Why I progressively stopped using OS X - <AUTHOR> http://chrixsoftwarethoughts.blogspot.fr/2012/07/why-i-quit-apple-os-x.html

<comment><USER2> Sounds like mostly FUD to me.

* Yes, new server-side features require a recent version of the OS. No one is forcing you to use iCloud.

* No, you are not forced to install apps from the Mac App Store

* auto-termination? OS X isn't IOS. Apps don't "auto terminate".

* OS X 10.8 uses HFS+ with Journalling, just like the previous versions of OS X.

* SSDs are still optional on most Macs, if you don't like having ultra fast, reliable local storage.

As for the "memory manager" issue - I don't know what the hell you're doing, but I've only _just_ (as in, February 2012) replaced my mid-2007 17" MBP. It had 4GB of RAM (from factory) and still performed perfectly well for development. I only upgraded because my employer offered a new one.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a fud :) I promise. Only what it happened. And you don't read carefully my post.One example: I didn't write you are forced use Mac app Store to install program, I wrote I read about Mountain Lion, by default you must install from MacAppStore. And I asked "what in the future?". With iPad and iPhone you can't choose your app provider.

And about, the memory management problem, I used to read this sort of answer: "It doesnt come to me so, it doesn't exist".

EDIT: And about the file system, I wanted to talk about [http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/143744/mountain-lion- brings...](http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/143744/mountain-lion-brings-new- ios-like-file-handling-icloud-app-library-features)

<comment><USER2> It's either FUD or complete ignorance on the subject.

"by default you must install from MacAppStore."

That's blatantly false. You can install any App that is signed (any developer can release a mac App that is signed, without going through the Mac App Store).

If you want to install non-signed apps (which is a reasonable thing, there are thousands of great apps that are unsigned still) - you just right click on the installer and select open - that's all it takes to convince 10.8 that you accept the software is non-signed.

There is no new filesystem - There is an option to store documents in iCloud. Calling it a filesystem is akin to saying IMAP is a filesystem because the emails are also stored on a server somewhere. If you don't like the iCloud functionality, don't use it.

As for the memory thing - it's not about "it didn't happen to me". It's about it hasn't happened to anyone I've ever spoken to, and the majority of my friends use Macs (most are several years old, but have maxed out ram) and 90% of my colleagues at work (100+ staff around the globe doing development and design).

Regarding your "choose your app provider" line: The App Store isn't a "provider". It's a distribution channel for Developers. One of its features is to protect users from malicious apps.

<comment><USER3> I think he meant "I read about ML, by default you must install [it] from Mac App Store", "it" meaning Mountain Lion itself; which is true. Now I don't agree with most of his points, but you</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Warn HN: Google Chrome chokes enrolling in EFTPS - <AUTHOR>

EFTPS = Electronic Federal Tax Payment System
I thought it might save some people the frustration of filling out the form 15 times like I did, wondering what I might have done wrong.
I didn't troubleshoot the problem, I just got it working in Firefox and got on with my life. <comment><USER2> Did you file a bug on their tracker, or use Tools->Report an Issue, so that the team can look at the problem?</comment>


Quantum 'weirdness' used by plants, animals, humans - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/03/quantum-physics-biology-living-things.html

<comment><USER2> An awfully watered-down and simplified presentation of an extremely complicated process.

Obviously, organisms are bound by the laws of chemistry and hence physics. The fact that the action of some proteins cannot be explained without knowledge of entanglement does not mean that the organisms "use it", no more than they "use" the strong force to keep their nuclei together.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Very pop science-y, but leads the way to other interesting stuff.

The best bit about this article is the naked "whoa, this is all totally weird stuff, man!" attitude... which will eventually disappear as we are able to explain it all. :-)</comment>


Hidden "App Ops" Feature in Android 4.3 Lets You Disable Permissions From Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.droid-life.com/2013/07/26/hidden-app-ops-feature-in-android-4-3-lets-you-selectively-disable-permissions-from-apps/ <comment><USER3> Cue the piles of posted code snippets on StackOverflow and similar to uselessly error out on startup without the full set of requested permissions.

Well-behaved apps won't ask for permissions they don't need anyway, and badly- behaved apps will simply refuse to run without all the permissions they (and their ad services) request.

Without the ability to pretend to have the permission but not actually provide useful data, this really won't help much.

On the bright side, at least a subset of these _do_ behave in the sensible way: various reports suggest that calendar and contact accesses will successfully return empty results rather than erroring out, for instance.

<comment><USER4> There are some valid use cases for this. "Read All Contacts" is often required to optionally invite your friends. "List running Apps" for crash-reports.

<comment><USER5> Why can't some permissions be prompt-based, instead of always giving access to apps? Say for contacts, if you want to invite friend you'll allow access to contacts just now.

<comment><USER6> This is what Mozilla does lately with new HTML5 capabilities in Firefox (e.g. desktop notifications, camera access, location access, local storage), and presumably is also how Firefox OS works. I agree, it's a nice way to do things.

<comment> mh- for that matter, it's also how Chrome/Chromium/Chrome OS work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fantastic. I barely have any apps on my phone because I refuse to accept the egregious abuse of privacy (why does Pandora or Yelp need to access my contacts etc). Recently some friends recommended WhatsApp, but after seeing the massive wall of permissions it was requesting, I didn't install.

I've been waiting for this feature since the day I got my first android phone.

<comment><USER8> What I really hate is that you can pay for and install an app with an acceptable set of permissions, and then later the developer can add new unacceptable permissions essentially changing the product you bought. You can try to defer installation of the new version for a while, but it gets increasingly difficult.

