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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

What's obvious about that? To me the obvious thing is that bookies have to honor the bets they sell and get to eat their delicious mistakes.

It's within their power to improve their automated system to not offer stupid bets.

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>It's within their power to improve their automated system to not offer stupid bets

So then it's also within your power to never write bugs. Have you ever written any? How did that happen? It was within your power not to do so, right?

I've never written a bug in a system designed to earn me money and then denied responsibility for the consequences of the bug, no.

That is, my argument is about how you decide responsibility, not about technical excellence.

So now it only matters in finance? No one lost anything here. It's ridiculous to expect a payout due to an error like this. You wouldn't get one at a casino if e.g. a slot machine malfunctioned. What if the payout was $500M? Should they have to pay that as well?

Actually you won't get a payout if the slot machine malfunctioned: https://vegasclick.com/games/slots/malfunctions

The difference being that the slot machine owners are not the slot machine developers and it is not within their power to do anything to prevent the errors.

thanks, that was a typo

Sure, I'm entirely comfortable making life difficult for bookies.

And why is that? The rest of society has deemed it a ligitimate business. So you simply don't like gambling and that's why you want them to eat it? Not a very strong argument.

It's more that I think the activity of promoting gambling is one of getting your customers to eat it (It's advertised as a game of stakes, it's really just skimming transaction fees), so I don't mind it if what goes around comes around once in a while.

Society did no such thing; they weaseled their way into a legal grey zone and made themselves big before society had much say in it.

And if that bug cost his company say, $80,000 for some reason, there's plenty of instances where his company just has to eat that.

I've literally made tens of thousands of dollars in mistakes over my careers (try not to make the same one twice) and 9 out of 10 times the company would go "shit dude, don't ever let that happen again!"

And what if it were 1M? 500M? 1B? They just go out of business? Your logic doesn't scale well and seems overly harsh. They offered $500 and a pair of tickets. The guy lost nothing, I think that's fair.

You may be surprised to learn that software bugs put companies out of business. They also can kill people.

I'm certain I wouldn't considering I've spent my entire career in cancer diagnostics and finance.

This is a completely reversible mistake and no one was harmed in any way (feelings don't count). Let's not go off the rails and start making Therac-25 like comparisons. This isn't some abstract problem; the issue is well defined, so let's stay within the realm of reason.

Do you also think bugs in HFT code should be able to "undo" their mistakes instead of losing lots of money?

And how do you propose that would be done? You've totally jumped the shark here. Comparing this, an easily reversible incident, to HFT is simply nonsense. Thousands (probably a lot more?) of transactions would have occurred within the context of the bug, and decisions were made based on bad data once the bug was in the wild. There's no way you could undo that.

If your company could create a ToS to get out of it, they would though.

There are reversible mistakes too.

It is very typical for contracts between businesses to include monetary penalties for bugs that are service or uptime impacting, so yes many other companies are required to pay for their major bugs, why not a betting company?

>that are service or uptime impacting

That's why. What's the impact here? The guy didn't lose anything; he got his hopes up and was disappointed, that's all. People here are acting like the degree of severity/impact doesn't matter, but of course it does.

What if there was another zero on there? How about 8 more zeroes? Still think they should need to honor the bet? They offered him $500 and tickets to a game, I think he is getting greedy.

What if the situation were reversed, and I bought a wager only due to the fat fingering of my calculator, or I mistook one team for another or just had a brain fart.

Wouldn't it then be reasonable for them to give a refund?

A part to consider is whether the other party knew or should have known of a mistake.

It's not reasonable for FanDuel to assume a mistake there. However, if a customer purchased a bet on a game that had already happened it would be reasonable to assume a mistake had been made.

Mistakes happen and the law of contracts deals with them.

Yes, and bookies do as long refund clients' mistakes as long as the price hasn't moved that much and it is before the event.

Both which were not true of this interaction.

What if there were less zeroes? At what point can the company just decline to pay anything out at all because it’s up to their discretion whether a line was good or caused by a bug? Obviously in that case they would go out of business because people would be mad. But my point is that (in my opinion) it’s a very gray area legally.

It was less zeroes and they didn't pay and the guy has threatened to sue. Obviously it's a gray area, which is exactly why there are 2 sides to this argument. Their fine print will either stand up in court, or it won't. But you can't just assume they are going to pay out willingly every time they make a mistake. There is obviously a line where they have to say the risk in not paying out is worth the bad publicity and lawsuit potential. Then they learn from that mistake and move on. Then people use your business moving forward or they don't. That's why I like free markets, the checks and balances are already there to handle situations like this, we don't need legislation.

It might be within their power, but they are going to need to collect even more juice to get the system to that point.

That or they might need to close up shop.

Most people prefer the current system where they are able to make very dynamic sports bets, sometimes in real time, with the rare mistake.

It's easy enough to imagine a gatekeeper that doesn't let high ratio bets through, or puts them in front of a human, or whatever.

Test the hell out of that and you are a long way towards where you want to be.

It kind of smells like they had one, except it only panicked after the bet sold...

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