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Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

"I asked WolframAlpha for per employee, per year revenue and profit comparisons and got this:"

What? You did division of some trivially-obtainable numbers. Why do I care that you did this in Wolfram Alpha, and why on God's green and spinning earth did you need to put the answers in two PNG screengrabs, rather than just typing the answer out into a single sentence?

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Why does that matter to you? It's citing a source and the png files were probably easily generated by taking a region screenshot... most articles on the web like to include a picture or two to liven it up. Why are you so angry?

Because the author, probably not the submitter, decided to do that in their article on their website. Also, as trivial as it may be to get revenue and employee numbers from annual reports, it only takes a few seconds to do in Wolfram Alpha.

I feel like most of the time savings were eaten up by making a bunch of little screen grabs to show us it was done in Wolfram Alpha. And it makes the information take up about five times as much space as it would if it was just written out in a sentence, and since the alt-text for each PNG is "Wofram IBM Apple Revenue" and "Wolfram IBM Apple Profit" the information is entirely lost for, among others, search engine bots, blind people using screen readers and any cached copies that have the text but not the associated images.

I came here for a bit of expert commentary on the article. I can only assume it must be pretty water-tight if we're sitting around arguing about this...

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