spicerguy

Thank you. Appreciated.

British English speaker here - I'm having difficulty identifying the word you're referring to here. Or are you referring more to definition and statistical presence in common usage?

"Law is also formal languages using logics" In theory yes, but contracts are not math and even though the consequences of disputes are costly, there is enough subjectivity within legal language that arbitration and interpretation by third parities is often required. i.e., two parties can have differing opinions on the meaning of the language and there can be enough uncertainty that costly proceedings are justified. (I'm talking specifically about civil rather than criminal law, and excluding cases where an interpretation of evidence is required)

IANAL, are you? This sounds like something you'd need to plaster with a LOT of disclaimers, especially if you're straying away from standard t&c/tos documentation.

Discreet industries have quite specific legal terminology (in my experience) and machine learning is probably better suited to weeding out mistakes in documents rather than interpreting the contents within them. It's the interpretation that earns the big money. The example you've given is useful - but useful to an audience with specific prior knowledge and an existing familiarity with the licence landscape. Expanding beyond this is probably going to be an exercise in unintended consequences.

The idea has a lot of merit and would be truly disruptive it it could be achieved, but if lawyer jokes have taught us anything, there is no shortage of motivation to reduce the worlds reliance on lawyers, but nobody has yet come up with a good solution (to my knowledge).

I knew I'd seen this before. Still, a slightly disappointing lack of cultural insight in the original article.

I'm not sure about how contracting works where this guy is, but in the UK if you're contracting you can (generally) be let go by the end of the hour if your management wants it. Nothing illegal about that at all.

Also, I can see how someone who's paying this guy a day rate might not take too kindly to an article written by said day-rater that looks rather like "don't worry about how long you'll be paying for this project". He's asking them to pay that day rate for an undetermined length of time for undetermined outcome.

Completely unrelated but as a British English speaker I was amused by one of the linked articles - http://www.inquisitr.com/3341656/pokemon-go-accident-man-acc... - I think the writers don't realise how many asterisks they actually need to use in this article, given some of the more localised swear words being used in the quotes.

yes, and scale is a material difference.

Yes, I've been stung with these sort of charges myself in the past here in the UK - the banking code has cleaned up this practice a bit in more recent times; however I think it's fair to say there's a material difference between being stung for £200 and having your house being ripped from under you by sharp banking practice. I recommend watching the film "99 homes" - it's not a perfect film by any means but illustrates many of the coal face issues of mortgage repossession in the US.

agreed - though I think the grandfather comment was probably referring to the UK marketplace and the US experience of subprime credit sales is somewhat different at the mortgage level. Payday loans are a different story all together and have the a similar, or even more vulnerable target market here in the UK as subprime mortgages in the US. However payday loans are not usually offered by traditional banking vendors in the UK and as such banks get off the hook here.

Yes, exactly. Credit is by far the biggest the driver for income in the financial sector, and consequently its biggest source of pain for those swept up in disasters of their own or others making. Anybody thinking of starting something disruptive in the fintech industry needs to have a very clear understanding of the absolutely central role that credit plays in the entire system.

There's a debate to be had about "no such thing as free banking" - I'm very familiar with the world of prepay in the UK and retail banking practice is a big headwind here.

this is certainly currently the case for the UK, with protection of deposits up to £75k for private account holders (http://www.fscs.org.uk/what-we-cover/products/banks-building...), though I'm sure we could find plenty of antecedents if we cast the net widely enough geographically and historically.

The bank itself is owned by the government but has independence from it in certain matters of policy. There are certainly many employees who come from private banking backgrounds but the bank is not a private bank.

completely irrelevant point of clarification: bank underground refers to the London Underground (metro station) stop immediately in front of the bank, rather than some sort of anarchist agenda (but given UK civil servants general ambivalence towards authority there may be a slightly sly nod to the alternative reading of this).

I would suggest you find out a little bit more about the BoE. It's not an investment or retail bank, it's a central bank which is more about influencing economic policy and other banking policy than pushing money around. Interestingly the UK government decoupled the bank from direct control in 1998, which greatly reduced the risk of wild interest rate fluctuations driven by political motivations, which had caused a lot of pain in the previous decades.

This reminds me strongly of an article in the economist published in 2010 - the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Made me glad (in a way) that I didn't finish my own doctorate, although I did find the research very personally fulfilling. article: http://www.economist.com/node/17723223

As far as aggregators go, Skimfeed.com is the obvious choice, and for more focused stuff I've also found applying filters on newsnow.co.uk can be quite useful as well.

And would have the associated effect of providing a very clear analogue for the protesting licensed taxi operators.

Yes, not sure if it's exactly what I want as details are scarce but I've dropped them an email, thanks for the nudge.

Yes, but the verification is tied to the phone, not the card. The way this fraud works is that fraudster has their "own" iPhone, then "loads" single or multiple stolen card details (perhaps obtained by mail intercept / redirect of new or reissued cards). The beauty of this from a fraudsters perspective is that you could have a whole deck of cards (all associated with different providers and individual victims) in your Appple Pay wallet and if one gets declined, well, cycle to the next. It's not like the teller sees the card name, just a secondary wave of the (apparently) legitimate customers phone. It's a beautifully anonymous customer journey for a fraudster in any busy physical retail environment.

Edited for grammer

yup, you're right - a misread on my part. Thanks!

Using wayback looks like the last version update was back in 2012 - the mention of 32 bit systems ending at Win7 is a bit of a clue, but this project could still have a useful role - although this isn't the most scientific approach, a trends search of "USB stick" vs "Cloud storage" shows there still might be a bit of life in the old usb dogs yet.

1] http://web.archive.org/web/20121028212422/http://code.google...

2] http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=usb%20stick%2C%20clou...

Of couse, add "dropbox" to that trends search and USB sticks look like their losing serious relevance from mid 2010 - until you factor in the fact that you're looking at a self selecting sample: People on the internet looking for internet connected things. Which USB sticks route around for a lot of users.

> 2) Is it a great idea to broadcast someone's card numbers so clearly? The graphic is so obviously a credit card, it would be easy for any onlooker to spot and steal.

yes - anything that signposts card data clearly to an onlooker is problematic, but any malicious shoulder surfer will probably be able to spot a payment page a mile off in any case. This might however, have a small possibility of encouraging opportunistic theft.

I think the bigger threat to this probably comes from the networks (MC, VISA, AMEX etc) who get VERY possessive about mock-ups / card image facsimiles that use their logos. The brand logo protection that they enforce is pretty strict and I would imagine this approach would not be welcomed. I'd like to be wrong, but my experience with the networks makes me pessimistic.

The xkcd comic referenced in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6768540 helped me to realise that there is a counter proposition to "because" - "but" - "but minecraft!"

yes, I know exactly what you mean and this was my first thought as well.