Live data from Hacker News

Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

blog.stephenwolfram.com

241–250 of 415 posts

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#241

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 -…

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...

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 remo…

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…

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.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 :)

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#247

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…

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.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#248
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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...

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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..

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?
Post reply on HN