Alex A. Hutnik

It’s something many high school seniors think about: Should I go to college and spend $100,000 ($160,000+ if you go to Case) to go to college or should I start working. On one hand, starting to work right away means you can start earning more money right out of high school. However, your wages will likely plateau. But would that still be better than graduating in debt? Nobel economist Gary Becker examines this trade-off:

The Becker-Posner Blog: The Benefits of Education-BECKER

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Greg Mankiw posts a link to a parody on Petula Clark’s “Downtown” about off-shoring tech jobs.

Direct Link

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I changed themes.  Hope you like the new one.  Let me know if there are any issues with it not correctly rendering in your browser.

To those who are e-mail subscribers, sorry for the short post.

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This is pretty cool: http://amazingfiltered.blogspot.com/2007/04/nuclear-explosions-photo-collection.html

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OK this one is a little more pointless than the others, but it was something to do while avoiding writing a book review on an investment guide. Anyway, I got the idea from a site I saw on Digg or Reddit or something. Basically, just enter your phone number and the tool will tell you where it appears in the first 100 million digits of the constant Pi. I set the limit at entering a 10-digit number, but to be honest I don’t think 100 million digits is enough to capture a large number of 10-digit phone numbers.

The second part will generate an arbitrary number of digit’s of Pi, up to 5 million digits.

Check it out: http://tardis.case.edu/tools/pi.html

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Dr. Becker, of the University of Chicago, wrote a very interesting blog post about how information asymmetry should be at the basis of tort law reform:

The old rule of caveat emptor, or buyer beware, is too rigid in a world where buyers of products, or of medical and other services, may be much less informed about possible risks than are the producers or doctors who provide them.

You can read the rest here: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2007/04/improving_the_t.html

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I’ve finished updating the Facebook Alternate Persona Revealer to version 2.0. If you don’t remember, it allows you to look up someone (at Case only) by their network ID, name, or e-mail alias. Hitting ‘Submit’ will show you all of their publicly accessible information.

Check it out.

Right now, the tool is hosted on my server at Case (to keep things speedy). If I have to move it to alexhutnik.com, I’ll have to look in to caching results. Feel free to check out the (sloppy) source code. If you have any questions, drop me a line.

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*Update*: I’m now hosting my site with DreamHost. DNS forwarded from GoDaddy flawlessly and now I’m all set.

After listening to the Diggnation guys Kevin and Alex talk on and on about the convenience of registering domain names with GoDaddy.com, I registered alexhutnik.com. The process wasn’t really as painless as they claimed. The issues stemmed from some vague client side Javascript form-validation. Apparently my password was too complex for their system and didn’t bother to tell me. The only validation response was that I didn’t have a properly filled out registration form. Very useless. This caused me to lose the username I preferred to register.

Other than that, the services have been great. $28 bought me the domain name for two years, along with a bevy of services like free e-mail, domain forwarding, private listing information, custom DNS, etc.

And, if I’m lucky enough to be able to host my website in-house when I graduate, I’ll be able to set up my own custom DNS entries with GoDaddy to forward to my next IP address.

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