jerry5

Shht. computer 'scientists' are the ones that didn't make it into the physical sciences. No need to stoke their inferiority complex any further.

I had to laugh when I read the quoted students reponse to the wrong output. Just introduce a simple correction that fulfills the requirement for his particular test case. Why you'd wonder what the academic standards are in a univesity that even allows such people to enter the door, this modus operandi is even encouraged the 'industry' under the moniker of 'test-driven development'.

The article complains about 'gimmicks'. People around here believe in producing tangible prototypes for $15,000 in three months, what can you expect but gimmicks?

P.S. The portals (I worked for one of those) are a step in the right direction as their convenient UI and STP lowers the cost of a transaction in terms of human effort, but other than that add little value on top of what's offered by the banks. They are at most leaf nodes in the networks as they can't hold money even intermittently and the actual settlement still takes place through the banks. So they cannot open 'new routes' in the network.

Aims (1) and (2) are correct. If there are more 'exotics' to go around and they become more easily accessbile (i.e. low transaction fees), wouldn't there be more competition on the currency market? Online retailers could quote prices in the currency of their choice and you'd get an instant quote in the currency of your choice out of that. As for the non-guaranteed quotes and the latency, I'm not sure whether someone has seriously tried to get their head wrapped around that, so there's room for innovative routing mechanisms. As for me it'd be fine to just do this as a thought experiment and then apply the results to poor man's P2P networks which are more accessible in the first place and see what comes out of that.

Hm, I said I found FX 'inspiring', but didn't say 'inspiring for a startup'. As I mentioned elsewhere my interest is more in P2P networks, and those elude classic funding strategies.

The STP I'm referring to relates to automatic roundtrips including request for quote > pricing engine > quote > order > confirmation > TMS but the real interesting part is when banks automatically back their orders with purchases from yet other banks, intra-bank. Exotic currencies add an additional dimension, as no immediate pricing for e.g. Mexican pesos in Norwegian kronors is available and the trade needs to be 'routed' through an intermediate currency, usually USD or EUR.

My view of the system didn't go beyond two banks at the time but in theory there could be a long chain. That way the banks would be forming a financial P2P network. In reality it's a pretty hierarchical network as not all banks are created equal, but it'd be interesting if you could come up with financial routing mechanisms that would find the cheapest route in a hypothetical more dense banking network and what you can learn from that for poor man's P2P networks.

Huh, wouldn't be able to comment on that. Of course this being Hacker News my interest lies more in changing the way things work through technology, I thought you had ideas that way. I was fascinated by "straight through processing" which can basically cause chains of deals to be executed automatically. It lowers the cost of transactions dramatically, and lowering the cost of transactions has had a broad effect in many other businesses.

I have a vague idea what you mean by the 'inefficiencies'. I am wondering whether these would have manifested in the first place if IT had been given a more central role. It's a lot about motivation too, the 'central' people in a business are usually motivated by being shareholders as well as employees at the same time. If you treat IT as just another accountant they will find endless means and ways to drag their feet and just generally pursue their own interests which are generally opposed to that of the business. Being linked into the flow of information, i.e. high level senior management decisions, is important too for efficiency.

Well go read above-linked article and tell me whether Yale does a good job in the "Human Resources Investment" idea posited by the parent comment.

> I completely agree with this. I don't honestly feel people of good faith need to deal with complicated rules or institutions. But not everyone is willing to go that route, so this is an idea which might serve the other 99%.

I sometimes wonder whether it isn't that 1% that carries the weight of society. And the Internet lowers the barrier to creating new trust relationships from scratch. If you were interested in that sort of thing, be my friend.

No one needs the reasons spelt out for them. That the current system has deficiencies is more or less painfully obvious to everyone. I may read some of your stuff later.

The karma system is a popularity contest as discussed in the various Hacker-News-is-going-down-the-drain discussions that have been popping up here a lot as of late. To any one who grew up with /. that's not a surprise.

In that respect I found kuro5hin quite interesting in, as it seperates out how many people voted the post/comment up or down. I wrote posts that had a lot of people agree (5 points) and a lot disagree (1 point) with very few in the middle ground, i.e. the audience was divided. I loved that. It means you are not sucking up to the majority yet not writing utter crap. Had you just computed the point average then that information would've gotten lost.

Also see this quote from this [http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.htm...] article: "the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni"

No I couldn't tell, because I stopped reading at "human resources". But since you stand corrected I'll stand corrected too and wrote a thoughtful reply above.

