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Comment by EpicEng | Hacker News Reader

>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?

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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?

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.

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

thanks, that was a typo

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.

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.

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