seferphier

>Say what? If I sign a 30 year note for 3% interest it's 3% for 30 years, and the bank is stuck with that.

Yes. if a bank would sign a contract with you then it is valid. I highly doubt that would be the case, the bank needs to borrows the money from someone else. They just merely make the difference in the interest rates. Taking a fixed interest rate would mean that they risk losing money if the money the borrow from somewhere else exceeds 3% in the next 30 years.

>why contract signings are witnessed. In a dispute the witness can testify that you did in fact read, appear to understand, and willingly sign. And this is why online TOS are difficult to enforce

This is not a problem at all. In Common Law jurisdictions (US, UK), contracts do NOT have to be witnessed (with some exceptions like Wills). Contracts that is signed without any witness are perfectly valid. This would apply to your ToS, if it states the laws of US, UK would apply to this contract. All contracts would state the jurisdiction that applies and all (respectable) courts would honor that term.

Yeah, I am talking about Common Law in general.

Interestingly, consumer protection aspect you talk about is very similar. Stronger protection is given to consumers through legislation - eg: Sales of Goods Act in UK. The word "reasonable" is ingrained into common law and a 1000% interest loan would certainly not be reasonable.

>You cannot get away from a contract by simply not reading it All circumstances around the contract would be considered in common law. I believe the courts would rather void the term on the basis of unfairness rather than putting weight on the fact that the person did not read it.

Contract is binding even if you have not read the contract is a very important cornerstone of contract law. Almost everyone that signs the contract does not read the contract - even contract that exceeds billions of dollars. They turn to their lawyers to read and negotiate the terms. Complex and specific terms are required to specify the rights and obligation of each side. If we are forced to read the contract before we sign them, our society would not be able to operate and many disputes would arise over overly broad terms that can be interpreted in many different ways.

very cool. thank you for all your work.

I also suggest that I can click into the brief description which will bring us to the exact term in question and highlight any other relevant terms. This may increase the chances of people reading the ToS and also increase participation. If I was reading a term on your site and I was referred to the actual term and realized that ToS;DR is incorrect, i would likely to correct it.

I believe the purpose of service is to raise awareness of your legal rights and what rights you sacrifice when using the service.

In Common Law jurisdictions, "I read and agree with ToS" is prima facie (on its surface) binding on the user. You cannot get away from a contract by simply not reading it - many people would repudiate their contracts if this was the case. I do not believe there is such a law in Common Law about "tricking people" to sign contracts. Whether a term is lawful depends on the circumstances of the case - this is why law is complex and must be cases must be litigated in order to determine lawfulness.

Many contracts we sign are one-sided. This is due to the respected bargaining power of the parties. The courts and the legislature have to balance between interfering with the freedom of contract and the notion of fairness. Some terms must be one-sided by nature- eg: banks can unilaterally change the interest rate on your property.

Great service.

You need to put in the version / date of these ToS, otherwise it would be hard to update. I would also keep an archive of all the ToS on your servers since volunteers would like to use track changes as a new version is published rather than re-reading the ToS. It would be also interesting to see how the terms have changed through the years.

A great feature would be to categorize these services by category. Eg: for search engine: Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo. You could add a more comprehensive chart on the terms and how it compares across these services. Eg: Tracking: Google keeps ur data. DuckDuckGo does not track user data.

This is something we really need as consumers. A short summary of essential terms for us to know about.

Would be interested in Mobile apps like: Instagram, Vine and Path.

Related topic: http://prism-break.org/

Replace your workflow with open-source tools that aren't attached to Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple.

"It's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy." - Elon Musk.

the author should have stated the first principles that are fundamentally true and then state her hypothesis of the employment market and justify them. she makes far too much assumptions without justifying them.

The limited number of spots in the tech world is the biggest flaw in the analogy. Life is not a zero sum game. You can create a new business and create great value for yourself without others "losing". The flawed analogy makes it difficult to follow the arguments being made.

you are being rude in the first place. You could have framed your comment better. quit HN if this community is disturbing you so much.

I disagree with your original comment. Yes, we can read the source. Yes, we can analyze it ourselves. But time is limited to all of us. The product should state exactly how it is different with the competition and why we should pick it. This is similar to how pg asks startups to describe themselves in one simple sentence. You don't tell pg that he lacks critical thinking for not reading my website.

