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Software Industrialization – A Programmers Dilemma – Productivity Lost
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I don’t do as much “on the job” programming as I my role has been a “Software Architect” for several years now, but I still do a fair share and even more so in my spare time as a hobby. For example, I released an open source project that I have been working for the last two years called Global System Builder. It was supposed to be fun, but that is the crux of the issue I am having – it was mostly a lot of really hard work. Not that it was technically difficult, but seemingly something very simple turned out extremely hard to do.
- Let me digress a moment to illustrate a point. As the domain name of this blog indicates, I was progressing in programming languages as the level of abstraction was being raised over time. Meaning in modern day times, not worrying about memory management, ala garbage collection in languages like C#, enjoying the REPL feel of dynamic programming languages and marvelling at the power of functional languages and then… – post by joel
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Inside the world’s most annoying economic crisis. – By Joe Keohane – Slate Magazine
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It was no surprise that the cab driver tried to rip us off. We’re in Buenos Aires, Argentina, after all, and we’d made the rookie error of requesting a vague destination instead of giving a precise address—naturally he interpreted this as a license to take us from La Boca to the Plaza de Mayo by way of southern Nicaragua.
- I proffered a 20-peso note (worth about $6.70), a – post by joel
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about $6.70), and he handed back 50 centavos, suggesting that I was going to be shorted 44 centavos. Then he realized that continuing on this course would require him to give me two
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tipjoy.com :: our 2 ¢: Tip via Twitter
- hi – post by joel
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You can now initiate payments via twitter. For example, tweeting “p @ev $1 because twitter is fun” would send $1 from your Tipjoy account to @ev.
- hi – post by joel
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- We’ll count anything that has an @username, dollar amount, and a
payment keyword in the first three words in any order. So “p @ev $1″
and “@ev pay $1″ both work. – post by joel
- We’ll count anything that has an @username, dollar amount, and a
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How To Spot a Breakthrough: Tips from Early Amazon Investor Nick Hanauer | Xconomy
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Qliance’s idea is to make a distinction between catastrophic and non-catastrophic medical problems, and to introduce a payment model similar to that of a health club, where you pay a monthly fee and no administrative costs for routine visits. The company has been open for a year, and is currently working on sales in what Hanauer called a $300 billion market. “It’s a great example of turning a huge industry upside down,” he said. “The entrenched interests hate this. They hate it. The big companies don’t want the world to change. It never fails to amaze me how dug in companies are around their strategy.”
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How To Spot a Breakthrough: Tips from Early Amazon Investor Nick Hanauer | Xconomy
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The key elements of a breakthrough idea, Hanauer said, are value creation and social disruption. “Value is difficult but possible to quantify—it’s the ratio of benefits to cost, divided by those of the alternatives,” he said. Benefits are things like a product’s durability, speed, and appeal; costs are things like price, distribution, and training. “Is this thing in some way 10 times better than the existing alternative?” he said. “No breakthrough idea has ever delivered less.”
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As for social disruption, Hanauer gave a quick summary of what he meant:
—If everyone thinks it’s a great idea, it probably sucks.
—If people understand it, you’re too late.
—If people don’t like it and don’t understand it, it probably still sucks.
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