a3camero

Around 700k machine translated laws and 1.4 million laws from 62 countries.

The search engine is run off AWS, database by Google Cloud and indexing instances by Azure.

Pricing is done by purchasing power parity so the price is accessible for developing country institutions.

It's being used at many universities, a Big 4 accounting firm, the Ontario government, and a few other places. We let anyone do ten searches for free.

Free till August 1st (with request limit) and then there'll be a free tier. Pricing is here: https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/pricing

Although it's a bit unfair to judge an entire software system by the actions of a handful of people. Although many people may have bought into The DAO, it's still software made and marketed by a small group of individuals.

You could try asking for a fixed price for the terms of service too. That sort of work is pretty easy for the lawyers to estimate so they might be willing to go flat rate.

Kijiji (a subsidiary of eBay) dethroned Craigslist in Canada a few years ago. It's more popular here, although Craigslist still exists.

HN has a global audience. Might be worth noting that this advice is aimed at Americans. This could be very bad advice for non-Americans.

I'm a lawyer who deals with startups in Toronto. Quite a few people ask about how to set up a Delaware corporation because they've seen online that that's how you create a startup.

The method for the paper that is quoted in the Wikipedia article can be found starting on page 2 (the full text is available for free): http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/11/11.... It's three and a half pages long and includes many citations to other published articles.

Losing your job << going to jail for your actions. From the Wikipedia article: "... estimated that approximately 59 premature deaths will be caused by the excess pollution produced between 2008 and 2015 by vehicles equipped with the defeat device in the U.S." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#D...

Installing the defeat devices in hundreds of thousands of vehicles was not an accident that happened one day. It was a calculated corporate decision involving many people, over a long period of time. The result, according to many sources, was dozens to hundreds of deaths in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

"The dispute between Rogers Communications of Toronto, Canada’s largest cable television provider, and a telephone company in Atlantic Canada, Bell Aliant, is over the phone company’s attempt to cancel a contract governing Rogers’ use of telephone poles. But the argument turns on a single comma in the 14-page contract. The answer is worth 1 million Canadian dollars ($888,000).

Citing the “rules of punctuation,” Canada’s telecommunications regulator recently ruled that the comma allowed Bell Aliant to end its five-year agreement with Rogers at any time with notice."

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25c...

Although the "proposals" themselves are Ethereum "contracts" (programs), the thing that the money goes towards doesn't have to be a program.

The most popular proposal for The DAO to invest in is actually a German corporation called Slock.it UG: https://www.online-handelsregister.de/handelsregisterauszug/....

They have put hardly any of the paperwork associated with companies on the blockchain. Here's my brief comparison between The DAO and some of the features of regular corporations: http://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/slock-it-dao-paper/index.htm....

This is more like a group of people pooling their money to invest. A savings club. The contract also gives them the right to withdraw their money if they don't like the direction it's headed.

Furthermore it's not a corporation. A "corporation" requires complying with a number of jurisdiction-specific rules (such as filing fees and certain paperwork). If you don't complete the steps, you generally don't have a corporation. In some places you would have a partnership or some other structure that's different from just a group of individuals. The laws differ by jurisdiction.

Although intended as a critique, a blog post I wrote earlier this week might help explain some of it: http://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/slock-it-dao-paper/index.htm....

And the original proposal for "The DAO" can be found here: https://download.slock.it/public/DAO/WhitePaper.pdf.

As for completeness: it relies purely on laws that are published online, which is always not the complete corpus, even for advanced countries.

That's a really interesting point about detecting lobbyists, although my first thought is that most language similarities will be due to international treaties.

I'd also be interested in seeing which jurisdictions have copied from each other. Maybe there are "leaders" in developing laws.

We translate them into English using Microsoft/Google Translate (which is what you need to do in order to compare between languages) so the meanings may not be quite so easy to compare (because it relies on the current state of the art of machine translation of language - still not at professional legal translator level).

We've actually done some work about extracting definitions from laws. But the meaning is still providing using legal language so they may not help too much for the lay person.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of global-regulation.com.

The search is free but almost all of the technical standards aren't free. The reason for that is that the SDOs (organizations that make the standards) license them out and don't provide them for free. There's no way around that, except perhaps for people like you to use only free standards (although some are written into laws so there's no choice in the matter).

If you're someone who buys IEC standards then you'll notice that the prices of those are the lowest available because those are sold directly under a reseller agreement and we have some influence over the price.

