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Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

blog.stephenwolfram.com

31–40 of 415 posts

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#31
post #29

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.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#32

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…

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?

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#34

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…

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…

> 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?

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#35

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…

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

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#36

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

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.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#37
post #18
post #3

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

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/ .

Please do and ignore dang. It’s important to remind people.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#39

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

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.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#40
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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