I am of the opinion you should be offered a refund/uninstall if new permissions get added. Or have a way of disabling them like the posting is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be nice if there was also a "simulate" option for some permissions. That way the app would think it has a permission when it doesn't. It could return an empty phonebook for contacts or random location for GPS or confirm a SMS was sent when it never went out, etc.

<comment><USER10> That's exactly what Privacy Guard in CM does.

[https://plus.google.com/+CyanogenMod/posts/86LLXrDpVWY](https://plus.google.com/+CyanogenMod/posts/86LLXrDpVWY)

<comment><USER11> Too bad CyanogenMod itself phones home to tell the developers about you.

<comment><USER12> Only if you opt into it. It's an option under settings. They also tell you what they're sending. If you're truly paranoid, just block Google Analytics in your host file. That's all they're using.

<comment><USER11> No, it's opt-out, unless the developer's changed his mind:

[http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/04/03/cyanogenmod-will- no-...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/04/03/cyanogenmod-will-no-longer- allow-opting-out-of-cm-stats-cyanogen-says-to-chill/)

And, if he does change his mind, it's more likely to be to remove the opt-out feature.

People don't expect Free Software to phone home like common malware. It's shocking. That's why I mentioned it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is an absolutely amazing feature. I've yearned for this for years, I hope it will arrive soon. Some apps just don't need the permissions they request, or I don't want to give them, or I don't want to use the functionality that needs it. This would allow me to disallow my bookmarking app from reading my contact list.

Fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really like that Google have added this feature, but unfortunately I don't see it helping things much. I'm willing to be that many of the applications requesting odd and unnecessary permissions will be rewritten to simply not work when any one of those permissions aren't granted to them.

<comment><USER15> Many programs already won't work since they assume that they have the permissions they asked for.

<comment><USER16> Heaven forbid your app does error checking!

<comment><USER15> It does error checking. Would you write a program that constantly checks the config file to see if something changed, or to see if the euid it is running as suddenly changes? Of course not, why would you? And why would an Android app constantly check to see if the permissions it has been granted are suddenly un-granted?

More to the point: why would an app ask for permissions it didn't need in the first place? The most likely thing to happen is that the app would be useless.

<comment><USER17> Android as a framework is designed in such a way that most of the times you wish to access a feature of the device requires a permission you should be using components that can enforce a security check with the PackageManager or can handle the SecurityExceptions generated from not having a permission. Poorly architect-ed apps will have an issue with this, but those apps already have problems.

<comment><USER18> No. The Android API has always given the guarantee (and it still does) that your application's permissions will always be there. They can't be revoked during runtime. If it's in the manifest, it's perfectly fine to assume that you have it.

No piece of documentation or sample code has ever encouraged a pattern of "checking if your app has permission X or Y" because it's a total waste of time. Likewise, none of the built-in Android apps or any of the open-source apps from Google developers I've seen do that. There is no point to doing so.

In fact, it's actually bad practice because you're adding a bunch of error checking code for an error condition that's never going to happen. If you're getting a SecurityException for an action that you've explicitly requested the permission for, you're running on a broken API and it's not your responsibility to handle that.

The framework does include methods for checking permissions, but they are generally meant for things like inter-process communication and library code. There's no need to use them for ordinary applications you are building yourself. And nobody does that, rightfully so.

<comment><USER17> I'm not suggesting that apps do this or even if it is a good idea to have this level of security checks in code. Rather, the Android framework encourages decentralized pieces of code that revolve accessing various capabilities of the API. The kind of paradigms in Android could be considered to be already a bit helpful in that they promote certain kinds of application architecture that may be more easily adapted to doing such security checks.

Ultimately it is a matter of time before something like this does make its way into the core features of Android. It is worth thinking about how Android is both deficient and helpful with its design philosophy regarding that eventuality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a good way to introduce this feature.

Developers: You are now on notice to handle SecurityException and fail soft. in most cases, this should be easy to do, and when it isn't, you can, at least, post a dialog that says" "This app really needs SOME_PERMISSION in order to run."

But since it is hidden, you are not on the hook, yet, to support users that start making use of this feature.

</comment><comment><USER20> More info for devs from Mark Murphy/Commonsware:

[http://commonsware.com/blog/2013/07/26/app-ops-developer- faq...](http://commonsware.com/blog/2013/07/26/app-ops-developer-faq.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> This removes one of my pet peeves about android. Now please allow users full control over uninstalling non system applications. I hate that I cannot uninstall Facebook and Twitter on my HTC one. My past Droid Charge by Samsung (on Verizon) was even worse since it installed a whole bunch of useless applications that I had no way to uninstall. I hated that phone every single time I used it.

<comment><USER22> That's on your carrier/manufacturer, not part of Android itself.

<comment><USER21> It shouldnt be on the carrier / manufacturer. Whats innately different about the software on phones as compared on Windows / OSX / linux ... that the user cant be trusted with administrative rights on their machine?

<comment><USER23> Uhm, yes, that, precisely. Most of Android is on a level playing field - <USER2> framework services get elevated permissions under the system group but __they 're still apps __. If you let the user uninstall them, all hell __will __break loose. It 's like removing the svchost.exe process in Windows. Or removing /bin/sh in Linux. The rest just doesn't work without it. Things like Contacts, Calendar storage, Bluetooth, Play Store, Google Backup, etc, etc, are all in /system/app, where manufacturers also put their apps.

If you ask me, manufacturers should be prohibited from adding to /system/app but that's not how the Android licensing works. So, we get un-uninstallable apps (vote with your wallet - buy only Nexus experience!).

<comment><USER21> Learning the nexus lesson slowly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is exactly the feature I've been waiting for to update my old Facebook app install. Ever since they launched FB Home, the normal Facebook app has asked for exorbitant permissions including the ability to see all the apps I have installed and running and even draw on top of them. I've refused to update to that version because I don't want to use Home, and those permissions could easily have been restricted to just the Home application.