I implemented this over the weekend using a small VM instance from Google Cloud + PDFBox 2. I set up Apache, wrote a quick PHP script that takes in the URL of the PDF to be converted, downloads it, converts it to HTML with PDFBox and then prints the HTML. I then linked this small piece into a bigger system that uses the converted HTML.

In Canada (which I believe is very similar to the US in this regard) lawyers generally can't contract out of their own negligence and the advice they give has to be at the standard of a competent lawyer (in the specific area of law). It doesn't have to be right or perfect but it does have to be the kind of advice you'd expect from someone who understands that area of the law.

Although of course, this post isn't legal advice. The actual rules are important, far more detailed than what I wrote, and jurisdiction-specific.

The reason why lawyers write "this isn't legal advice" (like I did above) is because it usually isn't and they don't want people to think it is. Although if it is, they could be liable for it and they want to reduce their effective liability by reducing the chance that someone will treat their legal advice as legal advice. Because sometimes it's not about what the law is but about what people think it is and how they react to what you've done.

Google "professional negligence" for more information.

Transfer pricing is not illegal. It's often an element of illegal schemes to reduce tax but the act of setting prices between non-arms-length companies is not illegal. It's necessary. The prices just have to be what an arms-length company would pay.

I'm one of the co-founders. Here's a write-up on my own blog about the service, including a bit of details on the tech stack (runs on a combination of cloud platforms, about 12gb of laws in RAM): http://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/announcing-global-regulation....

Annual licensing fees (state bar fees) and professional liability insurance are things that programmers don't pay for* but lawyers do.

*Some programmers have insurance but not to the extent that lawyers are required to have it.

I wouldn't be so quick to buy into the modern idea that this prohibition was always aimed at criminal laws. Excerpted from a paper I wrote in law school on the topic (sources at end of post):

Newly independent Americans in the late 1700s were very concerned with “this shameful abuse of power”, “those engines of oppression”, ex post facto laws. American businessmen were concerned with the macroeconomic effects and unfairness of interference with contracts by provincial/state legislatures.

One of the shameful abuses was the “paper money laws” that changed outstanding debts by permitting payment in paper money where the contract originally called for the use of gold or silver. There was widespread fear of the drying up of credit (in the context of an ongoing major depression at the time) as a result of concern that loans might not be paid back due to legislative intervention.

The dictionary of reference in 1739, Giles Jacob’s Law Dictionary, defined “ex post facto” as “a Term used in the Law, signifying some Thing done after another Thing that was committed before”.

Check out these sources: William Winslow Crosskey, “The True Meaning of the Constitutional Prohibition of Ex-Post-Facto Laws” (1947) 14 U Chicago L Rev 539

Roger W Weiss, “The Issue of Paper Money in the American Colonies, 1720-1774” (1970) 30 J of Economic History 770

Elmer E Smead, “The Rule Against Retroactive Legislation: A Basic Principle of Jurisprudence” (1935) 20 Minn L Rev 775

Harold J Krent, “The Puzzling Boundary Between Criminal and Civil Retroactive Lawmaking” (1996) 84 Georgia L J 2143

W David Slawson, “Constitutional and Legislative Considerations in Retroactive Lawmaking” (48) California L Rev 216

Always happy to chat about legal tech: addison@cameronhuff.com.

Who made the form agreements that you're using? You might be able to find a lawyer willing to supply you with these documents and also attach their name to them. That way your clients could have some confidence in the documents.

There are thousands of different NDA and contractor forms floating out there on the Internet but they don't come with explanations of the qualifications/experience of the drafter.

"Legal advice" vs. "legal information" vs. "project management"/"clerical work"/"administrative work".

Legal assistants are often carrying out the instructions of lawyers. I've never seen one that operated independent of a lawyer.

Becoming a Contract Programmer in Canada: http://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/becoming-a-contract-programm....

This has already started to happen in Canada: www.CanLII.org.

Have you discussed this with a lawyer who specializes in these kinds of agreements? Eric Goldman has written extensively on these types of amendment clauses (and has a very unfavourable opinion of them): http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2015/01/safeway-cant-un... http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2014/03/court-blesses-i... http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericgoldman/2012/10/10/how-zappo....

It's actually even better than that because there's also a national program that pays up to 35% of R&D salaries: http://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-tax-credits-for-soft.... There are hundreds of smaller special programs that can pay even more (and they often stack).