's definitely contributed interesting things to society. And I hope that I'm as excited by my work as he is when getting to that age.

There’s definitely arguments to have on the actual impact of Wolfram’s mathematical/scientific work vs the impact he claims it has, but there are no doubts regarding his skills at running a scientific software operation.

To be honest, the conference call linked lower in the thread has increased my skepticism for remote work. Another commenter pointed out how much smoother everything would have gone if everyone had been in the same room.

Don't kid yourself, it's not going to be as efficient. Audio and delay are big issues, as not everybody can talk at the same time. But the point is that it is doable, and some companies have good success with that. They are usually small-medium companies though, my guess is we won't be seeing any 100% remote unicorns popping up.

elastic?

You mean like github?

It continues to amaze me that most businesses use worse conferencing tools than the average e-sports clan. High-quality, low-latency conferencing and screen sharing is essentially a solved problem if you don't use completely crappy tools.

Which tools should you use?

Zoom.

Most businesses have far more requirements than a e-sports clan, namely security, standardization, and dealing with large numbers of people. An e-sports clan can change their service in a day with one email. A large organization can't move that nimbly.

We changed our voice conferencing to Discord since it worked better than anything else we had tried

Wolfram has 800 employees, most of them tech, which puts payroll at ~160m. Suppose 30% margin, thats about $50m earnings, at 20p/e thats about $1b/unicorn.

Both GitLab and InVision are 100% remote unicorns, last valued at $1.1B [1] and $1.9B [2] respectively.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/gitlab-raises-100m/ [2] https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/11/invision-valued-at-1-9-bil...

Haha I did set up the stage for the multiple slam dunks I received as replies. This is really amazing.

> how much smoother everything would have gone if everyone had been in the same room.

Definitely true, but you'd also have to watch the livestream of everyone prepping for and commuting to work for a fair comparison.

I tend to agree. Unless there are genuine reasons to work permanently remote, an face to face interaction is always better. I also worry about the loneliness aspect of remote work. For all its downsides, the Office provides a real life socially active environment. It's pleasant to have people around, and to have water cooler conversations, or share a coffee with an employee from a totally different department. It's feels pretty good. I may be wrong, but I also feel that work is more than producing code. It's also about interactions with people.

That's all very nice but it's all not work related. Water cooler conversation may be great for incubating the very very beginning ideation of some 20% project, but come on, how often does a 20% project really happen. When it comes to real work (well defined work), where what you need is a mix of concentration time and focused interactions to address questions, remote call could be much more efficient than face-to-face meetings that end up engulfing a dozen people just because "it's possible, everyone's here."

Humans aren't robots. If you want to keep them productive you should treat them as humans.

I think you're confusing "comfortable" with "productive". At some point in life a job is just a job and the job of the job is to get the job done. I'm happiest when I get it done, when everyone around me gets it done, together, on time and well.

Efficiency isn't everything. In my experience the problems with remote work are often more trust-related. If course this depends on the industry. We had a case in a fintech company where remote employee ended up doing some quite bad things for the company for financial gains. I think it is much more difficult to do that kind of deeds if you actually interact face to face with the people affected.

It's not always about projects. In order to be productive at a company, there is much more to do. In water cooler conversations, you learn who you have to talk with for this or that, you learn about meetings you may attend to learn new things, you learn that little trick that makes your work more efficient or about that colleague who is really weird, or about how to solve administrative matters. Not everything is in a manual or in a web site.

To give a very appropriate example, I think that if I was working in the same office as Wolfram, I may learn about his cool setup in water cooler conversations. In fact, I think it would make me a better engineer having water cooler conversations with Stephen Wolfram. I am not sure I would get the same benefit from interacting with him through screen sharing or phone calls.

I work in research, surrounded by PhD students. These students learn from the interaction with more experienced people, and I have to admit I also learn many things from them. Remote working would in theory be possible for most of us, but it would not achieve the same result.

I don't understand your point. I worked remotely for ten years and there was constant banter in the slack (skype before that) channels. We would spend as much time socializing as we would if we were in the office. I won't make any assumptions about your work experience but I believe most of these criticisms tend to come from people that have never worked at a remote-first company. If anything, remote is slightly more effective since you can have watercooler chats and go back to them months later to remember what Steve said about his cool personal infrastructure projects. :)

You don't understand that many people prefer interacting with other people in person instead of via a slack channel?

You can like your remote job. I agree there are ways to make it work, for certain people and certain jobs, and it can even be better than a workplace in some cases. I am not criticizing it, just explaining the advantages I find from working in an office with other people (btw, I have done remote work too, though never in a remote-first company).

I wonder if you have tried socializing in person and via a computer. It's so much better in person, that I don't care about not having logs. If you don't understand that, you may be a robot.

> You don't understand that many people prefer interacting with other people in person instead of via a slack channel?

> I wonder if you have tried socializing in person and via a computer. It's so much better in person, that I don't care about not having logs. If you don't understand that, you may be a robot.

Your point would be a lot more effective without the insults. I also wonder if you are unable to see the irony of your assertion that different people have different preferences and then telling me I must be a robot if I don't share your preference.

It's even more ironic given this person (or an ironic robot?) is socializing via a computer with someone else not even at work and learning about Wolfram's setup, something that'd be antisocial, uncomfortable, or seen as slacking off in many offices...

Why should it be antisocial or uncomfortable? I also prefer to see my family in real life than by telephone, but that does not mean I find phones antisocial.

To repeat my point: I understand there are advantages in working from home, and that for some people the way of socializing may be one of these advantages. What I found surprising was that pault did not understand that I prefer personal interactions when there are slack channels.

Your original comment did not say that you prefer personal interactions. You presented a bunch of your opinions about the effectiveness of in-person communication as if they were facts. Several more times in this thread you've written that it's just a preference then immediately asserted that in person communication is superior. That's what I didn't understand.

Also, you mentioned that you never worked at a remote first company, and I can say from experience that working for a company that has most of its employees in an office and a few remotes is the worst of both worlds. You get left out of all the decisions and social banter and all you get is a few crumbs when someone remembers to check the slack channel and see what you're up to. It's possible that if you worked for a company where everything happens online you would feel differently.

This is an interesting perspective. I guess having the company set up in a remote-first manner vs. just having a few employees working remote are indeed very different scenarios then, and if one is ever to work remotely, they should only aim for a remote-first company.

I did not know robot was considered an insult. It was just a lame joke. I apologize if it hurt you so much (ironically, this is the kind of misunderstanding that happens much less often in real life).

You may have different preferences, I did not say anywhere you should share mine. What I said was precisely that you should be able to understand that other people prefer to interact with their coworkers in the real world, not that you should do the same.

I feel like some people get a lot out of it, and others not so much. As in, if someone has the type of personality where they work best with lots of "heads-down" time on projects (and frankly many of the best engineers I know are like this), give them that space to do their best work without being interrupted by That One Person Who Always Comes Over to Chat. Most offices and even most orgs / teams have THAT DUDE. If you can't think of who it is, it might be you. Sometimes Dude has good ideas, but a lot of the time Dude just wastes time, and worst of all, wastes the time of others. Time that those other people could be spending Doing Work, but because Dude doesn't know when to can it, and because they're obligated to have their butts in their seats, they just make small talk while dying a little inside each day.

I've also seen people be incredibly productive because they can just walk over with a few people to another person and settle something in real-time. Doing that over email might take a day or two. Doing that over Slack could also probably work, and given how many people are in a meeting / out at lunch / OoO / whatever not at their desk, I'd say it's about a 50/50 chance that the unannounced walk-up actually works in person anyway.

Sometimes Dude is also one of the best engineers you know when he can just get some “heads down” time to himself, but when forced to be in an environment with many easy distractions, he acts like a kid on the playground. Or something.

I’ve been Dude in the past. Yesterday I was probably in danger of becoming Dude but for my general introversion and maturity. I walked around listening to James Brown instead. I think flexibility and a culture demonstrating proper time management and production would help. It’s important to socialize but without detracting from others. Yesterday, I just couldn’t sit or stay at my desk - I needed some air. In hindsight, I was pretty amped up from a meeting.

Absolutely. You could argue that a water cooler/coffee machine conversation is unlikely to be distracting as compared to interrupting people at their desk. If people are by the water cooler, kitchen, canteen, etc chances are they wanted to get away from their desks and would be open to engaging with others (even if bery briefly)

For what it's worth, I seem to recall reading that the most effective engineers are not necessarily the ones that (heads down) create the best solutions for some specific challenges, but those that know who is the best person to ask about (or task with) a specific problem. So, the Dude might be contributing quite a bit.

There's also the person who seems to not be contributing but who gently steers others towards a solution. Without this person, the team wouldn't work well, but looking in from the outside (or even from the inside sometimes), the person looks like they're doing very little.

You may find it pleasant to have people around and water cooler conversations, but many others do not and have no need or desire for work to double as a social outlet.

It's not (just) about social outlet, it's about growing and learning professionally. Unless your job is to blindly implement features someone else adds to a spec sheet it's always worthwhile to get professional input from people from different fields. Often they'll have unique ideas and insights that comes from having a different background and different experiences.

To add to this, in no circumstance have I ever seen developers spending 100% or even close to 90% of their time actively writing code or thinking about code and working. Heck, for most of the ones I’ve worked with, it’s probably closer to 60% productive time during office hours, with the most productive being somewhere between 80-100% busy.

Just because you (the person before you, actually) are a reclusive jerk, doesn’t mean everyone else also hates people and chitchat.

> Just because you (the person before you, actually) are a reclusive jerk, doesn’t mean everyone else also hates people and chitchat.

Downvoted for tone. You do not need to name call here on HN.

Yeah but the difference is when you work remote, you can use that other 40% of your time to:

- run errands

- do the laundry

- hit the gym for a while

- cook a tasty lunch or even dinner for later.

Whereas in the office, you just use that time for chitchat, HN/reddit, wondering around etc.

And I'm not a reclusive jerk, I like my coworkers and I do enjoy it when we meet up in person, but I don't need to see them every day. We have a short voice call most days, and we catch up irl possibly 6-12 times a year which is already more than I see some of my friends who live further away.

Honestly there's just so much more time in the day for my personal hobbies and activities that I don't think I could ever go back to on site, or even full-time/more than 4 days/week for that matter.

I also do a lot of "watercooler chit chat" over slack and, to a lesser extent, voice chat. I don't need to be in the same physical space as my coworkers to do that. I mean, before starting my career, most of my tech chit chat was online, since my offline friends at the time were typically not too interested in tech.

What I do find problematic is when the majority of a company is in the same physical space and only a few are remote, as then the remote people tend to lose out.