As others have mentioned I'm sure some app developers will resort to just erroring out if they can't access something they asked permission to access, but hopefully we'll be able to shame the bigger players away from that.

</comment><comment><USER25> This looks very useful. The Android permission system is pretty good from a technical point of view, but since a lot of apps just require all permissions regardless, and people are trained to disregard this when installing, it's almost moot.

I wonder if Google is using requested permissions in Play rankings. The apps which require _all_ permissions should definitely be ranked lower.

<comment><USER19> This lets you take those permissions away retrospectively. In many cases I suspect you will find it is a free app's ad network that's asking for ridiculous permissions, e.g. access to location in a flashlight app.

Google is probably reluctant to do things that "harm" competing ad networks for fear of getting sued.

<comment><USER26> It would make little sense for the finished feature to work retrospectively; apps would just grab the bounty on first launch and then the harm is done before you can get to the settings screen. This looks more like the screen you'd go to if you change your mind about an app. I expect the primary control for this feature to be a just-in-time dialog, similar to permission popups on iOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Didn't Google threaten to pull CyanogenMod's ability to distribute Google Play for implementing the same thing a while back?

<comment><USER28> Citation needed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Being stuck with old phones has its advantages. My phone only runs CM7, which has this very same feature for some 2yrs.

It's called app goggles or something.

I block internet access to lots of apps thatdo not need,it. And most of them crash when they try to use it.

Eg. Swype tries to connect every time i reboot my phone. Not sure if they are just checking for updates or uploading my personal dict, but since it doesn't try to upload anything while I'm actually writing, i just watch it die every reboot and that is it.

Almost all games i tried i removed access to see running apps and contact list. Very few crashed, meaning they probably expose those api to ads, and they are not using them yet.

</comment><comment><USER30> Permissions is the reason why I do not have Facebook installed (specifically the GPS).</comment>


Go's Error Handling Is Elegant - <AUTHOR> https://davidnix.io/post/error-handling-in-go/ <comment><USER2> Now compare a method with multiple lines and code paths, all with potential failures.

The problem with returning error codes is that you have to handle it for every external call, with exceptions you don't. The contrived examples hide this.</comment>


Wealth and empathy - <AUTHOR> http://www.vancouversun.com/Wealthy+really+different+nice+study/5239633/story.html

<comment><USER2> Nice Article. Is there research between social networking(fb) and empathy ? Fb and wealth ? I tend to find that social media sites are a trove of people concentrated on the 'self' or is it just my opinion.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does wealth lead to less empathy or does empathy lead to less wealth? I believe the latter.</comment>


Our atypical YC interview story - <AUTHOR> https://www.nomarketneed.com/YC/part-3-the-free-holiday/ <comment><USER2> Pretty fun read. I will be reading the next entry if only to hear how the story ends.</comment>


Suffering from App Store Rejection? [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE79zxtXbhg <comment><USER2> You had me at anal leakage.</comment>


Amazon EC2 freezes Moore's law - <AUTHOR> The power of an Amazon EC2 small instance has remained the same for years http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types
With EC2 there is no steady increase each year in computing power.  It's like Moore's law has been frozen in time. EC2 server instances are looking decidedly old and underpowered.
Amazon gets all the benefit of hardware costs decreasing and computing power increasing over time, but no increase in power gets passed through to EC2 users.
Very sad.   Slow old cloud computing servers are starting to make running your own powerful modern, cheap, fast servers look attractive.
Will cloud computing vendors start to seriously compete on computing power? <comment><USER2> I don't necessary agree with this post. Many m1 hosts have been upgraded from the original Opteron 2218 hardware to Xeon E5430. In the US East region you may still end up getting an m1.small 2218 though. EC2 fixes CPU allocation, so you won't get very good performance on an m1.small... 1 ECU just isn't designed to provide much compute power (1-1.2 GHz) With spot pricing, you can get small instances for typically about $0.04/hr which is reasonable if you just need a simple web server (EC2 gives you 100 Mb/s+ uplink and generally very good bandwidth & low latency).

The newer m2 instances use x5550 Nehelem hardware and perform quite well. You'll generally get the most compute power for the money with an m2.xlarge instance (6.5 ECUs) which generally performs much better than the supposedly 20 ECU c1.xlarge Xeon E5410 instance. m2.xlarge can generally be had for around $0.17-0.30/hr (spot pricing) which is very reasonable for 17GB ram (compare to Rackspace Cloud $0.96/hr for 16GB cloud server running on less powerful Opteron 2374 hardware).

If you are interested in other providers, I've done a complete specs/performance/price analysis of 20 different cloud providers including EC2 here: [http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu- benchma...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchmarking- in-cloud.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazon lowered the price of Linux instances by 15% in November 2009 (from 10 cents/hr to 8.5 cents/hr). Source: [http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=3055&categoryID=42)

If that doesn't seem like much, you also have to consider that other costs of providing the service may increase to offset hardware savings due to Moore's law. Think of the networking hardware, energy required to cool the datacenter, bandwidth, HVAC repair and maintenance, real estate, staffing, insurance. These costs are not likely to decrease at the same rate as computer hardware costs, and some, like rent and payroll actually increase.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd prefer more computing power to lower costs.

<comment><USER3> With cloud computing, lower costs = more computing power. If you were running 20 instances before, with the 15% reduction in price, you can now run 23 for the same price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was just thinking the exact opposite of this in the shower this morning.

Amazon is one of the few businesses I'm aware of that goes out of its way to keep its profit margin consistent, to the point of regularly _lowering_ the price it charges for its AWS offerings.

