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Comment by aij | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of when my university kept sending me a $0 bill every month after I graduated. They kept sending them, so eventually I wrote a $0 check and sent it back in the business-reply envelope. I guess they were happy I had paid my bill because they finally stopped sending them.

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I once read a similar apocryphal narrative. Someone, kept receiving 0$ credit card bills and the company sent repeated reminders with warnings. The person called, sent letters to discuss the situation but to no avail. The person finally gave up and wrote a 0$ check and they stopped sending letters. However, it led to a computer systems crash as the credit card company software encountered a "Divide by Zero" error due to eh 0$ check.

I'm having a hard me thinking of a case where you'd want to divide by an amount of money. What am I missing?

For example to calculate the expected time left to pay the remaining debt if you make a monthly payment of that amount.

So dividing by number of months, which is not dividing by an amount of money.

var balance = 0

var lastPayment = 0

var remainingPaymentsAtThisRate = balance/lastPayment

// divide by zero error

Surely that doesn't account for interest?

My goal with this 3-line pseudocode snippet was not to reproduce a banking loan administration system in its entirety, but just to show a place where it could make sense to divide by currency.

Or to produce a report on percent of debt that has been repaid.

>”However, it led to a computer systems crash.”

Reminds me of Bobby Tables

For those out of the loop : https://xkcd.com/327/

And the real life use http://i.imgur.com/RmfbEsZ.jpg

Probably the computer that crashed was in charge of sending out letters.

I receive $0 bills from some sources, and while they don't keep sending them, my bank's website (CapitalOne) does keep reminding me about it as an unpaid bill.

And it won't let me pay $0. I have to mark it as "I paid it myself, outside of your system". That makes it shut up.

Or you might be remembering this story from an email your mom forwarded to your MSN account in the mid '90s?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zero-dollars-and-zero-sens...

There's a golden age sci-fi short for everything:

http://the-eye.eu/public/Books/SciFi_Fantasy/Fantasy/Dickson...

(Computers Don't Argue, Gordon Dickson, 1965)

However I often had bills and reminders of amounts that hover around postage price. The latest one was a 6.22 euros hospital bill.

I had a similar experience. I wanted to cancel my old credit card but couldn't find a way to do it online. As there were no fees I just ignored it. Well, it turned out that my VPN still had it as the payment method and so I got a bill to please pay my negative balance (they require at least 10% to be paid off after a month).

Of course, I paid. But it turns out that I need to contact them to unlock the card after I had a negative balance. I kept postponing it and kept getting 0€ bills every month. After 3 months they told me they are sorry to see me go but they'd have to cancel my account because of a balance of -0€.

It was kinda funny but worked out well :D

I've tried to cancel a credit card and told I needed to withdraw all money first (I had +£5). I withdrew it, and asked them to cancel it again. They started processing, but by the time they had got anywhere, I'd acquired interest (1p) and they refused to cancel the card.

I had the same thing, after leaving the country - I had to fly home to take 1p out from the bank in person. "Don't spend it all at once!", the bank teller told me :P

Not sure if this would actually occur but would it be a negative mark against your credit score if they had to close your account due to non-payment of a -0€?

Credit scores are an American construct :)

The Germans have their own version - Schufa [0]. :-( Most of other countries also have versions too.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa

While we have Schufa, you should not (and I did not) get an entry for 0€ debt. Schufa is far simpler than the US credit score.

Worked with a guy that was fed up with the phone company, so he kept like a $0.11 balance due in his account, knowing that sending him the letters asking for him to pay the bill would cost the phone company more than the total was worth.

I kept a bank account open with £1 for a decade or so as a similar passive aggressive protest

In the US, keeping a balance that low will result in a bnak service fee that will, after a period of time, result in a negative balance (which then leads to other fees which further lower your balance).

AWS once sent me reminders to clear pending dues and pay the bills else service will be terminated. The bill was of $0.01.

yep. Me too. In my case, my bank was unable to process that amount of payment so they eventually had to strike it off my bill.

I kept not paying my debts and just accumulating more and more. One day my debts got so large that it caused an overflow. I now have a couple billion to spare. I'll be forever in debt with whoever did my bank's decimal type implementation.

Did they ever deposit the check?

Would a bank even accept it? Genuinely curious if it's even possible to register a null transaction like that.

Zero is not null!

Arguably it could be nullified if the payment isn't legal due to being for zero value. Under UCC §3-104, a check is only a negotiable instrument if it's an unconditional order.

UCC §3-103 defines an order as "a written instruction to pay money signed by the person giving the instruction."

So, to answer the original question - I don't think a zero-amount check is legally a check because it's not a written instruction to pay any money.

http://www.ckfraud.org/UCC_provisions.html

Hm. Is $0 not an amount of money?

Writing a check for $0 is not an instruction to pay. Paying $0 is equivalent to not paying.

> Writing a check for $0 is not an instruction to pay.

By describing it as a check you've already acknowledged it as an instruction to pay.

> Paying $0 is equivalent to not paying.

It's equivalent in terms of the final balance, but it's not the same thing in other respects. If I sent you a check for $0, you would wonder how I got your address. There are a variety of ways that it would be different from me not sending you a check for any amount of money at all.

is "0" ~= NaN ~= []

It is in Germany.

Sounds like misspelling "139" as "-1E9" could be profitable...

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