Software engineering is only part writing code. A lot of time is thinking, understanding, collaborating and designing. Also a lot of testing.

But that's more than possible when working remotely.

Emphasizing public-first communication methods is a big one. Don't just send a slack message to Bob asking about that thing, tag Bob in the #thing channel so others can see and weigh in if needed. Don't just do a code review over a call and leave, write up a quick summary and post it somewhere. Have meetings where people who might not technically be related to the project are involved somewhat.

Sure, it's work, but it's not more work in my opinion, just different. There are absolutely downsides to remote work, but I really truly believe in and have experienced the benefits too.

There's a hybrid approach we use here at Wolfram where a lot of employees work remotely 99% of the time, but at least 2-3 times a year are in town for our conference, picnic, etc... We also have virtual 'meet-ups' where remote workers can interact with the corporate or regional offices for video games, activities, etc. It's not a perfect solution, but does help keep interactions and idea sharing greater than zero.

Seems to me like the biggest benefit of a solid remote working culture would be the vastly larger hiring pool. That should be weighed against the downsides.

I've been working remote for decades and my observation is that whats standing inbetween great communication in remote teams are often trival, easily fixable things like poor software and hardware.

When it comes to hardware, people use whatever headset and camera they have, connected to wifi served by the a cheap SOHO router. More or less the stuff you use to call your parents over skype once a week.

Just curious: In your opinion, what are proper tools / setup in hard- and software terms that makes remote collaboration as efficient as on-site interaction?

That depends on what you work with. My productivity as programmer got higher but my ability to help with hardware issues went down a lot. Helping over phone or chat to replace a PSU is tricky.

I've worked remote for the past 4 years so I think I can weigh in on this.

If there are meetings in person you really need to have a good conference call phone, preferably with an external mic.

Like this: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/images/i/000/016/072/origi...

For things like screen sharing, the conference room must have a very solid connection as screen sharing typically uses a lot of bandwidth.

For the remote employee, you need:

* Solid headset. I've tried using a USB one but it had interference at terrible times. Once I was on a call presenting to the client when interference started making odd noises. Now I use a USB headset with noise canceling mic.

* Good fast reliable internet!

* Solid voice-over-ip phone if you need to talk on the "phone" a lot. I use DialPad which are the makers of UberConfrence. The quality is _way_ better than using Google Voice, skype, etc.

If you want what they use in places like the Senate and other Big Boy meetings, get a Shure MX418D/C and a real external audio interface with phantom power. I use mine for gaming, and while it's totally overkill, it's a purpose-made professional quality desktop voice mic. They're tanks and will last 20 years. You can buy replacement parts for them. They're also on eBay for ~$120 if you keep an eye out. Pair that mic with something like a Focusrite Scarlett Solo (~$110), Zoom UAC-2 ($250), Universal Audio Arrow ($500, has built-in DSP accelerator [offload]), or something crazy overkill like a RME ADI-2 Pro ($2000), Antelope Zen Studio+ ($2500), or an Avid HDX system (~$5k with Pro Tools) with external Neve preamp (~$3500) and a Neumann U87 Ai ($3600) mic. That's if you're trying to record the next Grammy Award-winning track and have an unlimited budget to get world-class audio. For reference, something like a $400 Shure SM7B is what you'd hear on most broadcast radio stations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpU6H2EtjLI has a comparison of the $3600 Neumann U87 vs the $230 Rode NT1-A for comparison. You won't be able to hear the difference over a conference call.

If only the mic was my problem and not the network! On cable here (Virgin, UK) and impossible to get VoIP to work well (lack of delay, crisp audio etc). Have tried half a dozen service providers and a range of codecs (including Opus).

When my mobile phone has less latency and better sound, I know my VoIP is screwed.

RME user here with plenty of nice microphones and preamps to choose from.

It’s been years since I went through the trouble of setting one up for a conference call. These days I just use my Sony Bluetooth headphones. IIRC, the difficulty with most (not DAW or professional audio) software on Mac and any external audio interface, is that it doesn’t actually allow selecting which input to use, only the device. So while I might select “RME Fireface 802” in Chrome as the input device, I can’t select Input 1, 9, or 12 as the input channel to use for microphone. This used to be possible with apps like Soundflower, though, I’m not sure what the best solution is nowadays.

UA DSP for conference calls, now wouldn’t that be something. Ha-ha.

> You won't be able to hear the difference over a conference call.

The difference between the microphones is stunning, I thought I was not going to be able to tell the difference, but the Neumann is extremely more, should I say, articulate? the Rode sounds "stiff." But nobody is going to be singing over a conference call, true.

Full commerical network hardware. Netgate makes the pfsense firewall and they make hardware for remote workers. You can traffic shape and have a VPN to your company and ensure that voice and your workstation have the bandwidth they need and your home gets the rest. A good firewall at your home can make all the difference and once that doesnt have yearly subscriptions is a good route to go.

I used to be a big pfsense fan, but Ubiquiti's UniFi is my jam now. If you get their gateway, PoE switches, and a couple of APs, it's by far the best SoHo system I've ever used. Enterprise features that are easy enough for non-network admin technical users to figure out, auto firmware updates, rock-solid reliability, all for around the cost of a high-end "gaming router" that will crash weekly.

Unifi WiFi + edgerouter lite isn’t bad either, software isn’t as cohesive but the ERL is solid and hasn’t been an issue for me at all over 4 years on gigabit internet. WiFi is rock solid after initial setup in a VM (does not need to be running controller continuously).

Have you noticed how incredibly resistant people are to doing a thing about it? Just getting anyone to put on a headset is like pulling teeth.

Maybe if companies paid for it it wouldn't be a problem, you know, like equipment at an office.

One source of resistance I've seen is that people don't like being forced to add cameras pointing at them to their set up.

> ... whats standing inbetween great communication in remote teams are often trival, easily fixable things like poor software and hardware.

Ironically for a big chunk of the time I've been working as an engineer, people have been falling back to consumer software instead of using broken entreprise videoconferencing.

> When it comes to hardware, people use whatever headset and camera they have, connected to wifi served by the a cheap SOHO router.

I mostly haven't noticed any huge problems here, but maybe I've just been lucky.

Now that I think of it my home WiFi has been getting worse over the years, and getting new top rated gear didn't help.

(I have seen some thread here lately about advanced troubleshooting of wireless networks and I consider getting the spectrum analyzed somehow.)

I may have formulated this a bit poorly, by exemplifying my experience, what I meant was that people that work remote and uses voice, video, chat, should spend more time making sure their setup works really well, with good audio and video quality.

Any resources you could share along these lines? I'm definitely interested in improving my setup.

I love such comments. The guy has a multimillion dollar private business which is at the same time his hobby and a dream, and does it in the way he likes. And someone comes and says his meetings can be more efficient..

Yeah that is HN!

But commenters are taking evidence of how this guy runs his business as evidence that that method is effective. Shouldn't there be comments pointing out if this isn't effective?

Not really. It will always be easy to look at something from the outside and point out all the ways it should or can’t work or could work better. The systems and people involved are usually much more complicated.

The world also owes itself more compassion. “Thousand foot” criticism lacks compassion.

You're describing a policy of not making frank assessment of the efficacy of business practices.

That’s a bit far. From my perspective, the point is that looking at inefficiencies in isolation is as bad as looking at benefits in isolation.

Making a frank assessment about the efficiency of meetings is probably of limited value in and of itself in abstractly assessing the overall equation of trade-offs in running a distributed vs collocated business. Even more so when concretely assessing this particular company.

There's an asymmetry between the strong negative reaction to criticism but not to praise, even though criticism is more likely to offer substantive points. This suggests to me that people are mostly offended at the arrogance of the commenter rather than working about the risk that we could all become mistaken through reading overconfident criticism.

Every bully I remember tried to mask their bullying as “helpful” or positive in some way.

Every dictator promised to make the nation better. This is not a good reason to reject politicians trying to make the nation better.

More like a policy of avoiding drive-by commentary on businesses with which one has little knowledge or investment.

> It will always be easy to look at something from the outside and point out all the ways it should or can’t work or could work better.

People pay me to do exactly that. Come in with a fresh, unbiased view on things, look at how stuff works and what could be improved.

It's not about telling people that everything they've done before is BS but if there are things that are not working well, just tell them.

It's easy to look at a something in isolation and assume you are qualified to cast judgement on where it can be improved but often a decision might have both a negative consequence and also a much further reaching positive consequences too. The sort of people who like to judge things in isolation miss those kinds of complexities.

This kind of arm-chair critic seems to be on the rise on HN as well. People making short, sharp judgements based off very little evidence yet they still feel justified as an expert by their self assessment.

If you think they are overconfident, then say so. If you think their analysis misses something, then say so. But being against assessment in general is not a good approach.

> If you think they are overconfident, then say so.

I thought I literally did just that?

> If you think their analysis misses something, then say so.

I've done that in the past and it usually just descends into stupid augments where the ill-informed only dig their heals in deeper rather than acknowledging their mistake. I mean if they weren't someone who was over confident about their own opinion then they wouldn't be the sort to make those kind of remarks to begin with.

> But being against assessment in general is not a good approach.

I'm not against assessments in general. I'm against specific types of non-constructive assessments from people who are just blatant armchair critics.

If someone has a the experience to offer a constructive assessment then odds are they wouldn't delivery it as a passive-aggressive one liner.

> I thought I literally did just that?

The point of my comment is that the discussion should take place on the merits of the criticism, not the arrogance of the person who would dare criticize. The fact that you mixed together the two is not a good rebuttal.

> I've done that in the past...

Bad arguments in the past are not a good reason to abandon the structure of good arguments in the future. Get better debating partners rather than trying to avoid the structure of healthy debate.

> blatant armchair critics

If some people praise "this is a good business practice" and others point out that, on the face of the evidence, it appears to be exact the opposite (i.e., that the conference calls are disorganized/confused), it is not unreasonable to point this out. It does not require special insight.

It's got nothing to do with the competency of the arguments presented and everything to do with the futility of arguing with someone who has already made their mind up. This very conversation is a demonstration to that fact.

wolfram admits in the article that his company can and should be bigger. fwiw.

I can't add anything to that comment except: , I know that's right.

Well there's always a trade-off, isn't there?

For me it does not look like a criticism. He simply is not convinced to the idea of remote work, which means that he does not see it fit for his way of working.

My son and I met Stephen and his son at the NY Maker Faire a few years ago.

As you might imagine, his son (I think he was around 11 then) takes after his father and was heavily into programming already.

Imagine having him as your father! Lucky bugger.