It's in their best interest to do so in the long run. Sure, they could fix prices and watch as a 1U EC2 instance gets more profitable over time and 100GB S3 bucket does the same, but eventually somebody else would build a business by squeezing in at a lower price.

As it stands, Amazon has the Cloud game beaten. They're just miles ahead of the next guy. Since the only reason to consider switching is price, it's a genius move on their part to keep walking the price down. If you want to beat them, you have to figure out how to build a better product _and_ squeak it in cheaper.

I just don't see that happening.

</comment><comment><USER5> They've offered more and more powerful instances as hardware has improved, and they offer spot pricing allowing the market to set the price for spare cycles.

Offering smaller instances is a good thing for a variety of reasons from simple cost savings when you don't need much to efficiently slicing up arbitrary hardware for embarassingly parallel compute jobs.

</comment><comment><USER6> At root it seems you're essentially asking Amazon to replace all their datacenter servers every 18 months to keep up with processor technology.

I don't think the economics work out for that. There have been price cuts, and I bet there will be more as Amazon pays off the hardware. Once their investment is amortized and the infrastructure is paid for, at that point the only costs on the balance sheet are the operating costs and prices would bottom out.

Worth pointing out too is that Moore's law governs transistors/cm2/$, not CPU speed as such. Thus Amazon could take advantage of Moore's law simply to fit more instances on a given chip. They may not necessarily pass these lower costs onto the customer _as rate decreases_ if the current rates are competitive in the market, and at the moment they appear to be - why would Amazon bite into their own profit margins for no reason?

I have a pet theory (which I think leads to wrong conclusions at the moment, but hey) that once CPU becomes a utility, Jevons paradox will apply and prices will start to decrease more slowly as opposed to collapsing like it has to date. FWIW I wrote the thing up here: [http://ianso.blogspot.com/2010/05/jevons-paradox-moores- law-...](http://ianso.blogspot.com/2010/05/jevons-paradox-moores-law-and- utility.html)

<comment><USER7> EC2 has been growing rapidly and Amazon has been installing newer (and thus cheaper) generations of hardware, so on average their hardware should be fairly new. Even once they reach steady state, the average perf/$ of their hardware should increase as old stuff is replaced. Clearly Amazon's costs per ECU are declining even though they don't replace equipment every 18 months. I think you're right that the lack of competition is why they aren't lowering prices much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't confuse an EC2 instance with real hardware. It's a convenient measure of computing resources used for billing purposes.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure why you say this. When Amazon says that you get 1.7GB of RAM, that's what you get. It's not an abstraction. The price of DRAM seems to be falling a lot faster than Amazon's prices.

<comment><USER9> The price of DRAM isn't falling though. A year and a half ago 6GB of DDR3 was cheaper than it is now. Sure over the long term its getting cheaper, but it takes awhile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At least Linode recently gave everyone a 42% RAM increase. Good point though, most of the hardware progress has been pure margin for the cloud vendors.

<comment><USER11> I'd say Linode are about the only people passing on the savings.

(Disclaimer: I use my linode for just about freakin' everything)

<comment><USER2> Linode is VPS, EC2 is cloud computing. Although I agree that Linode is probably the best VPS provider around, EC2 provides a lot of cloud features that Linode does not including CloudWatch monitoring, autoscaling, external EBS storage, greater memory and compute power options, AMIs, virtual private cloud. So Linode vs EC2 is not exactly an apples to apples comparison. If all you need is VPS, then Linode is really the best option available.

<comment><USER11> >Linode is VPS, EC2 is cloud computing.

No diff in utilization. You can still use the API elastically spin up new instances, if at a different scale.

>...$features..

I guess, if that sort of thing matters to you. I don't really like relying on third parties for utilities like that.

> If all you need is VPS, then Linode is really the best option available.

K, but has anybody been making their machines _faster_?

<comment><USER2> > No diff in utilization. You can still use the API elastically spin up new > instances, if at a different scale. They both have APIs, but EC2 has hourly > billing versus monthly for Linode (they issue service credits pro-rated > daily if you don't use a VPS for the entire month, refunds are manual and > require a processing fee). EC2 also offers more options in terms of CPU and > memory (3+ different CPUs and 1.7-32GB versus 0.5-4GB and single L5520 CPU > architecture). They are both elastic, but from a billing perspective, > Linode's elasticity isn't too practical.

> I guess, if that sort of thing matters to you. I don't really like relying > on third parties for utilities like that. It may matter for your project, if > you need automatic-elasticity, more durable off-instance storage, better > security, more compute power, more memory. Linode can't provide these > features.

> K, but has anybody been making their machines faster? Sure, EC2 has upgraded > their m1 hardware the past couple of years, GoGrid is upgrading to Westmere > later this year, Storm on Demand has upgraded some of their hardware, > Flexiscale has upgraded, and others.

<comment><USER12> Linode provides 512 all the way to 20G instances, fwiw.

<comment><USER2> You're right, I meant 0.5-14GB, I hadn't noticed their new 16 and 20GB instances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The thing is, computers are not getting faster anymore.

The only thing that is changing is parallel processing. So amazon is still selling a single CPU, and that single CPUs speed has hardly changed in years.

You should get more memory and disk space though.

<comment><USER14> Performance/watt is still increasing, though. This helps Amazon's margins.

<comment><USER15> But watts/dollar is quickly decreasing. I wonder if performance per dollar spent on energy is increasing or decreasing. I wouldn't be surprised if it's decreasing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Actually, if prices are not increasing, then they are falling. Prices fall by the inflation rate. Let inflation rate = 3% then the price is falling 3% per year. Not major but still a decrease.

<comment><USER4> Add to that that EC2 prices actually _are_ falling, from .10 to .085/hr for linux boxes for example, and it seems like a pretty good deal.

