Hacker News Reader

Not to mention elimination of pointless work.

I needed to gather various statistics on the speakers at the previous ICM

Why did this work need to be done? Are even the people who say they want this data actually going to use it for something productive? Is there something revelational in this data?

View on HN

He was the chairman of the ICM structure committee. Having stats on how previous ICMs were organized is obviously useful to him. It's not "people who want this data" who ordered him to gather it (not that anyone could order Tao anything), he wanted the data to use it himself. He had the choice between sifting manually through dozens of webpages or automating the task.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com