I saw a cool presentation by wolfram’s son last year. He seemed early twenties.

It was a neat demo of using population data and quickly running it through Mathematica for nice chloropleth maps, charts, etc.

He was pretty cool and answered questions afterwards.

He was showing how the tool is useful for social science, but it’s so expensive.

I hope that if Wolfram ever retires, he will open source it because it’s so useful beyond the current customer base who values it enough to pay.

At least for non-commercial use, Mathematica for the Raspberry Pi is free! https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

Hahahaha ... what an oxymoron here . Wolfram and rehabilitation. The company has not been doing well for a while. Having 800 employees at a macdonald wAge doesn’t seem like a hard thing to accomplish for a cult like corporation.

Hey thats like a pipe dream. Build a tool for yourself that you really like. Then build a company around it to make that tool better, so it gets better for you and everyone else who loves using it.

A former colleague went to the APS spring meeting in Boston in 2011 (I think) and went to visit the Mathematica booth there. To his surprise, he found Stephen Wolfram himself standing there and showing off some cool Mathematica features to a small crowd of physicists. My colleague was (and probably is) a total Mathematica fanboy and evangelist and seeing Wolfram himself talk to users there made a big impression to him. I also have to say kudos to that, not many CEOs of billion dollar companies take the time to mingle with their users let alone show them how to get the most out of their software.

That said Mathematica is a brilliant piece of software and I have never seen a more powerful system for computer algebra and symbolic computation. It is kind of slow but what you can do with it is absolutely amazing, so I think it will remain relevant for the foreseeable future.

> It is kind of slow

It’s not though. You just need to make sure you aren’t computing with exact precision (the default) but use numeric precision and it’s as fast or faster than maple, matlab, R or python. Which are the obvious comparisons.

> Having worked for over a decade at Google, I sometimes wonder if the founders still use the products. Larry Page used to always harp on latency (rightly), and now Google products are slower than ever.

Is this for real? I've never felt like google's products have prioritized latency. Android latency has been atrocious from the very beginning. And gmail and google docs are easily some of the slowest webapps out there.

Their search team prioritizes latency for sure, and they have performance teams and things like the RAIL model.

https://developers.google.com/speed/

Funny, I do this with my digital trash can:

When I was consulting at Bell Labs in the early 1980s I saw that a friend of mine had two garbage cans in his office. When I asked him why, he explained that one was for genuine garbage and the other was a buffer into which he would throw documents that he thought he’d probably never want again. He’d let the buffer garbage can fill up, and once it was full, he’d throw away the lower documents in it, since from the fact that he hadn’t fished them out, he figured he’d probably never miss them if they were thrown away permanently.

I do that with tabs for online articles I (probably) want to read.

You should use Pocket for that: getpocket.com

I prefer using tabs because the space constraint forces you to actually choose what's important to read. When there is no space constraint everything just gets dumped into a pile and there's no real way to prioritize what you truly do and don't want to read. You just end up with a long list of stuff you don't care enough to actually read.

At least that was my experience with Pocket. Maybe it works for some. I do the same thing with physical books. I don't keep a list of books to read. I keep a bookshelf full of stuff I'm making my way through over the years. Spending the money forces me to choose what I actually feel is important I read vs what I think I want to read.

Y'all love tabs too? Let me blow your minds real quick if you haven't seen these:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidewise-tree-styl... (tl;dr view tabs on the left with some visual hierarchy to indicate what came from where)

and

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo... (TL;DR click the button when you can't see the favicons anymore because you have so many open. It'll save them to a single page that includes all the previous tabs you've saved so you can cmd+f it if you REALLY want to find That One Thing You Had Open That One Time)

If you use that many tabs then you're better off using FireFox with the Tree Style Tabs extension [1]. Unlike the Chrome extension, it integrates properly with the browser window and you can hide the original tab strip.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Nothing ensures I'll never see it again more than bookmarking it and closing the tab in hopes that I'll one day read it. Out of sight, out of mind.

Accumulating tabs works for me. I always end up working back through them because they are so visible.

Pocket gets worse the more you use it: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...

Tabs save the history of the tab as well. This is a great resource. And it's saved in session files when you save.

I have a tab opened in October 2016 that I still didn't read yet.

I'd claim to do the same, but I never really close the tabs, I'll just fire up a new window, and maybe come back to the old window mañana.

I pretty much do this daily for everything. If I don’t interact with it in a year, it’s fine to throw away next house cleaning. So if I walk by, it goes out. Often “going out” means sold on Craigs list or eBay, but still.

I kind of force myself to do it, because deep down I think we are all pack rats. It’s in our nature to want to keep things “just in case”, but we live in a world where we can get anything with a few clicks. So why?

> It’s in our nature to want to keep things “just in case”, but we live in a world where we can get anything with a few clicks. So why?

Um, money?

Environment?

I mostly buy and resell so I actually don’t spend much at all on items. I lose from the depreciation, but not too bad actually.

I'd have thought the shipping (on eBay) and time would cost more than the depreciation.

If I had a 50's secretary to do all my fleabaying, I too would do this, sheesh.

I do this but don't throw the documents away. Instead I put the "buffer" into longer term storage (read: jammed into a box in my shed that can at least be searched even if it takes ages).

It turns out that, for me, there are quite a lot of things you suddenly need a year or more later that felt unimportant at the time.. insurance documents, warranties, car related documents that are useful when selling the car, documents relating to house improvements. These should probably be filed better on day one, but this is life :-D

I started following this same system, and after realizing how much sense it made, and how similar this system is to typical digital data storage system design, I concluded I should always design physical storage systems using the same mindset as data storage.

Scan, OCR and shred. I have a scan pile and a shred pile. I collect documents in front of my scanner. Once a month I'll shred the previous month's documents in the shred pile, scan the current documents, and put them in the shred pile to be shredded next month.

I do this because sometimes it's easier just having the hard-copy around, but if I haven't used it in a month, it's rare I still need the hard-copy.

Do you name them, or just put them en masse by date? And what ocr software do you use?

Cloud vendors have OCR built in now, Amazon announced a newer product at Ignite called Textract and the Rekognition service has some capabilities there. GCP Vision and Azure have options as well. Getting the mass scan/photo is the annoying part. Some scanners also have OCR built in, or you can look at pytesseract.

I do something similar. I scan to pdf then store those in Evernote and Evernote does the OCR.

Initially they are just named with the date they are scanned. Once a quarter or so I'll organize the ones I care about and the rest stay in an "unorganized" folder.

I use DEVONthink Pro Office which embeds Abbyy for OCR, along with a Fuji SnapScan.

I use JS1’s exact process, software and hardware. That is just too eerie. I however only shred once I have a full banker’s box, which I take to a commercial shredder for a big toss for $100, once or twice a year.

Why a commercial shredder rather than a $100 crosscut (Amazon Basics makes some pretty good ones)? I actually find the shredder pretty fun to use.

Most inexpensive shredders have a very low duty cycle, so they'll cut out or overheat if you shred continuously for more than a couple of minutes. That's fine if you shred a couple of documents at a time, but it's infuriating if you have a big box of documents that need to be shredded. Heavy-duty shredders capable of continuous use are bulky and heavy, which is a significant issue if you live in a small apartment.

just burn em in a trashcan

I use a cylinder of wire mesh on something heatproof, in the garden.

Better than a cheap shredder by miles, and some nice heat that makes it pleasant in wintertime. :)

Domestic burning of household waste is illegal where I live, I would have thought it would be illegal most places in the Western world by now. Burn paper = CO2; shred paper = more paper.

Ah makes sense. I guess I just do it as I need to, since I don’t do the document buffering thing.

Or a fireplace...

Even more fun is supervising a young child doing the shredding :)

It takes many hours to shred and not worth my time. I have a shredder for the rare cases I need something shredded NOW.

Staples will shred for a $1 a pound, and a banker’s box is at most 30lbs.

Staples does, but indirectly. Your stuff goes into a lock box. Does it get shredded? No idea.

> These should probably be filed better on day one

Maybe, maybe not! I've optimized aggressively for writes (common) over reads (rare) - I don't want to even waste time deciding if I can throw something away or not, so I also keep everything that isn't super obviously recyclable immediately (mass mail, autopaid bills for less 'important' things like internet/utilities, most receipts since I don't itemize my deductions, etc.)

Anything sent to me goes into either a yearly "keep long term" (10+ years - tax docs, house/car stuff, etc.) or yearly "keep short term" (2+ years - insurance receipts etc.) folder in a filing cabinet where it can be forgotten about. Even that's over-complicated IMO - I haven't gotten rid of any folders from either category. If I need my hard copy of something, I probably need it for a specific year anyways. Sorting into more categories doesn't help much - I'd still have to remember which category my 401k documents went in (tax documents? did I have a financial folder? was my system still the same in 2012?)

Hand written notes are slightly more complicated - I actually read my notes enough to optimize reads a little by scanning them in to save me the hassle of opening up my filing cabinet. Still extremely streamlined - I symlinked the default location to a single dumping folder where I actually want them (I:\home\scans\) without needing to select anything. I keep the default sequential numbering naming scheme. I got a sheet fed scanner so I don't have to keep lifting the lid of a bed scanner. I setup a shortcut on the scanner so I press the scanner touchscreen twice ("Shortcuts", "Scan to File"), and a file appears. I don't bother with OCR - my handwriting is terrible, a computer probably can't read it, I probably can't read it.

Car documents - glovebox. I don’t even attempt to organize them anymore. Buy oil to do a change myself? Put receipt directly in glovebox, writing mileage and date on it if I am diligent. Occasionally I’ll throw away the old insurance / registration papers in the stack.

People do that with their deleted items in outlook.

helpdesk empties deleted items

Hey! I keep stuff in there!

I had previously tried setting up some sort of Apple Script or folder action to do this in macOS for someone. The other day I noticed they added a, "Remove items from the Trash after 30 days" in macOS Sierra.

I call this putting my garbage in (reverse) quarantine.

I do something similar and thought it was a cool reference to find another does it as well.

I don’t throw the second pail away and just put it in a storage bin, forever (so far). About once a year, I fish out a document. To me, it seems cheaper than the time I spent trying to think about how to sort or keep stuff.

I personally wonder what has the modern world come to, that an individual cannot take a leisurely walk without distraction, and thus feels like they must be working on a computer while getting in some basic movement for their body.

It's a world that increasingly values cognitive output over physical output. Doesn't seem that dystopian to me.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

I see him walking while working as a way to keep his physical self exercising alongside his mind, not because he can’t handle being alone with his thoughts. He even mentions that if there’s a stressful meeting, he can walk off some of the stress.

