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Comment by heavymark | Hacker News Reader

I imagine if they had to honor, they would make it priority number one resolving those bugs, and make changes to make the bugs more apparent to people in the process. If they don't have to pay, there isn't much of an incentive to prioritize the fixes, especially since I imagine if the bugs are in the favor of the company they can make a lot of money.

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I'm sure it is already a high priority, but it is a system built by humans, and it will always have mistakes. What if they were being forced to pay out 82 million instead of thousand? What about 82 billion?

There should be clear cut laws surrounding clear errors, like there are in most places, and ones like this should not be forced to pay out.

When SCADA software fucks up and runs a ship aground someone has to pay. When something breaks because some engineer relied too much on FEAs and didn't do any destructive tests someone has to pay. "Whoops, our bad" is not an acceptable excuse except in tech.

"Whoops, our bad" is actually a valid excuse in virtually every industry, as long as your mistake doesn't cause damage that needs to be repaired. Such damage is the only reason anyone has to pay in the situations you described.

This situation is much more comparable to, say, ordering something from a store that turns out to be out of stock. The store has to refund you for the sale, of course, but that's all they are on the hook for. They aren't punished beyond that, they don't even have to go out and find the item for you.

Litigate it. That will be the answer.

in this case the odds jumped from -600 to +75,000 ($12 profit to $82,000) What if they went to +75,000,000? Would they have to pay the guy $82,000,000? As long as the mistake was obvious, of course not.

Then thy go out of business and someone more competent should take their place.

Otherwise there is no honor and incentive for them. Bookies have to live by their honor.

There are legal arguments that become valid at those amounts.

There is a difference between:

Ouch, that stung! Must do better.

That amount kills the business!

They own my whole enterprise now?

This is a sting. Quality control tax.

They should pay up, suck it up, maximize good will, and prevent it from happening again.

Given this gaffe, it is even odds they have pocketed more than this amount from errors going the other way.

it seems that errors are not uncommon and when they are "obvious" they typically void the contract. not sure why people are freaking out here. if you logged into your bank account and saw an extra zero that was caused by a temporary CSS bug, do you really think you are entitled to it?

If I remember my contract law, you're not 100% correct. Errors in the contract can be used as cause for severability or termination in some rare cases, but errors in execution are generally not. They're one of the reasons we have contracts in the first place. It is perfectly acceptable to sign a contract that in hindsight was one-sided. It's the pre-execution that requires mutual benefit. Otherwise every gambling wager could be challenged after the fact as mathematically the deal is biased to allow the book to arbitrage a wager!

maybe i should not have used the phrase "void"; in this case the contract includes a clause that says, "where a blatant or palpable error is made in... prices offered... bets may be settled at the correct price at the time at which the bet was placed". so more accurately, the incorrect price is voided

i think the issue here is that in some states, there is an authority that needs to determine whether the price was an error, and that it cannot be at the sole discretion of the sportsbook?

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