Interesting Snippets from 2012-04-24

• The Creative Monopoly - NYTimes.com

  The question got Thiel thinking. His thoughts are now incorporated into a course he is teaching in the Stanford Computer Science Department. (A student named Blake Masters posted outstanding notes online, and Thiel has confirmed their accuracy.)

  One of his core points is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value.

• The rewards of simple code - O'Reilly Radar

  When I look over all the projects that I've worked on, everything I've read in the field of software development, and all my experiences interviewing developers over the years, most of the non-simple code I see results entirely from human factors. Some people say that the tools are making their lives hard — and they often are — but, ultimately, complexity comes down to whether or not the developer writing the code has a deep understanding of both the specifics of his or her job and the fundamental principles of software development.

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