He also works remotely, and it’s important to take the opportunities to move around while remote. It’s easy to stay in the house all day, especially in a snowy winter, but getting some movement in is important for many people to have a happy and healthy life.

Different strokes for different folks - and he is certainly different. I have fantasised for years about doing my dev work away from a desk. So maybe it’s just me but I find his ‘walking desk’ fascinating and thought provoking.

He may take regular walks also and find it weird that you can't work without sitting in a chair.

To be fair, he's a very weird individual, and pretty old too (not all that modern).

Depends whether this is really "work" for him. He strikes me as a type who found his calling.

Given the alternative would be working while being sedentary, I think it's probably a fairly good (if odd) setup? I'm assuming he doesn't take the laptop like that when we he wants to walk to the shops at the weekend.

> Given the alternative would be working while being sedentary

I would say the alternative is to not work 18 hours a day, but obviously that is his choice.

> I'm assuming he doesn't take the laptop like that when we he wants to walk to the shops at the weekend.

I wouldn't put my bet on that. He has said in the past that he uses his weekends to grid down his e-mail backlog. Rather, his graphs in past posts show him not talking on the phone on weekends, but still pretty constantly emailing.

One thing that had me wondering about is how on earth he deals with reflections on the screen. Any attempt I've ever made to work outside in the sun (usually when it's too nice to be indoors) has resulted in me frustrated and giving up when I can't see a bloody thing on the screen. Maybe I'll give it a go on the Macbook Pro I've just gotten at work.

Polarized sunglasses help me a lot. As long as they aren't polarized in the same direction as your screen, it should work pretty well.

Ha! That's a really good idea. I guess most sunglasses are vertically polarized to avoid reflections off of water / wet ground so as long as the screen is polarized differently that should work.

Jack and Max are walking from religious service. Jack wonders whether it would be all right to smoke while praying.

Max replies, "Why don't you ask the Priest?"

So Jack goes up to the Priest and asks, " Father, may I smoke while I pray?"

The Priest replies, "No, my son, you may not! That's utter disrespect to our religion."

Jack goes back to his friend and tells him what the good Priest told him.

Max says, "I'm not surprised. You asked the wrong question. Let me try."

And so Max goes up to the Priest and asks, "Father, may I pray while I smoke ?"

To which the Priest eagerly replies, "By all means, my son. By all means. You can always pray whenever you want to."

I don't think he ever meant it that way. It's not that he "cannot take a leisurely walk without distraction", but that he wants to get some walking while working, i.e. the priority is reversed. He claims to walk for "a couple of hours" which is too long to not be doing anything for him. You seem to be generalizing a lot from this one person's preference.

Also, a lot of people listen to podcasts/audiobooks while walking/jogging. Is that a "distraction"? I'd say it's actually even a plus and those two activities are complementary to each other: Being in the wild helps you concentrate on the audiobook, and being able to read something uninterrupted motivates you to go out and do some exercise every day.

He is walking while working on a computer, not vice versa.

A lot of people don’t know absolutely massive amount of functionality that is stuffed in to Mathematica. It does everything from symbolic math to astronomy to economics to deep learning to biology to ... If Wolfram had figured out how to make his software free while still having sustained business, he would undoubtedly be the hero of the tech/nerd/geek world, perhaps shoulder to shoulder with Jobs or Linus or Gates - at least for the tech crowd.

Sage is free. William Stein deserves a huge amount of credit.

Some of the huge amount of functionality stuffed into Sage:

http://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/standard_packag...

Mathematica never hade widespread appeal because it wasn’t even close to being affordable. Sage never had widespread appeal because it wasn’t even close to being Mathematica.

It was free with every NeXT workstation!

This right here, I believe, is the biggest problem facing software today. How do you pay for it? End-users expect software to cost $0, yet it takes a lot of time and effort to build anything.

The most successful software projects and companies I see today are those which figured out innovative business models: advertising, hardware, free for open source / paid for business, make it all open source and get a job maintaining it.

There's no one correct answer. For any business model you pick for your software today, half the world will be upset with you. I wish Mathematica was more affordable, but I can't fault someone for creating a sustainable business. As Joel Spolsky said, good software takes 10 years (at least!), and most software dies long before it gets 10 years of development, so we never even get the chance to see if it could have been good.

Business models are the most significant innovations for any business. Google or Maps or Gmail is jaw-droppingly expensive software but its sustainably free.

There might be way for software like Mathematica. For example, having marketplace that sells professional plugins like aerodynamics simulation for aircrafts or autonomous trading library etc. You can also have special classroom edition that charges nominal amounts or the enterprise edition that has cloud and IT support. The large chunk of platform can potentially be free and open source.

> This right here, I believe, is the biggest problem facing software today. How do you pay for it?

You find the people who are making money with it, find conveniences that those people would appreciate, and put them behind a paywall.

Or, with the same group of people, offer them a support contract. Sell them the “premium” version of the software with 24-7 support and contractors who can solve any problem they might come across.

Or, host the software as a service and let people pay for that.

Or, host the software as a feee service and use your users’ data to market products at them.

Or, use the software to solve a social or governmental problem, apply for grants to do more of that, and use some of the grant money to improve the software.

Or you can always sell virtual hats.

There are lots of ways to do it.

Will his company survive when he's not around anymore? (I don't think so)

I think the chance for him to be that hero, is to opensource everything, and then lead that project (linus way) or retire.....

How cow, this guy is the world's most organized person. I operate in the exact opposite way. The more disorganized, temporary, inconvenient, and cluttered my workspace is, the more I can ignore the outside world and focus on the abstract problem at hand.

Funny how people are so different.

My desk has to have exactly, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse, 1 A4 5mm graph paper pad and that's it.

I used to struggle to work on a slightly cluttered desk but these days it has to be basically empty.

In terms of paperwork, it goes behind me on shelves sorted by "Important, will need soon, Important, will need later, Not important" everything else goes in the bin.

Periodically I rip the pads apart and put them through the bypass scanner on the MFP in the main office and store the resulting PDF's.

First time my partner saw my office at work she was positively shocked because at home (other than my work space) I'm a messy, "leave it where I had it last" type.

Younger I loved having all my shit around me on my desk. It was hyper natural and hyper efficient. Nowadays ... nope. It feels a bit like reading your own undocumented one night epic project .. with age you just love a bit of structure and cleanliness

Same here. Brain shrinkage is real; one can't deal with so much disorganization as one gets older.

Maybe that's me being in denial but I don't consider it to be shrinkage. In the recent years, it seems that motivation went from small to broad. I'm not less capable intellectually [1]. I'd say it's a decrease of energy and blind passion and more things to handle that divide attention and care. There's also a bit of energy saving dimension.. as a programmer we oughta know that a well maintained structure avoid worst-case complexity.. same goes for your drawers :)

[1] I'm actually a lot smarter than my college self, I tested few years ago when wildly sick trying to do proofs from scratch on stuff I knew nothing prior (theorems on fibonacci series). And after a bit of sweating and pencil twisting I managed to have insights and solutions. So it's not a linear decrease in brain power, it's more like a rotation or shapeshift.

What's a "bypass scanner"?

Bypass tray is the auto feeder on the top of the big copiers, ours can also scam to mailbox via that so it chews through 50 pages and emails it before I walk back to my office.

Beats doing it by hand.

> ours can also scam to mailbox

This would be a Nigerian scanner then? ;)

“Dear sir or madam, I have come in possession of a very valuable document scan which I am unable to get out of the country...”

How do you process the files in the three shelves?

Haha this guy doesn't know how to use the three seashells

;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdnuOa7tDco

I pile stuff up neatly left to right and periodically (usually last hour on friday when brain is done, go through it and either move or bin it).

The goal isn't to have everything meticulously organised (that becomes a task that takes more time than you save, it's yak shaving for me at least) but to be able to find it quickly (few minutes) if I need to and crucially out of my sight line, at my desk it's completely out of view.

Flat wooden table top, laptop, sketch pad with plain unlined paper, colored pens.

Are you sure you wouldn't like to try a plain sketch pad rather than graph paper with all those nasty lines?

I use the faint grey line pads and my drawing/handwriting is terrible so quite sure :)

That reminds me of when I attended a "Getting Things Done" ((C) (R) (TM)) seminar, sponsored by work. The speaker spent hours explaining how to organise the to-do-lists and calendars and how to label tasks (can be done on the road, calls, can be done offline, importance vs urgency, ...) and how to prioritise them, a really elaborate system, the whole shebang. And it results in the one task you should be doing right now.

He presented it, looked content, and invited questions, when someone asked, "ok, suppose now I know what I should be doing now. But what happens if I just don't feel like it? What then?". The presenter was dumbfounded, seemed confused, and had basically no answer (that I remember).

Completely unqualified thought, but I think it has to do with how you organize information in your brain. Are you spatially oriented or do you think in lists?

I'm a chemist, and I definitely think spatially. Creating images of physical objects in my head and reorienting them is a major part of my job, and the "memory palace" has been the most valuable memory tool I've found.

I can't think if there's an extra set of papers on my desk. I tend to organize my tasks using the physical space on my desk, so the most urgent item is about 3 inches from my keyboard at any time. I start to get anxious if too many things pile onto my desk without intentionally organizing them into priorities.

The implicit sharing of his sleep schedule through his email times over the past 25 years makes me feel better about myself.

https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2012/03/outgoin...

What happened in 2002?

EDIT: oh, NKS. https://www.google.com/search?q=when+was+wolfram+nks+release...

The article says

>The big empty spaces are when I’m asleep, and, yes, as I’ve changed projects—e.g. finishing A New Kind of Science in 2002—my sleep habits have changed; I’m also now trying an experiment of going to sleep earlier

Earlier being 2am

I did not see in the article, but I wonder if all of those times are in the same timezone and if those times are based on UTC or his actual timezone, I did not see data on that but could have missed it.

It's his actual timezone - EST (Concord, Massachusetts).

>The first thing one sees from this plot is that, yes, I’ve been busy. And for more than 20 years, I’ve been sending emails throughout my waking day, albeit with a little dip around dinner time. The big gap each day comes from when I was asleep. And for the last decade, the plot shows I’ve been pretty consistent, going to sleep around 3am ET, and getting up around 11am (yes, I’m something of a night owl). (The stripe in summer 2009 is a trip to Europe.)

https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analyti...

Shouldn’t that link be https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=when+was+wolfram+nks+r...? ;)

It is always great to see what an utterly incorrigible dweeb (and I use that term affectionately) does with power and money. I just fucking love that instead of a Learjet he has basically a large ecosystem of software built specifically for his personal needs.

