Then I absolutely want to know more about such things. Please do share some or anything you can, regarding, oh... I dunno... whatever sort of insights might escape the ordinary common man, equipped with a high-schooler's grasp of basic integer math.
I've heard these sort of claims before, coming from financially oriented colleagues. I hate it when they make these kinds of dismissive pronouncements. The worst thing you could ever do is plainly state that a thing is simply too complicated to be worth explaining.
If these arcane statements should be regarded as esoteric hieroglyphics by the uninitiated, at least tell us which one is the sun god?
Seriously, we're all pretty curious types around here, and even when the material is bone dry and stale as Soviet bread, we all enjoy learning. At least I know I do.
The worst thing you could ever do is plainly state that a thing is simply too complicated to be worth explaining.
After working in finance-related IT for 16 years, I signed up for the Level 1 CFA exam to take it in December of 2009. I've been in IT for 20 years but I thought, "How hard could this be?" I found out. I ended up studying for over 350 hours and was thankfully one of the 33% of people that passed the test when I took it. 67% of people that took the test failed it.
So I ask you - how much of those 350 hours of studying do you think I can squeeze in a Hacker News comment? Do you think you could teach a financial analyst how to analyze Java code in a Hacker News comment? Would you take the time to even try?
For all that studying you did, you still seem to be able to squeeze a lot of BS into your HN comments.
As an analogy, becoming a commercial pilot requires 1500 hours of flying time and hundreds of additional hours of studying outside of this for exams and checkrides. This is 5 times the amount of preparation you needed for your Level 1 CFA exam. Just about every time there is a crash of a commercial flight, you will hear remarkable insights from these guys that will usually help explain the situation. Here is a great example with a commercial pilot's take on the Asiana crash that killed 2 people at SFO: http://wgnradio.com/2013/07/08/analysis-of-asiana-airlines-f...
I can only hope that the countless hours you've devoted to finance would be able to provide you some insights into something as fundamental as a quarterly earnings report.
That still doesn't change the fact you have contributed absolutely nothing to this conversation. Your comments should would be marked as flame-bait, or not informative on old slashdot.
Stop talking nonsense and making shitty analogies and learn how to contribute to a conversation. At this point, I'm calling into question your bank teller file clerk financial knowledge and your A+ certification in IT.
Perhaps you could better contribute by pointing to specific examples where us unwashed, uninformed, unworthy hordes have demonstrated our ignorance of your obvious expertise. (And no, "I don't follow that stock" is a cop out when you're already telling everyone they're wrong)
You can't teach a financial analyst how to analyze code in a single comment, but you can certainly give them some rough pointers:
(using Python as an example)
def function(): This is a "unit" of code which performs an action.
raise Exception(): This means something bad happened.
...etc.
droneStrikes is asking for something along these lines. We're not expecting to become experts at financial analysis after reading a paragraph, but we'd at least like to leave more informed than when we arrived.
For fuck sakes man, if you have any insight, share it instead of just pointing out that others are wrong in some obscure and nonspecific way. I bet you are full of shit and have no clue what you are talking about because you are yet to say anything intelligent. All you did is claimed all kinds of credentials without adding anything, at all, to the conversation.
There's one major flaw in this spectre of the unstoppable killing machine known as the "autonomous corporation":
If the whole premise of its autonomy rests solely on it's ability to engage in metered economic exchanges by way of some kind of bitcoin-style protocol, then an "autonomous corporation" MUST, by definition, persist on a distributed global network of continously available computers. So, if this entity has that dependency, then who's providing the hosting?
He who opts in on hosting the protocol, carries a say in the fate of the entity, thus this is no more "autonomous" than any other body of distributed human decision making. Whether it be voting, the purchase of publicly traded shares, or the organization of a bond to fund a bridge to nowhere.
It comes down to this: In order to mine bitcoins, or rather, add value to the system, you have to be constantly connected tothe internet. You can't mine a bitcoin in isolation. You can't power up a stand-alone, air-gapped machine, and mine bitcoins and expect them to have value when you connect it to the internet.
If you can't mine your own bitcoins in a vacuum, then very obviously, this requires you to interact with the world at large, over public networks. Those other systems must be available and complicit in such activities. That certainly doesn't fit my definition of "autonomous" in the sense of some massive force-of-nature style artificial intelligence boogey man. These systems need to be switched on, activated and tended to by someone. Someone will eventually want to extract value from these economic crypto-currencies.
So, here we are, coming back to the drone/remote control debate. Is a drone really "autonomous" when there's a pilot manning a set of remote controls from a bunker? Similarly, is this truly an "autonomous" corporation, when there are people deploying agents onto client hosts and services onto servers, all with the goal of gaining wealth? However you want to encapsulate the skill sets involved, that still requires expertise, and human intervention in my book, and certainly doesn't sound autonomous at all, to me.
Autonomy is a relative term. Whose autonomy are we talking about, here? And autonomy from "what" precisely?
The only other thing you really need to be able to program arbitrary services is a decentralized work queue.
And I'm not suggesting that those particular protocols are the final solutions for these tasks, but they are proofs of concept that are being iterated on by a lot of very smart computer scientists.
A lot of very smart computer scientists then, are the ones who claim stewardship of the system.
Let's say the computer scientists die, and leave these systems behind. If their legacy is ignored, it will not persist in humanity's absence. Unless people continue to employ these tools, the tools will not spring back to life and animate themselves for their own sake.
Just because you have an idea, and you throw up a wiki, and some client code on github, does not an A.I. make. This all sounds so much like it's just a Simple Matter of Programming (SMOP).
As humans, we generate the electricity, we manufacture the chips and lithium-ion batteries. We buy the remote controlled quad-copters, and send them flying through the air. We turn the radios on and off. We plug in the network switches and routers, and administer the servers and prevent them from overheating. These things don't produce and care for themselves. There's a person on the other end, no matter how much they attempt to obfuscate their identity, or piggyback on crowdsourcing. Even with distributed peer-to-peer crowdsourcing, you still need peers and you still need a crowd.
Are there self-replicating computers out there, building 3D printed copies of one another, fabricating their own solar cells, growing legs, walking themselves over to wall outlets, plugging in, and then executing block transactions for the sake of their own desire to be a bitcoin node?
You're arguing against a strawman. Autonomy doesn't mean complete independence. It just means self-governance. An human is considered autonomous, even if he relies on other people for survival, like we all do.
At the risk of sounding like a hippie - mother nature. Forests, savannahs, and oceans have been doing their thing long before humans arrived, and will continue doing their thing long after we perish.
The planet has a whole is... largely autonomous but is still affected by the sun, meteors, the moon.
Oceans are affected by those above as well, and by us. We have managed to affect the oceans quite a lot during our short time on earth, mainly by pollution it and the environment in general.
Nothing is really autonomous in that sense. Yes, the earth will probably be here after we perish and it will probably survive, more or less, intact so in that sense it is probably quite autonomous.
I've heard these sort of claims before, coming from financially oriented colleagues. I hate it when they make these kinds of dismissive pronouncements. The worst thing you could ever do is plainly state that a thing is simply too complicated to be worth explaining.
If these arcane statements should be regarded as esoteric hieroglyphics by the uninitiated, at least tell us which one is the sun god?
Seriously, we're all pretty curious types around here, and even when the material is bone dry and stale as Soviet bread, we all enjoy learning. At least I know I do.