<comment><USER2> If you want to get the lowest pricing on EC2, use a spot instance request where your bid price >= standard pricing (i.e. 0.085/hr for m1.small). This will essentially get you a spot priced, but indefinitely persistent instance and you'll typically pay 1/2 or less than the standard pricing. I've had a spot instance running for 3 months paying about 45% off list price on average.

<comment><USER17> Can the spot price rise above the standard pricing? If so, are you able to switch to standard pricing without losing your instance(s)?

<comment><USER2> It could, but it is extremely rare. Check out <http://cloudexchange.org> to see historical pricing. A spot instance cannot be changed to standard pricing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do you actually, when running your own server cluster, upgrade every 18 months to keep up with Moore's law? I know I certainly don't. It was only just recently we phased out x86 boxes.

Will cloud computing compete over computing power? That depends, does anyone turn to cloud computing for serious computing performance?

</comment><comment><USER4> When EC2 came out, your only option was 1 compute unit (CU) with 2GB ram. Now they have high CPU and high memory options up to 26CU and 68GB ram.

If you want power, you can certainly get it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Couldn't write a couple paragraphs on a blog and then link to that?

Amazon's cut prices, and the high end of their offerings have gone up. Yes, they're going to take a disproportionate share of the benefits from speed if they can get away with it. They also took all the risk on the outlay and used to charge comparatively less per dollar of provisioned hardware when they bought those chips. So I don't think they're ripping anyone off, yet.

If it becomes a bad deal, people are free to go elsewhere - likely quite easily, what with EC2's architecture.

<comment><USER19> Excuse me, why is this being downvoted?

<comment><USER11> Don't ask meta questions like that please, distracts from the conversation at hand.

<comment><USER19> Well geez, sorry for ruining your morning.

My post was approx 20% meta question, 80% substantive, by word count.

<comment><USER11> See? You keep getting downvoted. Exercise some self-control and dignity and focus on the topic at hand. I'm violating my own habits here to try to show you what you're doing.

And getting back to the subject, are you aware of any companies that _have_ been upgrading their servers beyond just RAM (such as linode)?

<comment><USER19> Yeah, Amazon. Cutting prices across the board at the low-medium end and adding new options at the high end. As I said in my original comment.

<comment><USER11> > Sorry if you couldn't get that in between all of my awful, antisocial > behavior.

The griping and passive-aggressive comments are what's causing the down votes. _Cut it out_

As for the price cuts, at the small-medium size ranges, the cuts haven't been extensive, and certainly not to the same scale as what Moore's law would indicate. The new options at the high-end aren't an upgrade if they cost more (which is in fact the case).

At present the best deal I've been able to find in terms of $/performance has been Linode, but they aren't the most reliable in the world so far.

<comment><USER19> Moore's law is a law of economics, not nature. Competition drives the performance improvements coming out of Intel and AMD, and competition will drive the rate at which savings are passed along to the consumer in cloud service providers.

<comment><USER11> It's not even really a law of economics or nature. Or a law. It's a state of a tendency if the rate of expansion of transistor density.

At present, it's more economical (if you don't need programmatic elastic expansion of your cluster) to rent/lease dedicated hardware or set up your own. This is because hardware has been getting faster than they have been upgrading.

>Competition drives the performance improvements coming out of Intel and AMD, and competition will drive the rate at which savings are passed along to the consumer in cloud service providers.

The point of this discussion is that this hasn't happened yet with any known majors beyond RAM upgrades and small amounts of price-twiddling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am going to move past the OP's face-value argument.

The point is that amazon pricing is fairly static. You get X for $Y. However as the years go by, the value of X decreases yet you are still charged $Y. So basically going to a hosted service I might get a significantly faster machine for my buck. Sure it won't scale as quickly but that might be a minor issue, pick your battles so to speak.

Amazon needs to take into account this, and instead of upgrading everything, just start deflating prices of the old and buying newer hardware every 2 years or so and charging full price for the new hardware. This keeps them well balanced with technology. In the end this just means that instead of buying 1 server, you will buy 2 for the same price outdated servers and vuala.

However thats not quite how servers work and its not like their cost-for- operations is going down with the years as well.

</comment><comment><USER21> amazon offers a product. people buy it. if people were concerned with getting more for their money or following moore's law, they'd buy something else. instead, people buy from amazon because they're an industry leader and have good community resources available.

moore's law is about the level of modern hardware capabilities. what servers amazon uses isn't going to affect that much.</comment>


Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/ <comment><USER2> 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.

<comment><USER3> 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.

<comment><USER4> 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..

<comment><USER5> 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?

<comment><USER6> 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.

<comment><USER5> You're describing a policy of not making frank assessment of the efficacy of business practices.

<comment><USER7> 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.

<comment><USER5> 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.

<comment><USER6> Every bully I remember tried to mask their bullying as "helpful" or positive in some way.

<comment><USER5> Every dictator promised to make the nation better. This is not a good reason to reject politicians trying to make the nation better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 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.

<comment><USER9> 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

<comment><USER10> 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.

<comment><USER11> Do you name them, or just put them en masse by date? And what ocr software do you use?

<comment><USER10> 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.

<comment><USER12> 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.

<comment><USER13> 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.

<comment><USER14> 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.

<comment><USER15> just burn em in a trashcan

<comment><USER16> 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. :)

<comment><USER17> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 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.

<comment><USER19> It's a world that increasingly values cognitive output over physical output. Doesn't seem that dystopian to me.

<comment><USER20> I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 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.

<comment><USER22> 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.

<comment><USER21> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 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.

<comment><USER24> 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.

<comment><USER11> How do you process the files in the three shelves?

<comment><USER24> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 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...](https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2012/03/outgoing- mail-diurnal-image.png)

<comment><USER26> What happened in 2002?