He says in the article he went from never traveling to traveling all the time. I wonder if he has a Learjet as well.

I agree. This was one of the most motivating articles I've read in a while. This is a man who unabashedly goes 100 % all in to whatever he wants, fully admits it's nutty, and looks like he's having the time of his life.

Here's a guy I think of as very successful, and very smart, and yet he seems extremely tethered to his computers.

Meetings while walking, and assuming nobody notices? Questioning the practicality of time spent outside? That's kind of... really... sad.

It’s not that nobody notices that he’s walking... it’s that, what is anyone going to do about it? Who signs their paychecks?

I'm just going to say this: walking is faaaar better than eating :)

I think most of us would be sad or depressed if our lives were like his. But it seems like he has intentionally conformed the rest of his life to the things that matter most to him (his work, company, personal productivity) rather than what you or I think of as happiness or a good life. I certainly wouldn't want to be him, but if he's living how he wants to live, who am I to judge.

I might be a little biased though, WolframAlpha got me through countless hours of college homework assignments.

I guess it really depends. I think I'd loved this lifestyle - always doing work that contributes directly to humanity's scientific output and having time to follow your own intellectual pursuits? Sign me in.

What's wrong with meetings while walking? It's a great way to have a meeting, even better if it's a one on one and you're both walking.

Better than sitting in a cube all day like a lot of sw eng...

What's so sad about someone who doesn't really like to spend time outside? Personally I like going outside, but I'm a bit jealous of people who love their work environment that much.

I think there's great value in walking with no distractions and it is definitely still very productive if it lets you focus and gather your thoughts. Many great thinkers in history (Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, Carl Jung, doubtless many others) had walking as important part of their routine. But, there's no accounting for taste, and whatever works for you is all that really matters.

That was an intense read. I’m not sure I actually learned much of value beyond how awesome it might be to have an entire IT department at your beck and call, but certainly his File System has helped solidify some of my germinating ideas on how to reshelve my own file system with which I am lately dissatisfied.

Through the article I found he livestreams many of his meetings on Twitch!

This is particularly candid moment I happen to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGjvFyRk_4I&feature=youtu.be...

edit: I wasn't aware of the negative opinions regarding his ego, but from listening to this meeting I can say they aren't unsubstantiated!

I have somewhere between 5–20% comprehension of what they're talking about in a technical sense but found the conversation from 4m31s (as you've linked) to ~10m45s utterly fascinating.

you know what's insane about that video? the CEO of a 100 (200?) person software company is writing docs. but then again i'm not surprised that wolfram is a micromanager.

And I quote...

> Usually we (which quite often actually means me) will write documentation for a function before the function is implemented.

The article says 800. I can't imagine what it would be like, to be part of a machine of 800 people basically set up to cater to the whims of one overlord.

Every company is set up to cater to the whims of one overlord. Then there is a group who can change the overlord. Most effective companies are dictatorships with a fairly reasonable dictator.

I don't think I necessarily agree. While having one person who has complete control and effectively focuses a business to the correct decisions and technical goals is super effective, part of that effectiveness is getting the rest of the business on the same mindset as you and giving employees room to add their technical nous to the work.

The criticism leveled (which I do not actually any insight to the truth of) is that essentially people have to follow his "whims" and are micromanaged, which does not bring out the best of employees and can be very stifling.

But that said, I don't know the truth of that criticism.

Two words: Larry. Ellison.

The way you say it is like you're saying that Documentation should be second class, not just that it is anyway. Keep in mind that the software in this particular case, is software used mostly for the API, so the Documentation is front and centre.

Very much so. The documentation is the specification, so it's not merely writing the documentation, but writing the specification.

Another interesting tidbit that plays into this...the syntax coloring is programmatically derived from the documentation (yet another consequence of the documentation being the specification). This wasn't mentioned in the meeting because most or all of the participants already knew this, but it's an important part of the subtext of the discussion.

Speaking as an insider who wasn't present at that particular meeting, but has been present in some other live-streamed meetings.

Attention to detail is not micro-managing. In fact, it's very very good thing and you should have respect for people at CEO level having this kind of care, understanding and passion for their products. It's kind of thing that makes Steve Jobs, the Steve Jobs.

Especially as documentation is kind of the core value proposition of Mathematica

I think this video highlights as a leader being the 'bad guy' in a meeting because they are demanding excellence to a specific vision/goal and their subordinate's output isn't meeting their expectations.

There are no personal attacks, just critiques on the thought process, output and plan (or lack of planning), all of that is fair game. The dev(?) even admits at ~25:40 that they should be taking notes and fixing what is pointed out.

There's a bit of passive aggressive hierarchy conflict at play but it doesn't go that far IMO. Tone mostly goes back to relaxed ... could be friendlier but alas.

Reminds me of this Sir Issac Newton quote:

> Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.

Hearing this coming from Newton is surprising, given his infamous feud with Leibniz over which of them invented calculus.

Not really. People can have ideal ideas that don't match their own lived reality. And the Newton / Hooke feud is probably more interesting and relevant, than the Leibniz one (given that was entirely of Newton's making).

Do you have a source for that?

That does not sound like Newton ar all.

Maybe mastery doesn't imply usage

If you google “Newton” Google attributes it to Issac Newton on the side bar, seems like it must be wrongly attributed unfortunately. Thanks for correction.

This is a Howard Newton quote. I think you're confusing it with "F = ma".

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/07/18/tact/

Thanks for the amusement, I'm left with the distinct impression that if everyone on that call were in the same room it would have gone a lot better.

His staff didn't even seem engaged in the subject.

From the article:

"Often I’ll do a meeting where I have lots of people in case we need to get their input. But for most of the meeting I don’t need all of them to be paying attention (and I’m happy if they’re getting other work done)."

So they're not paying attention because he enjoys having excess people on calls and wasting their time.

Sounds like torture. The CEO wants you on the call, probably won't need you, and you're supposed to feel comfortable disengaging when he's berating coworkers about a missing third argument in a function's documentation.

> and I’m happy if they’re getting other work done

It seriously doesn't sound like he's happy when he snaps at them to unmute and start responding!

If that's what he's arranging, then its his own self-created dysfunction.

The people on that particular call didn't even seem to know what they were talking about half the time though. It's entirely possible that they're both asked to passively participate in oversubscribed meetings and neglecting to do their jobs creating further frustration.

First, it's awesome that these are live-streamed and publicised.

Second, I didn't hear anything unreasonable in that meeting. SW has a reputation for ego, but honestly this particular extract just sounds like frustration with buggy/messy documentation. I mean, the fact that the CEO is personally going through documentation is telling in itself.

I agree. If that seems ego driven, then you shouldn't be working in a professional environment. It's not even so much frustration as just getting to the bottom of the issue and resolving it.

I don't know why you're bending over backwards to excuse it.

It's toxic. He's being nasty. He could say everything he does without the snapping, blowing up at questions, dramatic sighs, 'oh boy's. It's all so incredibly passively aggressive.

And that's actually the worst bit! It's hard to call him out when he's not explicitly calling them 'idiots' or something. It's like it's some kind of plausible deniability of being horrible to people.

But I don't know these people and maybe they're all fine with it. And Wolfram is paying the bills so it's his style if he wants.

I guess "toxic" is pretty subjective. Personally, I draw the line at personal insults. You might draw the line a little earlier.

As is “nasty”, “snapping”, “blowing up at”, “dramatic”, and “passive agressive.” Oh, and let’s not forget “horrible.”

Have you ever dealt with bad docs? Seriously!!!

I only watched a few minutes but I didn't see anything objectionable. I was getting annoyed at the people he was talking to. It seems to me, you either know what the answer is so state the answer and the evidence, or you don't, so state that you don't know and express your plan to find an answer and return with it.

Once I hurt my back, had to drive for three hours, park far away, hadn't eaten all day, and when I stopped at a restaurant, having hobbled there with my bad back from a distant parking spot, the hostess was absent for ~5 minutes and when she finally showed up she was distracted and talking to other people multiple times while I tried to get an answer to how long the wait would be and if I could get served. So far, I've lived a fairly easy life, and I've always tried to be polite and even keeled - but in that moment of discomfort, tiredness, hunger, and disrespect, I genuinely wanted to be rude to the hostess.

The point of the digression is, I imagine that's what being the CEO is like, only it's not once. It's every day. And the more committed you are, the more hours you subject yourself to this kind of thing. You just want things well documented, bugs fixed, quality high, you want people to answer questions etc. When you've been dealing with this all day for decades - I can see how easy it would be to be a bit impolite.

Rather than admit that the red, undocumented third parameter was a mistake they seemed to make all sorts of rationalizations for why it’s wrong (“It’s new”, “I thought it was fixed”, etc.) rather than just saying “You’re right, that’s a bug. We’re fixing it.” Why were the employees waffling around the fact that it actually is a problem? Calling them out on their justifications and excuses isn’t being toxic or nasty, it’s called being a professional who takes pride in the work they put out to the public.

Either it's a flaw in the engineers (lack of social skills to admit a mistake accurately) or in the working climate (fear of unreasonable repercussion make the engineers defer disclosure of failure). I'm undecided. Eitherway it seemed surprisingly inefficient way of communicating.

Can you link to a bit you consider toxic and nasty? I went in expecting to hear him sound like he was reading out a Linus Torvalds email but I couldn't find anything like that.

Yup, and at the end he even says good work and acknowledges that he knows it's taken a lot of work to get to this point.

It's not professional for a mentor to take out his frustration on employees. I'm not saying I never get frustrated with poor quality work, but I don't see it as helpful taking out that frustration on someone. Better things I can do: 1. Figure out how to inspire quality with positive reinforcement. 2. Eliminate blockers to quality. 3. Automate quality checks so I'm not even reviewing code unless it already passes a certain QA level. Sometimes people are broken and that's fine. Let them go instead of beating up on them. But very often it is the processes that are broken and you should be fixing those instead of trying to fix people.

Oy, I'm fascinated that this is publicly available, but kind of horrified if I was one of the developers on this public "con call"!

Interesting stuff, here's a recent one, if anyone is interested they are reviewing some new blockchain related methods and they walkthrough the methods. Not everything is clear to everyone, it's refreshing to see a very smart, CEO level person, logically step through new concepts/code.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYcH0IngWxs

This is crazy. He is the CEO of an 800 person company and the people talking to him sound like they are completely unprepared for the conversation. Of course the third argument needs to be fucking documented! Their response should have been "yes, this is a clear bad, we'll fix the documentation by tomorrow's meeting." Not just sit silently on the call while the CEO has to go do it themselves.

