Hacker News: utnick

New comment by utnick in "Employee Wellness Programs Yield Little Benefit, Study Shows"

utnick — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:47:06 +0000

Maybe paying more is something that should be explored...

I think for $500-$1,000 a month per person you would have widespread behavior change in most companies, and it wouldn't really even be that expensive in the context of total healthcare+wellness program spending.

New comment by utnick in "IBM acquires Red Hat"

utnick — Sun, 28 Oct 2018 18:25:24 +0000

Wow this would be a very expensive purchase for IBM , redhat is currently worth about 20% of IBM's market cap

New comment by utnick in "An Update on Last Week’s Accident"

utnick — Sat, 31 Mar 2018 15:11:08 +0000

Yup this also mean that Tesla's radar and camera systems had 5 seconds to realize it was driving straight into an unmoving concrete barrier and did nothing...

New comment by utnick in "Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election"

utnick — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 03:42:21 +0000

by 'blockchain-based' they mean, a normal election happened with traditional voting, and then some of the vote counters uploaded the tally of the votes they counted to a private blockchain

New comment by utnick in "A Tiny Hedge Fund Made 8,600% on a Vix Bet"

utnick — Sat, 10 Feb 2018 16:40:09 +0000

The real gem of that WSJ article was that 10% of daily trades on E*Trade were either pot or cryptocurrency related

New comment by utnick in "How Does MoviePass Make Money?"

utnick — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 15:58:27 +0000

Is that data that valuable though? Its not that unique, off the top of my head there are several companies that have similar datasets, Every movie theatre chain, every online movie booking service, every movie review site

New comment by utnick in "Truffle: Ethereum Dapp Development Framework"

utnick — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 04:33:42 +0000

Here were mine Here were a few of mine, I’ve tried to get into ethereum a couple times

- installing mist and getting it to sync is very difficult and time consuming

- connecting to a testnet and getting ether on the testnet is also very difficult

- most ‘cool’ dapp ideas rely on oracles to publish data about the real world into the block chain. When you dive into it you realize that such an Oracle would be very very expensive to run for even trivial usecases.

New comment by utnick in "Beer giant ABI bought many craft brews and is now buying beer rating websites"

utnick — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:11:50 +0000

I think the hate comes from some shady stuff the big brewers have historically done to push out smaller brewers, limiting tap and shelf space for craft, sponsoring laws that reduce ways that beer can be sold direct from the breweries or adding fees that hurt small players

New comment by utnick in "The fight over preserving public land takes a twist in Montana’s mountains"

utnick — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 01:34:58 +0000

Check out backcountry Hunters & Anglers: https://www.backcountryhunters.org/

They fight to preserve and add to the existing lands.

New comment by utnick in "Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged"

utnick — Sat, 21 Oct 2017 21:10:06 +0000

Sportsbooks in general don't mind winning players though, especially big ones. They make money off the vig and move odds to get equal money on each side of the bet so that they'll make money either way.

New comment by utnick in "Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged"

utnick — Sat, 21 Oct 2017 21:03:42 +0000

There has to be more to this story. I would like to hear the bookmakers side of this. Perhaps the researchers were scripting or triggered some other kind of security tripwire.

Winning $900 split across several different bookmakers is absolutely nothing in the sports betting industry.

William Hill, one of the companies that the researchers claim restricted them is a multi billion dollar company. They aren't sweating small time bets like this.

EDIT: I noticed that the screenshots they used as proof their bets were restricted are for bets on very minor football leagues (Australian semi pro football), its common for betting limits to be lower for games that don't see a lot of betting action & is not proof enough to me that the bookmakers lowered their limits globally

New comment by utnick in "How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block"

utnick — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 22:00:06 +0000

A possibly simpler solution would be to not have assigned places to vote that are based on your ID & DOB.

Just vote at the polling place most convenient to you, and announce available polling places on posters around town, or facebook & twitter if you prefer.

New comment by utnick in "How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution"

utnick — Sun, 20 Aug 2017 15:03:56 +0000

When do you think programming began to have high prestige?

I didn't think programming in the 80s or 90s was a particularly prestigous or high status job, salaries back then kind of reflect that too

New comment by utnick in "Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows"

utnick — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 00:05:56 +0000

If you want to really see what the environment is like now, read the bitcointalk ico announcement threads. It's absolutely insane. Very little of that stuff makes its way to hn.

People are raising money with 10 page vague 'white papers' with ideas that make no sense or are completely unworkable on the blockchain.

There is very little skepticism or research with these icos . Most of the commenters are trying to help the project and receive tokens in return, do tasks to qualify for free tokens ( bounties ) , or promote the ico so their token value increases

If there was a good way to short individual ico tokens it might bring some sanity

New comment by utnick in "Iron Yard code school to close all campuses"

utnick — Fri, 21 Jul 2017 01:18:02 +0000

My hunch is location, iron yard had a bunch of locations in 3rd and 4th tier markets where there just aren't that many programming jobs. Even in Austin which is probably one of the better markets they had, entry level coding jobs are somewhat scarce compared to demand for them

New comment by utnick in "Architect explains why large development in LA seems to be luxury development"

utnick — Sun, 09 Jul 2017 13:42:53 +0000

> in order to increase housing prices for their own private investment benefit.

I think its more that most people just don't like change and want their neighborhoods to remain the same

If they really just wanted to increase their investments, up-zoning greatly increases the value of existing land in most cases.

New comment by utnick in "Death pools can bring financial security for the long-lived"

utnick — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 12:16:23 +0000

Also how would it work if everyone is anonymous? Don't you need to know when people die?

New comment by utnick in "Harland Clarke Acquires RetailMeNot for $630M"

utnick — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:41:09 +0000

I use their papa johns codes frequently, they always seem to be good for 40% off - however lately I've noticed papa johns trying to cut out the middleman and run their own coupon adwords offers

New comment by utnick in "How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on a Resume (2016)"

utnick — Sun, 26 Mar 2017 15:13:19 +0000

If I received a resume from a collegiate track person I would probably google them out of curiousity to see how fast they were, and in this case I would realize it's a fake name and resume, I wonder if that had any effect on the results

New comment by utnick in "Launch HN: Lively (YC W17) – 401(k) for Healthcare"

utnick — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 18:56:01 +0000

Great idea, I think most people don't realize how great HSAs are. They are better than 401ks in almost every way besides the lower contribution limit.

Even if you are very healthy, the category of medical expenses you can use it for is very broad.