EDIT: oh, NKS. [https://www.google.com/search?q=when+was+wolfram+nks+release...](https://www.google.com/search?q=when+was+wolfram+nks+released&oq=when+was+wolfram+nks+released)

<comment><USER27> 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

<comment><USER28> Earlier being 2am

<comment><USER27> 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.

<comment><USER29> 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...](https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of- my-life)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> 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.

<comment><USER31> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> 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.

<comment><USER33> 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.

<comment><USER34> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> 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.

</comment><comment><USER36> 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.

</comment><comment><USER37> 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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGjvFyRk_4I&feature=youtu.be&list=PLxn- kpJHbPx14mHrB5BlhImVOWo5Geg6f&t=271)

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!

<comment><USER38> 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.

<comment><USER39> 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.

<comment><USER40> 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.

<comment><USER41> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Fwiw: in 2010 Stephen Wolfram did an interview about his setup: [https://usesthis.com/interviews/stephen.wolfram/](https://usesthis.com/interviews/stephen.wolfram/)

</comment><comment><USER43> 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.

<comment><USER44> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> 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.

<comment><USER46> Why is that embarrassing? I think they're pretty and pretty good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> 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.

<comment><USER48> You might like Netvibes. I've been using it for over a decade and it's still fantastic. [https://www.netvibes.com/](https://www.netvibes.com/)

<comment><USER34> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> 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.

<comment><USER50> 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.

<comment><USER49> 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.

<comment><USER50> > 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](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.

<comment><USER49> You have a good point!

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Wow. This mans brain operates differently than mine (in a wonderful sense).

</comment><comment><USER52> 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.

<comment><USER11> 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.

</comment></comment><comment> g-harel I recently finished a project which looks a lot like that browser homepage!

[https://targetblank.org](https://targetblank.org)

</comment><comment><USER53> 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.

<comment><USER54> Reminds me Perkeep also. [https://perkeep.org](https://perkeep.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Is Wolfram Notebooks the new Lotus Notes? Does their "Knowledgebase" compete with Bloomberg - is there live information?

<comment><USER8> Yeah there's live information sourced from all over the place...kind of like Wolfram Alpha in a notebook

[https://www.wolframalpha.com/knowledgebase/](https://www.wolframalpha.com/knowledgebase/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I couldn't take tips on personal infrastructure from someone whose monitors aren't perfectly aligned.

</comment><comment><USER57> "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!

</comment><comment><USER58> I had to stop reading. It's such an obsession with working and technology.

<comment><USER59> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> 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

<comment><USER54> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> 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.

</comment><comment><USER62> Stephen Wolfram created his remote organization in spite of Richard Feynman advise:

<comment><comment><comment>

[http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand- ord...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand-ordinary- people.html)

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.

<comment><comment><comment>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Funny but he seems to be old enough to realize that success in life and career is about people, not machines.

</comment><comment><USER64> That envelope idea based on need (Hotel, Conference, Car, etC), that's a pretty slick idea.

<comment><USER65> 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, ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> 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.

</comment><comment><USER67> 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...

</comment><comment><USER68> I wish I was 10% as organized as Wolfram.

<comment><USER69> He probably wishes he was 10% as human as you ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> 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!

</comment><comment><USER71> That's great! But I think life should have some uncertainty and a little entropy. It is the little chaoses that make life interesting.

</comment><comment><USER72> > 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

<comment><USER73> Index cards also work well for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> That rack photo belongs in /r/cablegore

</comment><comment><USER75> Any idea what the "roll-around mouse" thing is that he mentions? The only Google results for that phrase are cat toys

<comment><USER76> Old-school non-optical mouse

<comment><USER77> 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.)

<comment><USER78> 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...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sun_optical_mouse.jpg)

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

<comment><USER79> You could rotate the mouse pad and the mouse wouldn't track. Very prankable.

Edit: At least on a Sun workstation

<comment><USER78> I have fond memories of those things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> I can't un-see that Comic Sans clock

</comment><comment><USER81> > 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.

</comment><comment> nevi-me 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?

<comment><USER82> > 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.

<comment><USER83> Do you use a left handed mouse or the same mouse you would use for your right hand? Also, which mouse are you using?

<comment><USER82> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> 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.

</comment><comment><USER85> "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.

</comment><comment><USER86> 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.

<comment><USER87> 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/...](https://www.amazon.com/Iridium-9555-Satellite-Kit- Packaging/dp/B00IJHGSIO)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> 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.

</comment><comment><USER89> bring a satphone when go outside?

I thought at least 90% of inhabitable place has some GSM signal?

<comment><USER90> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> "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?

<comment><USER92> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> > 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.

</comment><comment><USER93> 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.

</comment><comment><USER94> 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?

<comment><USER95> Also: [https://sivers.org/dbt](https://sivers.org/dbt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Having a satellite phone is very interesting! I wonder what motivated that. Is he traveling to extremely rural (presumably international) locations?

</comment><comment><USER97> I see he doesn't live in California. $.25/kWH power bill would make that basement rack very tough to justify ;)

</comment><comment><USER98> 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](https://www.boardingglasses.com/?action=home&lang=EN)

<comment><USER99> 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".

<comment><USER100> Toothbrush, even

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> I love how he just sprinkles in the Iridium satellite phone and the Comic Sans MS and makes no mention.

</comment><comment><USER102> My main takeaway from this was: owns a billion dollar company and can't afford AirPods

</comment><comment><USER103> This should be entitled "A Treatise on Why My Personal Infrastructure is Amazing"

<comment><USER90> A new kind of personal infrastructure?

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> you don't need a computer to code while walking, do it in your head and type it in when you get back

</comment><comment><USER105> 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/](http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/) It's not just about productivity, people...

