Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Justice Stevens reads the fine print

matthewbutterick.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 230 posts

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#121

Post by RugnirViking »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #69

Do note though that „legal fine print“ is similar to „React-Node.js-Mongodb“ boilerplate. Meaning that it sometimes makes sense to not have to start off at zero. Also complaining about long contracts is like saying „I don't like this program because the source code is too long“. Depending on the program, this might be a little capricious. Do you want lawyers to be „code golfing“?

If somebody handed me a program and asked me to prove that there wasn't a virus/security vulnerability hidden somewhere in the source code, yeah I might well say that "I don't like this program because the source code is too long“. Especially if I had to do that for a different program every time I wanted to buy or do pretty much anything at all

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#122

Post by nerdponx »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #69

Do note though that „legal fine print“ is similar to „React-Node.js-Mongodb“ boilerplate. Meaning that it sometimes makes sense to not have to start off at zero. Also complaining about long contracts is like saying „I don't like this program because the source code is too long“. Depending on the program, this might be a little capricious. Do you want lawyers to be „code golfing“?

Nobody is arguing against reusable, well-tested chunks of legal text!

The argument is that there are too many detailed requirements for typical consumers to reasonably agree to, and moreover they tend to be hidden away where users can't even find them anyway.

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think Justice Stevens' objection that the text was too small actually misses the mark. What else are they going to do, have you mail an old-school SASE to an office, or go to some website?

The problem is that consumers don't actually have alternatives to agreeing to terms like this, so the assertion that consumers enter into these agreements "voluntarily" is flawed, because it's not voluntary if there are no alternatives.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#123

Post by nerdponx »

RugnirViking wrote: post #121
axiosgunnar wrote: post #69

Do note though that „legal fine print“ is similar to „React-Node.js-Mongodb“ boilerplate. Meaning that it sometimes makes sense to not have to start off at zero. Also complaining about long contracts is like saying „I don't like this program because the source code is too long“. Depending on the program, this might be a little capricious. Do you want lawyers to be „code golfing“?

If somebody handed me a program and asked me to prove that there wasn't a virus/security vulnerability hidden somewhere in the source code, yeah I might well say that "I don't like this program because the source code is too long“. Especially if I had to do that for a different program every time I wanted to buy or do pretty much anything at all

I've been arguing that length is just a result of complexity, and at the real problem is complexity.

But I suppose in an extreme case, you could obfuscate a simple program by making it really long.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#124

Post by willcipriano »

krageon wrote: post #117
willcipriano wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this isn't mandatory where you live, you live in a country with bad hygiene laws. Are drugs illegal in your country? Do people still do them?

If you spend a little time thinking about the amount of restaurants versus the amount of actual people there are in a country, you will realise one is relatively easy to enforce compared to the other. Furthermore, the conversation was about the average. It is not the case that the average human being goes around snorting coke in the toilet every day, just as it is not the case that the average restaurant is some bast…

Having worked in them for a decade I know how it works in practice. Perhaps whatever country you are from has sparking clean restaurants full of well paid, sober people but in the US, they are disgusting as a rule. My peers in the UK reported the same.

We had to call a ambulance for our health inspector once beacuse they overdosed in the bathroom. Check out Kitchen Confidential if you want to see this backed up, and even that's about the highest end restaurants in the country.

https://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Confidential-Adventures-Culin...

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#125

Post by denton-scratch »

chinathrow wrote: post #100
denton-scratch wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or they're just as good as any other lawyer My experience is that some advocates are much better than most advocates. The best lawyer I've had was a trainee barrister, standing in for a run-of-the-mill high-street solicitor, who couldn't show up. Presumably because she was a trainee, she did a really meticulous job for me, on what was a trivial offence: speeding. Few lawyers would put much effort into a speeding ti…

Where you charged for speeding afterwards?

No, she got me off. I was acquitted.

The copper that was standing duty as the prosecutor wasn't briefed. He had an afternoon's-worth of cases to present, and he wasn't qualified to argue a case. And either I couldn't be re-charged because double-jeopardy, or it just wasn't worth the effort.