Stating how you are different gives the customers focus. If you state that you are different because of X then you can go into the code and look at X particularly.

exactly.

Knowing that there are more popular alternatives around, the question that everyone has is: why should i use this? This value prop is something that interests me greatly.

Hi Elli, thank you for your response. This is a very interesting startup that I will have to follow. I have a few more questions:

1) How do you price your service? Do you price it by the number of successful hires/ number of job listing / number of questions they ask? How much do you charge?

2) How long does it take to fill up a position after it is posted?

3) As I understand it, you guys are doing most of the heavy lifting by scanning through the questions yourself. How do you plan on scaling the business?

4) How do you judge whether a candidate is suitable for a position? In many instances, tell me about your personality or broad questions are not helpful in pulling top 10 candidates out of 500. I was expecting HireArt to focus on technical jobs since you can give out technical tests - like the excel test cited on NY times.

This is a very interesting approach to solving an old age problem: how do you match the right people to the right employers?

The solution for most people used to be stacking credential and hoping the competition wouldn't have the same level of credentials as you.

What type of jobs are available on HireArt? How do you decide on what metrics and skills are useful for that particular post? How many test have you devised?

can u elaborate a little more? i checked out the website, i'm not that impressed about the execution or the idea.

Agree. it has been argued that the whole financial industry is indirectly subsidized by the government for being too big to fail.

Elon states that many forbes list billionaires receive huge amounts of profit from the subsidies (oil, agriculture)

I am a new to css / html. Can you explain to me why it is painful to deviate from their styles?

i have no idea what this app does from site

out of my curiosity, which person in the buffer team is located in hong kong?

Congrats on your first mac app!

Rather than spelling out features (or the lack of features), it is much better to show them the features through screenshots on the page.

A link to a page dedicated to screenshots creates friction and the lack of description can be confusing.

The title is incredibly political and biased.

US keep seeing themselves as the superpower - a superpower that is paying a rival (and developing) country instead of fighting against it. Why can't we move past that and think of win-win scenarios for both countries.

Taking this logic, the media in China should state: China is buying US debt - Yes, US. China is a significant holder in US debt and bought a lot when the economy turned sour in 2008. (Terrible investment since the US would just turn around and force the RMB to appreciate against the dollar). This in turn supported the US economy and the world's economy.

As I read the article, I see this as a win-win scenario. US gets bandwidth and China gets money. Cross border cooperation should be encouraged - not discouraged.

90% is definitely a huge loss. But like other users said this bug only applied to the UK store that does not sell Razer blade.

That said most of razer's customers are repeated purchasers and that honoring the orders is going to generate a lot of good will among its core customers. A very bold move though.

There is a lot of hate on copying. There is nothing wrong with copying as long as it is the right thing to do. If the world is moving to the direction of Google glasses, it would be insane not to copy.

The question is whether copying is their long term strategy, which would mean that they are constantly being reactive to the market. In some industries, a wait and acquire approach is better like pharmaceutical industry since R&D is so expensive. This does not seem to work well in high tech industries but baidu (by being in china) is more insulated than other companies in the US or Europe.

I hope that Google glass would be a lesson to all to put innovation to the heart of their company's strategy.

if the mythical iWatch has a 10% probability to have the impact as iPhone and iPod it is worth trying.

it is a much better strategy than waiting for Apple to release and copy them- only to realize that Apple's iPad pricing is much lower than predicted.

The paypal mafia could be the creators of bitcoin. They certainly have in depth knowledge about the financial markets and technological expertise. Furthermore, the idea of bitcoin is not only original but also frightingly ambitious that fits well with their personalities.

i am curious as to peter's opinion on bitcoin.

I think kiip, not foursquare would be able to conquer offline commerce.

> "We support this idea. would definitely be sweet to get paid back. -Chinese President Xi Jinping" "Man, this is a great idea. I bet this was Biden's thing, am I right? Joe, call me. -Bill Clinton"

Genius.

yea. i agree.

9gag was immensely popular and profitable before joining YC. They joined YC for the experience.

They monetize the service by ad impressions. I can't think of any other ways they can more deeply engage with the audience while monetizing at the same time.

I love the blog. bookmarked. I love the lego story especially - the founder was truly relentlessly resourceful.

phishing scam websites spend a lot of effort to fake their website.. amazed.