</comment><comment><USER106> What's HN's opinion of Stephen Wolfram?

Is he legit?

Is the tome _A New Kind of Science_ worth reading?

<comment><USER107> He is the creator of Mathematica:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Mathematica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Mathematica)

I would consider that legitimacy.

<comment><USER108> 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.

<comment><USER109> 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.

<comment><USER110> That's why basically all Lisp systems in that area (Macsyma, Maxima, Axiom, REDUCE, ...) provide non-lisp syntax programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> 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).

<comment><USER112> 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)

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> Wolfram talking about Wolfram for 14,000 words. The most Wolfram thing imaginable. Wolfram!

<comment><USER114> 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...](http://chrishecker.com/Kurt_G%C3%B6del_is_Laughing_His_Ass_Off_Right_Now)

<comment><USER115> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> 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?

<comment><USER117> 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.

<comment><USER116> 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.

<comment><USER118> Relevant: [http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand- ord...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand-ordinary- people.html)

;-)

By the way, he is in the annals of particle physics...

<comment><USER119> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why doesn't someone this wealthy have a "body man" to carry around all this shit for him?

</comment><comment><USER120> This is the best thing I've read in a long, long time. Mr. Wolfram, how does it feel to be a god? :D

</comment><comment><USER121> 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.</comment>


Any creative writers here? I'm trying an experiment. - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikebridgman.com/about/

<comment><USER2> I think this sounds like a really fun thing to do. I'm told that I write decently, and have been trying to get into the creative side of writing lately. Also, the PI-like aspect sounds fun! I'll hit you up on email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man, I've received a positive response so far - a few creepy proposals but I guess I'm asking for it :) I'll be on the lookout for your email.

<comment><USER2> email is on the way! Although the idea doesn't scale well, this actually seems like the seed of an interesting business.

I'd had a similar idea for dating sites: hire someone to write your profile, based on the best available data. OKCupid's blog has some great posts on how to basically SEO your profile (but instead of search traffic, you get dating traffic...) and it seems useful to a segment of the population to have it done professionally.

Anyhow, look forward to hearing from you</comment></comment></comment>


Baseball, Judgment, and Technocracy - <AUTHOR> https://thefrailestthing.com/2019/06/30/baseball-judgment-and-technocracy/ <comment><USER2> Bit strange to see a piece like this not refer explicitly to Moneyball (2011), or the book by Michael Lewis on which it's based. The film's fantastic, and shows how Oakland Athletics pivoted their player selection process from the talent scout gut-feel approach to a sole focus on statistics, and the dramatic turnaround it brought.

Then again, the piece focuses on the human aspects of removing the mystery behind the game, perhaps it doesn't need to speak to why/how that came about.

<comment><USER3> The quintessential insight from Moneyball was that walks were undervalued at the time.

Now, thanks to a combination of camera tracking and radar, we know the exact location of every player and the ball at every millisecond of the game. This has given rise to a new, hyper-optimized style of play that can't be replicated at other levels (minor leagues down to college, high school, and little league) due to the technology and analaytical skills needed to harness this information. It's starting to become clear that the optimizations slightly favor pitching and defense more than hitting, which some argue leads to a boring, "3 true outcomes" style of play.

You're never going to see the exotic shifts they use in the major leagues on the playground or in an indie ball game because they don't have statistics on the exact trajectory of every ball the current batter has ever put in play at their finger tips. At those levels, they'll continue putting 4 fielders evenly spaced in the infield and 3 evenly spaced in the outfield, the way they had in the major leagues for more than a hundred years* until Statcast came along.

* With some notable exceptions: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Williams](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Williams)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Those closing lines really struck me. Deshumanising as technology has been during the last century, it has been this way that we learned even more about what makes us human.</comment>


Blade Runner 2049: Inside the Dark Future of a Sequel 35 Years in the Making - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/09/behind-the-scenes-blade-runner-2049-sequel/ <comment><USER3> Blade Runner means so much to me. I'm very glad that this is a thing, although, like with all sequels and re-interpretations of experiences that are near-and-dear to me, I'm struggling through "trying not to have too many expectations." I'd like to see the way that this is re-interpreted - <USER2> there's a very particular aesthetic and air about the original that I'd love to see kept around.</comment>


SpaceX Launch: Starlink 12 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j4xR7LMCGY <comment><USER2> Everyone is commenting saying how mundane it has become to see the landings. Hence you might enjoy this official SpaceX Blooper reel from 2017 that shows the numerous spectacular failures that they worked through.

Innovation is a type of gamble. People forget that.

"SpaceX: How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ)

(and regular reminder that these things are 12-storey high explosive tubes)

<comment><USER3> If the Falcon 9 landings feel mundane, I would recommend to follow Starship development. Starship SN6 might do a 150 meter hop later today: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky5l9ZxsG9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky5l9ZxsG9M)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The true beauty of SpaceX is that they've made landing their boosters boring (almost). This makes their competitors throwing them away seem stupid.

It also shows how clever it was to livestream so much of what they do. So many people have seen a rocket booster land. Children today will hear that ULA doesn't land their boosters and ask "why not?".

<comment><USER5> Let's talk about the "why not" for a second.

The incumbents have 200 years of collective head start over SpaceX, which started from scratch in 2002. They had 18 years to use that advantage to beat everyone else to reusable space access while remaining in the cherry procurement positions. Instead, they mismanaged, wrecked their quality culture, and lobbied for more handouts.

Unable to compete on merit, schedule,or price, ULA is reduced to buying another congressman, who's implying SpaceX is a security threat via the China card.