The people there sound like I did on my thesis progress reports after I had been out drinking with friends. As much as I was ready to hate on Wolfram given his reputation, he's completely justified about his complaints, and he's being professional about it.

I see nothing "toxic" about this conversation, as others have mentioned. He is completely focused on the work; there are no personal attacks. The main interlocutor sounds like he is taking things personally.

Frankly a good CEO would not tolerate this bullshit or promote people like this. My guess is people there are promoted on technical merit alone which means that there must be a lot of smart fucking people there but with obviously poor task execution skills.

It's obvious that these people are not stupid and understand that interfaces need to be documented. They are instead confused. I've had micromanagers like SW before, and have been confused many times at the state of something precisely because the micromanager took it upon themselves to "do it themselves" on the fly, just like SW did here.

Admitting that it's clearly bad and saying you'll fix it by tomorrow would be a neverending pursuit, because the micromanager's meddling is constant and touches everything.

No doubt somebody else will now be confused that this third parameter is suddenly documented when it was a task delegated to them, and somebody else is confused because they were told to deprecate the parameter.

The difference between a micromanager and a detail-oriented manager is the micromanager tells you how to do it, the detail-oriented manager tells you what to do. I only see detail orientation here. Even the string to describe the API was written by Wolfram even after he asked for suggestions. I’d expect them to jump in and commit to fixing it themselves.

Oh boy. If people think this is an example of being unacceptably direct and gruff, I need to reexamine the way I talk during technical discussions.

I've always thought it best to just cut straight to the core of issues like he's doing. I suppose it's a jerk move to corner people into admitting they're wrong even when it's obvious. Maybe there's a nicer jedi-mind way to do it.

Fwiw: in 2010 Stephen Wolfram did an interview about his setup: https://usesthis.com/interviews/stephen.wolfram/

I always find it interesting to see what personal productivity improvements highly successful people _do not_ implement. Considering that the typical productivity speel for technology & progaming tasks is tiling window managers (minimize mouse movement), mechanical/ergodox/split keyboards (ideal hand width and orientation), possibly linux or OSX w/ homebrew to automate tasks using scripts. It's interesting to see how relatively rare these setups are among CEO's (in tech) and how 'normal' the setups of successful people really are.

There are several factors I see that are or have been impeding implementation of such setups. Firstly, many of the most common tiling WMs have only existed since the 2000s resulting while the current, mature segment of highly successful individuals likely started with the tools available in the 80s & 90s and by then both Windows and Mac OS were using desktop metaphor (floating) environments.

The use of floating windows (even with snapping, etc) increases use of the mouse and decreases the relative benifit of highly specialized keyboards like the ergodox. And a lot of membrane keyboards nowdays can /feel/ decent w/o mechanical switches.

The choice of OS is likely whatever they have been using since the 90s with some bias towards switching to OSX/MacOS and since it provides many linux-like capabilities in terms of shells for scripting(albiet often horendiously out of date).

Finally, likely the largest factor contributing to having relatively normal setups is that the more involved tasks can be delegated to employees whom may or may not have highly customized setups.

That's because a lot of gains can be realized from sticking to a given system. The hardest part is starting some system than sticking to it. Also, being a CEO makes things easier from other perspectives. You have staff to take care of your mundane stuff and people double check to make sure they utilize your time effectively. A random employee wouldn't walk over and lean on his desk to comment about the weather.

    > It's interesting to see how relatively rare these setups are among CEO's (in tech) and how 'normal' the setups of successful people really are.

I suspect that's because one's setup isn't really a big deal.

Saving a odd second or two because you're using a split mechanical ergodox or whatever dvorak keyboard with no window manager and scripts to automate the wazzoo out of everything adds up to... not very much at all unless you're doing very repetitive tasks where seconds count.

I mean, I think folks should just use whatever makes them happy, and it is interesting to see what people end up using like on usesthis (https://usesthis.com/). But really, people can be productive with almost anything.

Personally, I use tiling window managers and mechanical keyboards not to be more efficient, but rather for 1) physical comfort and 2) personal taste.

By physical comfort, I mean that I rely on my hands too much to not take care of them to avoid RSI and personal taste, well, I like not having to reach for a mouse, being able to have what I need side by side with the press of a button and just the minimalist look of tiling window managers.

Does it also make me more efficient or productive? Maybe, possibly, who knows! It probably does, as it removes roadblocks from my workflow, but its not something I pay a lot of attention to.

I almost wish more CEOs published something like this. It's quite fascinating to see what sort "manpower" it takes to help them run/lead their org at their greatest efficiency... the behind the scenes look. I imagine head fashion designers or Apple and Tesla execs have a troupe of people working tirelessly to make sure the boss doesn't scew up.

I can see why some people think this guy is a bit much (Wolfram-branded Pilot Precise Grip pens, Wolfram Cloud, Wolfram Language) but this is a very thorough and interesting article. He even admits the embarrassing stuff: Apple Mac Pro.

> Wolfram-branded Pilot Precise Grip pens,

Honestly, that's just swag. I must have a box of them, plus 10 t-shirts, cardboard spikeys, bags from various conferences.

Why is that embarrassing? I think they're pretty and pretty good.

I really like the personal homepage idea. Reminds me of the iGoogle days.

Anyone know any products / tools to create a simple one consisting of essentially an organized collection of links? I guess any static site generator could work, but would be nice to have an out of the box theme and can show RSS Feeds.

Google Chrome shows tiles of your most visited links. In mine, HN is first one.

Problem is it includes distractions. A personal homepage would be better focussed on things I SHOULD do, rather than things I actually do.

You might like Netvibes. I've been using it for over a decade and it's still fantastic. https://www.netvibes.com/

Haven't heard that name in ages. Thanks for the reminder.

Wow, I'd love something like this, but that would incorporate my social media into background stream of super-compacted, mostly-text events. Think of being on a Slack channel (in Compact mode), where the only things that are posted are messages from your Facebook timeline, e-mail, HN stories, replies to your HN comments, new IM threads etc. Also, you could pin stuff you care about, and with one click/keyboard press, everything else gets cleared.

Alas, I don't think Facebook in particular allows for such deep integration with one's feed - because yes, that would essentially replace me the facebook website/app.

I've been using Dropbox Paper and you can extend this AWS Lambda script I wrote that uses Dropbox Paper to generates a webpage to include RSS: https://gist.github.com/abhiyerra/7dcd96741cf98a1823da91f32b...

I just started using Notion (https://notion.so) for organizing to-do lists, links, notes, and reminders. It's simple yet amazingly flexible. I highly recommend it.

I just created my own chrome extension, and an html file for the new tab page:

https://github.com/codemac/config/tree/master/chrome

Currently, I have a cronjob that greps my todo files in org mode, and puts the currently scheduled task below a picture of General Sherman.

Doesn't have a theme or ability to show RSS feeds but... I built an open-source Chrome extension I call SwiftTab for creating a custom page of links from my Bookmarks Bar (or a folder named "_Swift") https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/swifttab/poikmgend...

Source code is @ https://github.com/joshbuchea/chrome-ext-swifttab

I just don’t know about hiking with a laptop. Down time is also productive time. That said, it is interesting how he organizes the digital assets of his life.

A little off topic: I subscribed to use the Wolfram Language a couple of years ago and really liked the integrated documentation, and the capabilities built in for just about everything. What was a turnoff was the very slow cycle time between entering code to be evaluated and seeing results. I signed up for a less expensive level of service (about $20/month) and that may have been the problem. I would like the speed of, for example, Common Lisp repl development with the power of the Wolfram Language.

Rather than throwing even more money at Wolfram, it would be even better to put up a fund (maybe a crowdsourced campaign) to buy the rights to Macsyma and PDEase to release them under the GPL.

Except the Wolfram Language provides access to vast information about the world.

I worked with the Knowledge Graph at Google and Wolfram Language seems like an easy to use personal version of that.

I would be happy to pay for it, forever, if it were more responsive.

> Except the Wolfram Language provides access to vast information about the world.

Which is mostly pulled in from public data sources, such as the CIA World Factbook, US census and economic data, US Geological Survey data, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, etc. Knowledge Graph was based on Freebase, which in 2016 transferred its database to the Wikidata project (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page). So once again, instead of throwing more undeserved money at Wolfram for appropriating other people's work, the better alternative is to work on integrations of Wikidata into Common Lisp, SciPy, Org mode, etc. and contribute to Wikidata itself.

You have a good point!

Something to consider starting. A quicklisp library that caches wikidata, etc. and provides a uniform interface.

Isn't it at least conceivable that there are a small number of people who can just be mentally productive all the time? Considering what he has accomplished in his life, if such a person could exist, wouldn't he be one of them?

> Down time is also productive time

...or maybe it's not productive and not being productive all the time is a good thing for your mental health.

I think it depends on person. Also Cal Newport, though advocating the concept of "stopping the work day at 5 p.m.", also strongly advocates that one should not mindlessly spend the time "after work", but should engage in other types of productive activities such as reading books. He quotes Bennett, who said that the human mind doesn't tire except for when sleeping, and all it needs is switching to a different type of intellectual activity, which I find to be very reasonable.

My personal experience has been that whenever I'm varying the type of productive activities throughout the day, I get a lot done, feel satisfied, stay sharp and productive. Whenever I do too much mindless entertainment such as playing too much of one video game or browsing reddit, I end up not feeling very well the next day whatsoever.

So in the case of Wolfram maybe he checks email or does some type of activity that is not the same as the type of activity he does while at the desk, which I think can be totally conceivable and productive.

Wow. This mans brain operates differently than mine (in a wonderful sense).

Most interesting to me here is his "walking outside" work setup (fairly simple, as he says, like you're selling popcorn). Because apparently walking outside reduced his resting heart rate more than just relying on a treadmill.

One could imagine any number of reasons: air quality, sunshine, a calming effect from seeing nature or variety in peripheral vision, difference in terrain providing stimuli, strength benefits of carrying the apparatus (it sounds like he often carried stuff even before working outside)

The benefits of the outdoors are pretty widely reported. And it doesn't sound like he went outside much of his own inclination.

I recently finished a project which looks a lot like that browser homepage!

https://targetblank.org

I'm struck by how his Metasearcher is somewhat similar to Gelernter's Lifestreams concept. I've taken for granted for 20+ years that would eventually be coming and it hasn't yet. Some Google products are a little like it: Photos, Gmail. I like that Wolfram has his own.

Reminds me Perkeep also. https://perkeep.org

Is Wolfram Notebooks the new Lotus Notes? Does their "Knowledgebase" compete with Bloomberg - is there live information?

