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micwawa's comments

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

$1 is 1981 was four popsicles from the icecream truck. Well worth it to be the king.

$1 in 1996 was a bottomless plastic cup of PBR. Also well worth it.

$1 is 2011 is the cost of an overnight diaper that my three year old son throws away in the middle of night because he says he doesn't like it.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Ethereum Development Reality Check

Agreed - It doesn't seem that these are anything near legal contracts. I would like to see a less misleading word than 'contract.' A contract is a 'meeting of minds' and requires considerations from both parties. What we have are distributed programs that require signatures that run on a blockchain. Pretty sweet, but someone trying to sell it as more than that may be guilty of unauthorized practice of law.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Ethereum Development Reality Check

By the way, if you have some presale ether and you think the price might be a little frothy, Kraken makes it super easy to sweep your presale wallet. I recently did this and had bitcoin on its way to my Circle account within an hour.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Why Apple Is Right to Challenge an Order to Help the F.B.I

I got my previous phone three years ago - the battery has gone to pot and Verizon has been telling me I'm reading for an upgrade - but I kept putting off going to the Verizon store to get a new one. I thought, sure, I'll go for the secure phone which is the product itself, and not the one that is created by companies that wish to make me the product.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: LinkedIn dark patterns, or why your friends keep spamming you to sign up for it

Last night I applied for a job, and there was a link that you can click to allow the website to access your LinkedIn information. I clicked on this. I usually breeze through this because all these applications just want to access your basic information. I entered my password and hit enter when I looked at the screen and realized that I agreed to the following:

iCIMS would like to access some of your LinkedIn info:

YOUR PROFILE OVERVIEW

YOUR FULL PROFILE

YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

YOUR CONNECTIONS

YOUR CONTACT INFO

NETWORK UPDATES

GROUP DISCUSSIONS

INVITATIONS AND MESSAGES

So I looked up what this meant :

Network Updates - Retrieves and posts updates as you.

Group Discussions - Retrieves and posts group discussions as you.

Invitations and Messages - Sends messages and invitations to connect as you.

So it seems I gave them access to pretty much every feature except the ability to close my account and/or change the password (which I promptly did.) Woops.

This is a category of dark patterns: have the user click on something that has been benign the last 20 times they've seen something similar, but this time isn't.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: The Rent-Seeking Is Too Damn High

The internet is full of misinformation about dentists. Some corporate sponsored dentists will mill up thousands of fake reviews. These used to be five-star, but now they're smart enough to use a more nuanced strategy and throw in some four star, because at some point people caught on that no dentist has 45 consecutive five-star reviews. Also, the negative reviews will often disappear if the dentist has a lawyer handy.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: The Rent-Seeking Is Too Damn High

Funny bone indeed. It also seems that, as a consumer, these same professions are the hardest to get good information about. If someone serves a burger with a bland sauce they'll get 20 Yelp reviews over the weekend. On the other hand, there's no way for you to tell if your lawyer is going to charge $500/hr to to google stuff that you googled a long time ago.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2016)

Location : USA West coast, near an airport, but not near a major tech hub.

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: No.

Technologies: Matlab, Python, and lots of geometry. Looking to do some machine learning.

CV: 20+ refereed papers. 2 NSF grants. Ph.D in math, postdoc at an Ivy. Currently Assistant Professor.

Email : mwfd541 @gmail

Sorry to be cagey, but I'm keeping secret my fantasy of becoming a data scientist, lest I be labeled an apostasy by my colleagues.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

Optimization of tax code via machine learning. It should be possible to build an intelligent tax machine that uses enough features in order properly classify and tax corporations like GE or high frequency trading funds in the most obviously and proper way. Simple tax codes are vulnerable to lawyers who complicate them.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is there an app that reminds me where I stashed stuff?

Tangential exactly (which is why something like a spreadsheet would never work.) I've tried using notes but then I often forget exactly which note I used or how I had planned to access it later. But I imagine myself being able to quickly tell the app "I'm a stashing X at Y" without a lot of cost.
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