Hacker News Reader

Comment by walthamstow | Hacker News Reader

No other political parties are constructed as a limited company controlled by a single person, that's what's so interesting about Reform.

View on HN

Maybe I missed something in the article, but it goes through the companies office finding companies based on the names of key Reform UK members.

Couldn’t the same be done for other major members of the other major UK parties?

Quite possibly. The same could be done with the Register of Members' Interests. But again, Reform is unusual in that it has no internal democracy and is basically the Richard Tice party.

Buying your way into British politics is very cheap. He'll get maybe 15% of the vote and no seats in exchange for spending an amount 1/100th of a minor US senate seat race.

That is true. However The Conservatives have a lot of satellite companies run by politicians. There are some fairly well known ones even though it's not obvious they are run by party members.

Yeah, but then you get into disambiguation hell. My first serious coding project was an insanely ambitious attempt to do something like this with CH data. Great punt for a Masters thesis, but not the sort of thing I'd base proper research on.

Love the look of the library they used to do this, in considerably better shape than my attempt.

https://github.com/ribenamaplesyrup/sugartrail

Not research, but I spent 5 years writing matching algorithms for data for financial companies which was entered from random crappy mainframes driven by the lowest bidding data entry workers. This tied together the financial relationships of millions of people. The dumber it was the measurably more accurate it was. Hell even some of it used soundex scoring and a naive z-test to work out the confidence that two names were matching.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com