Yeah there's live information sourced from all over the place...kind of like Wolfram Alpha in a notebook

https://www.wolframalpha.com/knowledgebase/

I couldn't take tips on personal infrastructure from someone whose monitors aren't perfectly aligned.

“One, for example, initiates the process for me doing an unscheduled livestream: it messages our 24/7 system monitoring team so they can take my feed, broadcast it, and monitor responses.”

Must be nice!

I had to stop reading. It's such an obsession with working and technology.

haha. if i was walking outside and ran into wolfram like this, i'd fucking bookdrop his stupid ass laptop and watch him cry and freakout. I work in town with wolfram HQ, have had relationships with folks who work very closely with wolfram. As you could imagine he is a fucking nut case haha.

I applaud his work ethic, but can you imagine how many people it takes to support this work style? Programmers building custom interfaces, around the clock monitoring people for his streaming whims (mentioned in the article), system admin's keeping his home cloud running, his personal dev cloud at the office, and the syncing between them. It seems pretty personnel intense

Which is a crucial point. While his infrastructure might be interesting (or perhaps bizarre), it's not repeatable for the vast majority of people.

This is his empire he has build from scratch and is ultraeffective for years.

Now compare it to how much work is involved to support politicians work style and what is the efficiency of that system.

There is something that makes me a little sad inside that running on the treadmill while being on the computer and working is even a possibility. It's like in the movie WALL-E where people are shuffled around on lazy-boy like chairs while eating ice cream. It just feels wrong. There is much to be appreciated with being with your thoughts, music, and running.

Stephen Wolfram created his remote organization in spite of Richard Feynman advise:

~~~~~~~~~

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand-ord...

You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in - but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administering it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? You won't enjoy administrating people because you won’t succeed in it.

You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.

~~~~~~~~~

Funny but he seems to be old enough to realize that success in life and career is about people, not machines.

That envelope idea based on need (Hotel, Conference, Car, etC), that's a pretty slick idea.

I have a few of those for different uses: mini toiletry bag, extra toiletry bag, mini electronics bag, extra electronics bag, travel laptop bag, world adapter bag. I use zip locks or water-resistant roll-top bags to compress better in a 25L "personal item/carry-on" bag.

My camping gear is organized the same way: cold weather gear bag, cookery bag, bug spray/sunscreen/soap bag, medical bag, utility tool bag, hydration bladder, tent bag, sleeping bag, burning man costume bag, burning man crafting bag, mini cocktail kit, ...

This tidbit is delicious:

Perhaps all that data I’ve collected on myself will one day let one basically just built a “bot of me”.

In the end all we want is freedom. I suspect that productivity optimization is our unconscious search of a (social) way of getting free.

I just realized upon reading this that I might have car sickness too (and that it's a real thing). It's worse if I sit at the back, usually its a concoction of strange feelings, mild nausea, weird pangs of pain...

I wish I was 10% as organized as Wolfram.

He probably wishes he was 10% as human as you ;-)

The way he organizes things is almost like an experimentation and reflection process. Boring activities can be fun if a bit structure/design is added!

That's great! But I think life should have some uncertainty and a little entropy. It is the little chaoses that make life interesting.

> in my pocket I have a pen, together with a piece of paper folded three times (so it’s about the size of a credit card)

I'm really loving this idea

Index cards also work well for this.

That rack photo belongs in /r/cablegore

Any idea what the "roll-around mouse" thing is that he mentions? The only Google results for that phrase are cat toys

A mouse with a ball inside of it?

He's probably referring to a regular mouse that you move around your desk. As opposed to a touchpad or static mouse with a large sphere you spin around with your thumb.

Old-school non-optical mouse

Did you know even the old-school computer mouse uses light to work?

The new school just don't have a mechanical component of a ball and two rollers which spin two separate "gears" which blocks light and then math to figure out the horizontal change + vertical change.

I found that pretty neat when I learned. (I'm old enough to remember the pains of using a gunked up ball mouse.)

The old-school mice were also called "optical mice" because the old-old-school mice used mechanical sensors.

For old-school meaning about '85 or so, 'optical mouse' meant a mouse on a special gridded pad that worked optically.

See this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sun_optical_mouse.jp...

That's not a regular mouse pad, it's a special red/blue/silver grid detected by a laser in the mouse.

You could rotate the mouse pad and the mouse wouldn’t track. Very prankable.

Edit: At least on a Sun workstation

I have fond memories of those things.

A Logitech wired optical mouse. At the very end of the article, he gives links to all of the gadgets and software he uses. (Actually, I like that he did it that way, rather then polluting the article with lots of products mentions -- other than his own product, of course.) The mouse info I've copied verbatim below. Interestingly he uses one with a cord -- maybe he had driver issues with wireless mice.

Mouse

Logitech wired optical mouse

[Though I’ve considered more modern and more numerously buttoned mice]

https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Optical-Wired-Mouse-Black/dp...

I can't un-see that Comic Sans clock

> On my personal homepage there are some links that do fairly complex things. One, for example, initiates the process for me doing an unscheduled livestream: it messages our 24/7 system monitoring team so they can take my feed, broadcast it, and monitor responses.

Stephen mentions that his mouse is on the left because he's left-handed. I'm left-handed, and I don't think I've ever seen someone put the mouse on the left.
How much difference would it make to accuracy, or does the other hand eventually learn to compensate?

> I'm left-handed, and I don't think I've ever seen someone put the mouse on the left.
I'm left-handed. I mouse left-handed at work and right-handed at home. I used to mouse exclusively right-handed, but I started developing wrist-aches and realized I could prevent them by not using one wrist so disproportionately.
> How much difference would it make to accuracy, or does the other hand eventually learn to compensate?
Zero. I got used to using my left hand very quickly, in no more than a day or two.

Do you use a left handed mouse or the same mouse you would use for your right hand? Also, which mouse are you using?

I use generic ambidextrous mice, but flip the left/right buttons so my index finder is always main-click and my middle finger is right-click.

I'm left handed but when I have had a physical mouse (or... trackball) it's always on the right. My left hand, at this point, is essentially incompetent at mousing. That's partly because in the computer lab at school the mice were on the right side and often the cables were too short to be moved to the left with easy use. In other shared environments it's good to be able to just sit down at any machine and use the mouse there---the same reason left-handed people often want to still learn right-handed guitar.
If I'm on my laptop I use the trackpad mostly with my left, but on the few occasions I've used a separate trackpad device I've put it on the right.

I (also left-handed) got the impression that I'd probably be a bit more accurate using my left, but found right-handed overall more practical, since you can't really switch all the random PCs you use around, especially nowadays where many have non-symmetric mice you can't really hold with your left, and for me consistency wins then. I use laptop touchpads with my left though.

I'm right handed, and after experiencing some starting RSI issues, I've switched my workplace mouse to the left. I'm using a cheap upright mouse. At home it's right-handed, with a three-button IBM/Lenovo mouse (no scroll wheel).
Helped my issues a lot, and I haven't experienced a major difference between UI navigation or even light image manipulation between the two setups. Then again, I'm not a twitch gamer or visual artist, so you might call that an "ambisinister" setup.
Only having to move my left arm 10cm at work to get from keyboard to mouse is a nice added benefit, although you'd get the same for a dextrous arrangement if you wouldn't use a full size keyboard.

I’ve always admired Wolfram. As he said in the article he could have made his company much bigger but he has a great thing going and gets to do what he loves most every day. Do really cool stuff, mostly stay out of the rat race and make a few bucks.

“Twenty years ago I imagined doing it with an augmented reality display and a one-handed (chorded) keyboard.”
The idea of being more productive away from my desk has always been appealing.
I hope he explores this further. This would be an improvement to the computer strapped to you.

Sorry if this is off topic, but does anyone know what model/brand of the satphone pictured in the hardware/daily gear section?
Alternatively if anyone here knows that market I'd appreciate some guidance in terms of what brands to look at.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you can see a Product Details box where Wolfram lists the specific products he currently uses. According to that, the satphone is an Iridium 9555 (https://www.amazon.com/Iridium-9555-Satellite-Kit-Packaging/...).

What the heck... this guy just wrote more words on his personal infra than I have probably written in my lifetime.
In all seriousness, everything said in the top ranked comment by chubot - ditto here. The article was too long for me to finish, though.

bring a satphone when go outside?
I thought at least 90% of inhabitable place has some GSM signal?

I once visited the US SW with a T-Mobile phone and I think I've seen it connect to some network twice in ten days.

"And—partly out of caution about having a radio transmitter next to my head all day—my headset is wired,"
What is the current medical consensus on how dangerous wireless headsets, bluetooth headsets, cell phones, etc are?

Of the known ways for electromagnetic radiation to harm cells (directly breaking chemical bonds when a molecule is hit by a photon, and heat damage from the energy absorbed), we are pretty sure that wireless headsets and cell phones are safe.
The frequencies they use don't involve photons that can break bonds, and they don't have enough energy for heat damage.
The open question is whether or not there are either unknown ways it can harm cells. An unknown direct harm method is probably unlikely. There have been enough studies that we would have spotted it.
An unknown indirect harm, though, is harder to rule out. An indirect harm would be something like it can't cause cancer, but if a cell goes cancerous for some other reason the electromagnetic radiation interferes with the body's mechanisms for detecting and fixing or killing the cancer cell.
Keep in mind that even if these things do increase risk, either by some unknown direct mechanism, or by an unknown indirect mechanism, we can say that the risk increase is low. You probably do dozens of other things a day with similar or more risk that you could avoid.
Bottom line: if you want to have a wireless device next to your head all day for convenience or out of work necessity, no one can really say you are being foolish or cavalier toward you health. But if you decide to minimize such device usage, no one can really say you are worried over nothing.

> I do basically no videoconferencing. Screensharing is great, and critical. But typically I find video distracting.
In our remote work we also do not use video, but use screensharing and audio a lot.

Is there a good open source database of people and things like the pBase Wolfram mentions in this article? I've been thinking of hosting an instance of Monica myself.

Only 1 mention of pBase in this thread so far, I really liked this idea of having a database of people, I'm wondering if someone has solved this problem already?

Also: https://sivers.org/dbt

Having a satellite phone is very interesting! I wonder what motivated that. Is he traveling to extremely rural (presumably international) locations?

I see he doesn't live in California. $.25/kWH power bill would make that basement rack very tough to justify ;)

I'm kind of outraged that he has a solution in hand to carsickness in the form of strange glasses and didn't prove a link to the product.
Does anyone know what those are? I would kill to be able to read in the car.
edit: seems to be these https://www.boardingglasses.com/?action=home&lang=EN

There is a link to nearly every item mentioned in the post in a section called "Product details". The glasses you mention are the last item under "On the move".