Just as icing on the cake, my advocate was a stunningly beautiful redhead.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#126

Post by makeitdouble »

mjevans wrote: post #90
makeitdouble wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff. I think incredibly long EULAs would be fine if violation on technicalities were lighter, and/or critical sections were put on top, in plain language. For instance, I wouldn't care much about Youtube's terms and services outside of what would warrant an account ban, and what's the privacy boundaries. If Googl…

Respectfully; No. A standard library of terms, preferably from the highest (and thus widest covering) level of government, should be the bulk and basis of all widely common contracts. I shouldn't have to re-read 40+ pages when I renew my dwelling's rental lease for another year; this should not be one more thing that has to be shopped around for. Don't provide an illusion of choice (as if we the people really have on…

Can’t you have auto-renewing clauses on your lease, with only small contractual updates every year on the points that effectively changed ?

That’s what I had on every appartment I rented. As you say it wouldn’t make sense to go through the building’s description every single year when nothing has changed.

Otherwise, an issue with having “standard” clauses, and only the differential in your contract, is your knowledge of the referenced standard at the time of the contract.

Imagine buying a house: I can’t imagine you’d be reviewing the standard house buying contracts every year just to be ready in case you buy one. So I’d assume you’d be reading the whole terms, from the standard + the differential at least once when you buy your first house. But then, if you sell and buy another one 5 years later, won’t you want to recheck the up to date standard terms, on top of the differential you sign for your specific contract ?

At the end of the day, I feel it would only benefit people who spend their lifes in the field and are aware of the standard terms at any given moments. I’d prefer to optimize for the people who are not familiar, and would have a harder time understand the whole of the contract.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#127

Post by tomrod »

atoav wrote: post #68
noduerme wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking. It's no different than being a victim of dark pattern software practices, which you would be if you didn't know how to code. (Ironically, part of my slot involves helping lawyers get around pitfalls in software)…

It saddens me that such a great part of US society (as I perceive it from the outside) has basically given up on fixing any systemic problem at all. Be it small things like robocalls, or bigger things like a broken healthcare system, gun violence, lobbying in politics or things like the housing/opiod crisis — a big part of the US people I talk to have basically given up on any collective way of fixing these issues an…

Economists have all sorts of names for these.

For examples, imposed barriers for law or medical school is a form of barriers of entry. The profit-seeking motive becomes rent-seeking then, because the number of competitors is artificially lower.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#128

Post by staticautomatic »

makeitdouble wrote: post #85
lordnacho wrote: post #43

Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex. It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff. It's basically impossible to read the docs for all the services you buy, and even if you did you wouldn't know what it meant in terms of law. Yet we have lawyers talking through the technical minutiae as if they are source code. There's a huge d…

> It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff. I think incredibly long EULAs would be fine if violation on technicalities were lighter, and/or critical sections were put on top, in plain language. For instance, I wouldn't care much about Youtube's terms and services outside of what would warrant an account ban, and what's the privacy boundaries. If Googl…

“ Failure to make it prominent should be ground for voiding critical clauses.”

In the US it typically is.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#129

Post by nerdponx »

dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote: post #20
drewcoo wrote: post #6

Justice Brandeis says a thing: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2016/05/27/justice-louis-bra...

Off topic question but can anyone explain this baby/toddler talk "did a thing" / "said a thing" meme that is spreading lately? I hear it at work from some of my dev team and just curious if I'm missing some sarcastic/jokey reference every time it's being said.

It's a rhetorical device. Babies wouldn't understand it.

When used in earnest, it tends to sound breathless and dramatic, probably because that's how trashy journalists use it in headlines.

It tends to be used as a kind of statement of passive resignation. It's deliberately the most colorless, blandest, simplest way to possibly express the idea that it expresses. Whereas you might otherwise say "well that's new" or "ugh, I forgot about X", you might say "that's a thing."

It also seems to be somewhat of a recurring meme, I remember reading an article showing how this "a thing" phrase makes the rounds every couple of decades.

I think there are some really ugly phrases out there now ("ask" as a noun instead of "request" or "task" is kind of nauseating).

But lighten up a little bit, some people like to have fun when they speak. Think of it like absurdist humor, rather than baby talk.

I know it's trendy in some circles to claim that adults have become infantilized or whatever, but I don't think that's what's happening here.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#130

Post by tomrod »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #70
lostlogin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean that everyone on HN should have a computer science degree, a marketing degree and an MBA?

At least have a degree in cryptography so you can verify your random number generator is cryptographically secure. A trivial task for the average HN reader, except the greatest impediment being that mathematics is impenetrable largely because of the obscure notation that mathematicians use when writing it.

This is like complaining that code syntax is inscrutable because someone hasn't taken the time to learn it. While it may be difficult to access without some time spent on it, mathematical symbology avoids massive verbosity.
Post reply on HN