This is pretty much what universities do, especially the more elitist kind. Alumni don't have a contractual obligation to pay x% of their income, but in practice they end up making donations to their alma mater for the rest of their life.

However I don't like this idea at all, it's what creates elitism and closed circles in the first place. Our society already is institutionalized to the hilt, I wished people again found their natural ability to create trust relationships, from scratch.

> "Human Resource Investment"

Oh yeah, humans just love to be called 'resources'.

> some sort of trading system that mixed FX with a whole bunch of wacky synthetics to allow you to easily take positions on things which are normally more complicated

Heh, what's this? I worked in FX at one point in time and found the whole thing very intriguing and inspiring. Maybe you can elaborate? There could be an overlap of interests.

The Wall Street Journal disses Wall Street!? ZOMFG

You are right as are the other commentors. However it seems that the difference between a 'social news' site and a forum aren't huge, i.e. forum software could be spruced up with a few lines of php and they'd be the same.

Sorry on the first 10 or so pages I saw just blah blah. Don't spam the forum here if you have nothing to offer.

I've sometimes wondered whether IT isn't becoming the 'core' part of a business. I.e. the one that's most complex and drives the competitive edge and success of a business. I have worked in IT in many different industries and often enough found the 'business' part of the business to be easy to pick up while it sometimes took ages and a lot of brainpower to get on top of the technology. In other words, IT people can understand 'businesss' but business people can't understand IT. So, in the future, instead of having a bank with an IT department, we'd have an IT company with a bank department. They'd probably switch sooner from banking to insurance than from one IT infrastructure to another.

I think amazon is a good prototype for this. It's a tech company that also sells books. They later added all sorts of other crap like electronics, then stuff that they don't even deliver but where they just act as a front for other retailers and finally they are now offering their IT services purely by themselves (S3, EC2).

If you wan to mock someone why not mock the original post that's asking for new economic models?

With all the ventriliquists that I have seen that's exactly the sort of thing their sock puppets do.

As for my personal projects, see the answer to rms below.

As for anyone else's projects, even though they promise to put you in front of the right people eventually, you have to have some small-time prototype to show before they put you through to the bigwigs. Whether you use the $15,000 offered to create that prototype or already have one doesn't matter I guess, however what does matter is that for improvements in ERP/CRM/WebOS/somebigtech there aren't any small prototypes that could represent the idea's viability better than a PowerPoint presentation already does.

So how about judging the idea just by its presentation itself? The other problem is that PG/RTM/TB aren't exactly industry veterans themselves. Any Dilbert in the country has a better clue of how things work in, say, the corporate world than a painter and a university prof. They wouldn't recognize a better CRM solution if they sat on it, and neither, I am assuming, have friends in the right places that they could consult on the matter. So seems like inventors would be better off beating down the door to the real guys.

Just put the offer on ycombinator's - or another reputable entity's - web site for everyone to see. However the "call me" part is half joking; while I have ideas to tackle some of those problems, especially the economic foundations of them, they are not amenable to funding by ycombinator or similar entities. The smaller problems being purely practical such as not being - or wanting to be - in that funny country of yours over there, the larger ones being that it's a contradiction in terms to use an old economic model (invenstments, corporate structures, sell-outs) to create a new economic model. Look at the file-sharing example quoted: A P2P network technology, even one that created economic benefits for its participants, such as musicians and listeners, would never get VC funding since there's no central entity to siphon the profits off.

Well thanks for disagreeing "passionately", seems like you have evidence that I don't have. I can only hope for you that your conclusions match your reality and that you will therefore have a happy life with no bad surprises.

Hm, seems like pg & co. want to have all the big problems of business and the economy solved for $15,000. I guess if you're only funding kiddies with amounts equivalent to the allowance they get from their parents, all you get is kiddie solutions. As soon as $15m are on the table, call me.

P.S. This seems right out of the mouth of Ron Paul, who to my amazement seemed to have developed some following on reddit. 'Amazing' because his ideas don't even withstand superficial scrutiny, the kind of scrutiny that forums like this apply to ideas.

I've seen reports on fuel from algae, that seems very promising.

Mister, property rights and the legal system are entirely functions implemented by a centralized government. So it's not either/or. It's just a question of which centralized government mechanism we want. Trespassing laws and the legal system were created to keep my neighbor from building the extension to his house onto my lawn. I don't see how I can sue someone from the other side of the world that's polluting my air with their CO2 under the same system.