[https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense- national-s...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national- security/elon-musks-spacex-nasa-contracts-threatened-over-tesla-china-ties)

<comment><USER6> > Unable to compete on merit, schedule,or price, ULA is reduced to buying > another congressman, who's implying SpaceX is a security threat via the > China card.

That's quite the leap, although I can see your logic.

Ultimately Musk should have seen this coming because it's obvious. He's tied a huge amount of his net worth to the favour of the CCP and involved himself with a program of national importance to a country that is at odds with the CCP.

What's worst, Musk has zero respect for any sort of arms length separation between his companies, so it's almost guaranteed that the CCP has some level of access to SpaceX IP as they expand their grasp on Tesla through Shanghai.

This was all easily avoidable if Musk didn't insist on thinking that if he didn't personally come up with the idea, the idea must be idiotic.

<comment><USER7> So if I fall your logic correctly then Boeing, which is part of ULA, is also in CCP's pockets. They produce planes there, a lot. Just one example.

<comment><USER8> This. Embracing level of argument. Lets ignore the fact also that the US had a 50+ year standing relationship with China and it encouraged its companies to work there, including China in the WTO and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It really is quite incredible how _boring_ this has become. I was chatting with a friend who used to follow all of this stuff closely with me at the beginning of the landing attempts. He wasn't tuning in this morning (US east coast) because he didn't find it exciting without the almost 50/50 chance the Stage 1 booster would RUD on landing.

Starhopper 150M hop window opened today. Hoping to see some action there as that seems to be the new hotbed of SpaceX excitement. Not that I wish for a RUD but it's far more likely to see something crazy on these early experiments making it more fun to watch.

<comment><USER10> Last hop there was no RUD but the raptor did quite a job to the launch mount it was definitely entertaining if not unexpected.

<comment><USER11> The "small fire" around the raptor engine pipework also added to the tension, even though we knew it was a success by the time we had that footage.

It definitely had that prototype feel to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An interesting detail mentioned during the webcast was that SpaceX have already performed initial testing of inter-satellite links on a pair of Starlink satellites.

<comment><USER13> Was that laser or radio links?

<comment><USER12> The commentator called them "space lasers" on stream

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love that the presenter is a female engineer. How inspiring this must be for millions of girls around the world. Hopefully it encourages more girls to take on engineering to help provide a better balance of gender in the field.

<comment><USER15> So is SpaceX President & COO Gwynne Shotwell.

You might be interested in her TEDx talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THQPNDNulVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THQPNDNulVc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thats becoming one massive constellation [https://space- search.io/?search=starlink](https://space-search.io/?search=starlink)

<comment><USER17> Is it even possible to take them down without scattering debris all over the orbit later on?

Also, is orbit considered to be a free real estate? Does the first one to call dibs just take it or what? It's sure slowly getting a bit crowded over there.

<comment><USER18> They already deorbit Starlink sats regularly. The "prototype" birds from the first launch are being decommissioned. SpaceX could hit a button (well, run a script, probably) and Starlink would disappear within 2-4 weeks.

Earth orbit is kinda first-come, first-served, though there is some coordination for GEO and large constellations via FCC and the ITU. It's really not particularly crowded. Starlink in particular basically occupies only one orbital shell at the moment, and not a particularly popular one, though it'll eventually have three or so.

<comment><USER19> >SpaceX could hit a button (well, run a script, probably) and Starlink would disappear within 2-4 weeks.

Make me wonder what kind of security is in place to prevent a bad actor from doing that.

Is there some 'field' of CS that deals with this? I would love to read about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've had so many outages this month with Cox. Can't wait for this project to start rolling out to consumers.

<comment><USER21> my wife and i are looking at property in the mountains of SE Oklahoma. I'm hoping starlink comes online in the next 2-3 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They nailed the landing of the booster and I yawned.

Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER23> At 9:33 she says "100 Megabytes/second". Probably megabits/second. Still cool.

<comment><USER24> Eric Berger confirmed with SpaceX that it is 100 megabits.

[https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/spacex- launches-12th...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/spacex- launches-12th-starlink-mission-says-users-getting-100-mbps-downloads)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What will be the speed of the internet down and up link when fully operational? The video said 100Mbps at low latency. Do they expect more afterward?

</comment><comment><USER26> The satellite deployment seemed a bit wonky at the end of the video. Like they were tangled. Hope it went ok.

<comment><USER27> SpaceX hosts said during earlier launches that these satellites are built to be able to bump into each other after payload separation. SpaceX chose to stack the satellites on top of each other to save mass and volume that a larger payload adapter would have required. The stacked satellites are held together by 'tension rods' which are released to let them separate. In today's launch, you can actually see a rod being released [0]. Normally they lose the video feed around that time. They separate relatively easily because the second stage spins up to 'throw' them out. It didn't look worse than during other launches.

[https://www.starlink.com/](https://www.starlink.com/) has an image carousel with renders of the satellites and the stack if someone wants to have a closer look.

[0] [https://youtu.be/_j4xR7LMCGY?t=1780](https://youtu.be/_j4xR7LMCGY?t=1780)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> So, what about upload speeds?</comment>


FBI issued warrant to Apple to get data from Sen. Burr's iCloud account - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-reportedly-issued-warrant-to-apple-to-get-data-from-sen-burrs-icloud-account/ <comment><USER2> Well that's good news.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh, sweet irony. Let's see how quickly Burr does a 180 on his comments and proposal to break encryption. Proponents of increasing surveillance powers tend to change their minds rather quickly when the same powers are used against them.

I bet he wishes Apple iCloud actually implemented end-to-end encryption by now, instead of delaying its implementation precisely because it was fearing government action like what Burr was proposing.

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/burr-feinstein- proposa...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/burr-feinstein-proposal- simply-anti-security)

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud- exclusiv...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud- exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi- complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT)</comment>