muhamm

This article says that since 1965 the return on assets for US corporations has dropped by 75% while the biggest additions to the asset base over the same period have been hardware and software. The first question this seems to raise is what are we actually measuring when we look at return on assets - does it take into account the fact that your customers view your brand more positively because your IT has made your company more responsive to the customer? Because that change could actually reduce your advertising costs and not end up in any metric. And the second question is whether most companies are just investing in technology to automate existing processes or are really reorganizing the way they do business around their IT so that they can fully leverage all of the potential benefits of their IT. Of course that takes a degree of understanding of IT that many older executives simply do not have.

Shirky is a ridiculously good speaker. Thanks for posting this.

-> "A good developer would never put the end of the digestive system right next to the start of the reproduction system - not even if that would require fewer lines of code (which it undoubtedly did)."

Whatever point he's trying to make in this post - and I'm not going to take the time to try to figure it out - I'm sure there's a simpler way of saying it.

I doubt whether there is any conclusive empirical data on this question. Feel free to guess.

Pogue says he uses "typing expansion software" -> http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/typing-expansion-s...

That must take some getting used to. I use a similar feature in Netbeans for Ruby programming but didn't know there was a feature like that for regular English words. Pogue has said previously that he has suffered severely from RSI so it must be related to that. He has advocated Dragon Naturally Speaking so much that I assumed he didn't type at all.

Not sure what you mean.

I really like Derek Sivers' blog but I have an issue about affiliate linking. Maybe it's just my issue but when I see Amazon affiliate links for all of the books on this list, it makes me hesitant to click them. Call me crazy perhaps.

Doesn't the company have a contractual obligation to pay you your wages even if it has to go into debt to do so? I don't see how they could get away with that.

"Redfin is trying to rewrite the rules of the real estate industry."

It would be nice if TechCrunch didn't copy the press release verbatim.

I don't find it particularly uncool to convey your meaning as effectively as you can, especially when, in a corporate environment, there is so much other data competing for the attention of your reader. Thanks for the tip. I'm going to try to use this myself.

If this is a duplicate, it's one that a lot of people could benefit from.

Summary:

1. Delete redundancies. 2. Use numbers and specifics instead of adverbs and adjectives. 3. Add missing context. 4. Focus on the strongest argument. 5. Delete off-topic material. 6. Seek out equivocation and remove it. 7. Kill your favorites. 8. Delete anything written in the heat of emotion. 9. Shorten. 10. Give it a day.

But multiple authors can have a different take on the same event. I don't want a 10-page thread with multiple links spread throughout. It's nothing to do with karma, which I could give a rat's ass about. In this case, I ignored the first story when I saw sun.com as the URL because I figured it was a bullshit press release, but read the one that said nytimes.com even though it turned out to be not much better. Over the next few months additional stories are likely to revisit the same topic with additional analysis. Lumping them all into the same thread would mean we would need to re-scan the discussion to figure out which comments we have read and which ones we haven't. By keeping the discussions fragmented we avoid that problem.

There are many issues that get articles from multiple sources. You want us to start categorizing everything according to content instead of by url? I don't think HN is set up that way.

It's not a duplicate. This is a New York Times article. The other one is Sun's bullshit press release.

Sure. Sexual frustration is a given. Although not just among hackers. I'm just wondering why there's been a confluence of similar articles in such a short space of time. I'm not complaining about the articles. I think they're all interesting. I just find the timing curious.

What's up with all the "getting laid" threads on the front page the last couple of days?

Spring is in the air?

To be honest, at first I also didn't like the lack of visual distinction between properties and methods but now I just like the fact that I don't have to type the extra characters. The implicit self is nice too.

Sure. But is that Python? You know in Ruby you wouldn't need the parens? It would work nicely for the sleep and dont_care methods since you're not passing any arguments.

I like monkeys too. Not enough stories about them on HN in my opinion.

I said the wrong thing again? There's a serious commitment to seriousness around here.

Of course we should be silly. As if the question even needs to be asked.

I can't believe you guys don't like the monkeys thing. Monkeys are always funny.

Title: Are monkeys taking over the job market?

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=programmer%2C+monkey&r...

Beggars can't be choosers. Sometimes you have to take what you can get to make the thing work.