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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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 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?

People do that with their deleted items in outlook.

helpdesk empties deleted items

Hey! I keep stuff in there!

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

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 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 call this putting my garbage in (reverse) quarantine.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.....

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.

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.

What happened in 2002?

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

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.

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 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.

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?

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.