Toothbrush, even

Mythbusters seems to think that ginger actually works. [1]
[1] https://mythresults.com/episode43

I love how he just sprinkles in the Iridium satellite phone and the Comic Sans MS and makes no mention.

My main takeaway from this was: owns a billion dollar company and can't afford AirPods

This should be entitled “A Treatise on Why My Personal Infrastructure is Amazing”

A new kind of personal infrastructure?

you don't need a computer to code while walking, do it in your head and type it in when you get back

Obligatory mention that he spent 10 years writing a 1000+ page book of nonsense called A New Kind of Science that was basically about how great he is and how everyone else is an idiot: http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ It's not just about productivity, people...

What’s HN’s opinion of Stephen Wolfram?
Is he legit?
Is the tome A New Kind of Science worth reading?

He was a child genius, known as a bit too egotistical today, but he has made genuine contributions to the field. NKOS has a nice narrative at least, and might be worth reading as a pop sci work, but isn't very scientifically noteworthy in itself.

I met him at a talk about a year ago, I would agree he is somewhat egotistical, but he didn’t come off as arrogant - which was interesting.

He is the creator of Mathematica:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Mathematica
I would consider that legitimacy.

Mathematica is literally the worst PL I've ever used, especially since you effectively have to use their built-in editor that doesn't even have multiple undo. Of course, it is the least-worst symbolic system out there currently. But, it's not like lisp wouldn't have developed similar capabilities if Mathematica didn't come around.

You mean like Macsyma, now Maxima, where he probably got some early ideas from?

Mathematica (SMP) started out as a Macsyma clone. Here is a anecdote of how Wolfram went about this with his usual humility:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/BUxXH76CYdc/I...

That's a more direct way of making my point ;-) I don't recall seeing that Pitman post before... good stuff. Interesting to see that Wolfram always had his <cough> confidence.

It's had multiple undo in notebooks (quite more than "an editor") for a while, and you can run it from a command line or use an IDE.
https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/program/wolframsc...

I mean, I wouldn't make a website with it, but for computational/mathematical code I'd choose Mathematica and its editor over a Lisp language any day, even if it's just for the syntax (though it most certainly is not). Some of us actually find it easier to understand and write math when it looks like math and not just a wall of parentheses or ASCII art.

That's why basically all Lisp systems in that area (Macsyma, Maxima, Axiom, REDUCE, ...) provide non-lisp syntax programming.

> Mathematica is literally the worst PL I've ever used
Have you used Maple? I had to for a General Relativity course, and far preferred Mathematica and its syntax.

Mathematica is good software (I posted on it here recently).
A New Kind of Science is part of where Wolfram gets his bad rap...just read the Amazon reviews to get an idea.

More like "A New Kind of Science".

I think the answers are, essentially:
> Is he legit?
Yes - but he's amazingly full of himself and incredibly self-serving.
> Is the tome A New Kind of Science worth reading?
Not really, no.

on NKOS: http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

Thank you! That's a great review - long, well-informed, savage yet trying to be fair; totally accurate as far as I could tell, although the criticisms seemed far weaker in places. Lots of good links too. ... 168 other long reviews by Cosma Shalizi on that site, and a lot of other stuff. I hadn't heard the name before, thanks again.

NKoS is definitely worth reading especially if you have "boolean" in your username. And it's mostly pictures anyway.

I thought A New Kind of Science was wonderful. It's a deep dive into cellular automata by a very creative, systematic and productive mind. He doesn't succeed in remaking physics with these models, but he does succeed in demonstrating that the natural world is full of vast computational potential that emerges everywhere from simple interactions. It's a vision of an awesomely fecund ordinary reality.

I loved the book as well. I found it exceptionally well written, researched. The content was eye-opening and the author was . This is the first I notice that there's so much discontent with it. I'm not sure where it's coming from.
Edit: actually, I'm understating things. I found not only his central ideas very noteworthy, but how he managed to portray the historical development of mainstream science as largely random (as opposed to the, now silly, idea I may have had that today's science is somehow "optimal") was great and a positive influence on my outlooks, I'd say.

I think a lot of the discontent is that (reportedly, I have not read it) he seems to present the material as 1. largely his original work, and 2. revolutionary, while the ideas may be interesting and well presented, neither of those things are actually true.

NKOS is probably the (or at least one of the) defining works on cellular automata and the thought around/behind them, at least when it was written. It will likely be as interesting as that sounds to you.

He’s like a Mozart who thinks he’s better than Bach.

Lol good analogy, although Mozart had a sense of humor going for him

Well, he started Wolfram Research. You should try their products if you haven't. If you have, just try to imagine how you'd make something like Wolfram Mathematica or Wolfram Alpha.

I liked a ANKOS, especially the chapter about physics.

> Is the tome A New Kind of Science worth reading?
The best thing about ANKOS were the footnotes. The footnotes/appendices could have made a good popular book on the history and relationship of computation and physics, except for all of the gag-reflex-inducing Mathematica self-promotion. Here is an example from the first footnote I clicked on just now:
"But in the so-called lambda calculus of Alonzo Church from around 1930 what were instead used were pure functions... of just the kind now familiar from Mathematica."
https://wolframscience.com/nks/notes-11-12--lambda-calculus/
The whole book is full of things like that.

But, the big question on everyone’s minds: “When is v12.0 coming out, and what all will be in it?” I could swear folks said [tentatively] it was supposed to come out mid-to-late last year, or maybe now early this year? Anything more definitive yet? I keep checking back for updates, but not sure I’ve ever seen a definitive release date mentioned yet? Well, whenever it finally drops, I’m sure it’ll be great and I’ll pick up and upgrade from v9.0 (been waiting a while for the money & impetus to upgrade to the latest version).

You can get sneak-peeks on Stephen's twitch livestreams (he's been doing design reviews live for a while now, including a lot of the v12 functionality). twitch.tv/stephen_wolfram (also on Wolfram's youtube channel for archives). He tweeted Monday about burning down bugs for v12, if you follow the extrapolation, a good guess would be release of v12 in late March to early April (assuming there are no killer bugs left)

Wolfram talking about Wolfram for 14,000 words. The most Wolfram thing imaginable. Wolfram!

Reminded me of this classic:
>A group of friends and I used to do dramatic readings of the About the Author text from the Mathematica Book, which begins thusly:
>About the Author
>Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today.
>The guy wrote that himself.
>Wait, while searching for that, I see he updated it slightly in later versions:
>About the Author
>Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, and a well-known scientist. He is widely regarded as the most important innovator in technical computing today, as well as one of the world's most original research scientists.
>I guess the original didn't fully express the boundless expanse of his awesomeness.
>"Does anyone want to bet as to which will gain self-awareness first: Wolfram Alpha or Wolfram, Stephen?"
http://chrishecker.com/Kurt_G%C3%B6del_is_Laughing_His_Ass_O...

He may have the data to make the argument. I suppose if anyone wanted to measure such things which really shouldn’t be measured, I bet Wolfram has a compelling case.

Thanks for sharing this. Helped me understand what i was reading before.
It honestly took me a while to realize the article wasn't an April fools post!
I am still upvoting the submission for its comedic value.

lol, i was gonna say the same thing.

For the longest time I thought Sheldon Cooper was supposed to be a pisstake of Wolfram, specifically.

Please don't take HN threads on MPTs (Most Predictable Tangent). They're always the same, therefore tedious, therefore off topic here.
Those who haven't had enough can find their fill at https://hn.algolia.com/.

Say what you want about Wolfram, he's a brilliant guy. Brilliant people often have strange quirks and egos, but that's just a part of being them. Also, this account has only posted links about Wolfram. Is it him or an assistant?

Linus Torvalds is quirky and has an ego. Steven Wolfram is one of the most arrogant people I've ever read. It comes through in virtually every aspect of his writing.
It's understood that people who are exceptional smart aren't always socially pleasant, but Wolfram is trying to raise that bar by quite a bit.

Could he be autistic or something? Usually people would know how they would be perceived if they were well socialized. In any case, it doesn't bother me. He thinks his work is of the utmost importance and wants to be in the annals of mathematics alongside Newton, Einstein, etc. He won't be, but let him have his fun. He's at least doing interesting things, unlike these unbearable celebrities that are incredibly dull, but everyone fawns over. I hereby transfer the right of ego from the mainstream celebs to the scientists.

Relevant: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand-ord...
;-)
By the way, he is in the annals of particle physics...

Awesome letter, thank you. Feynman was a genius in more than one way. In a way, all great teachers have the ability to see into us.

I wonder how Wolfram received this letter. It's an amazing historical letter.

He might be, but none of the spectrum people I know have an ego like Wolfram's.

In an elite hackers setting, in an offsite camp in the Santa Cruz mountains long ago, this Wolfram character bolted around like a bull in a china shop, finding people to give orders to, basically, and blowing his own horn at many opportunities. It was quite a contrast to the intense hack sessions and co-teaching that was going on at the same time, while serious nerds did what serious nerds do... The news that he screwed dozens of programmers out of the proceeds of Mathematica (1990), exactly matched the in-person behavior. This was before the net was the way it is.. ymmv

Watching his livestreams, he seems like a reasonable guy focused on real work designing a programming language and software. Not sure what you're alluding to in 1990, guess it's been disappeared from the web.

Who cares if he’s arrogant? Linux is a mean bastard and Stallman is a weirdo who eats stuff of his feet during interviews. None of these people are well balanced great guys you’d take to the pub to watch football, but that’s not why their impressive in what they do and accomplish.

Linus is mean, but aware of it and actively working on it. Stallman is harmlessly weird. Wolfram thinks he's the smartest person on the planet when he's objectively not.
You are correct in that these are not the reasons they are impressive. It's the reason (in Linus and Wolframs case) they aren't particularly good people.
You should have to suffer brilliant assholes.

> Wolfram thinks he's the smartest person on the planet when he's objectively not.
That was definitive. How is he objectively not? How are you defining the smartest person on the planet. By what criteria?

How is he arrogant? Here he is clearly proud of his personal infrastructure and wants to share it with the world. What is arrogant about that?

http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2009/04/monumental_egos.... "I suggest we call the unit of ego the Wolfram"

Why doesn’t someone this wealthy have a “body man” to carry around all this shit for him?

This is the best thing I've read in a long, long time. Mr. Wolfram, how does it feel to be a god? :D

To add to comments. This story Is delusional for people knowing wolfram company. It is known that company has not performed well for a good while ... I guess this hackernews featured story is trying to reverse trends. If that was a strategy, people should start looking for new gigs. It is also notorious that his micromanaging style hasn’t appealed to many employees.

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