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Actually Deaf people have campaigned against a proposal to ban the selection of embryos based on a preference to have a Deaf child, because they wanted to be able to choose to have a Deaf child. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7287508.stm

The campaign was unsuccessful. UK law now says that:

(9)Persons or embryos that are known to have a gene, chromosome or mitochondrion abnormality involving a significant risk that a person with the abnormality will have or develop—

(a)a serious physical or mental disability,

(b)a serious illness, or

(c)any other serious medical condition,

must not be preferred to those that are not known to have such an abnormality.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/22/section/14

> I really wish polls like these would include a control question, something utterly implausible... Whatever percent of people answer yes to the hippo question get subtracted out from the other questions.

This is standard in appropriate cases. The official survey of young people's drug taking in England says:

"The survey asks about awareness and usage of a fictional drug called Semeron. Responses to these questions provide a guide as to how much pupils are over-estimating so it is reassuring to see that in the 2018 survey only 24 pupils (0.2% of all pupils)admitted to taking Semeron which is in line with previous surveys and suggests that only a tiny minority of pupils maybe falsely admitting to drugs use. However, 1,717 pupils (13%) said they had heard of Semeron which suggests awareness of drugs could be over-estimated. Hence the majority of the tables in this report focus on drug usage rather than drug awareness."

https://files.digital.nhs.uk/B8/8B8160/sdd-eng-2018-qual.pdf...

Congratulations! Nice problem to have.

Others are better placed but you've been waiting an hour...

- You say "Starting up is the most challenging job ": what if you assume it doesn't get any easier?

- What are the downside risks of an aquihire? What would you work look like? Is this somewhere you would otherwise choose to work?

- Leaving aside success for the business, what do you personally want out of life now, in the next few years, long term?

- You've had four offers without actively looking, what if you active look for buyers?

- What two people/roles could you hire that would make you enthusiastic about continuing to build your company?

Charities should use direct debit not card details for regular donations but direct debits are much more expensive.

If they used direct debits you wouldn't need to update anything when you got a new card.

If these organisations had either the resources or the transaction volume they would/should switch to DD.

What you've experienced is the entry level option.

Charities have a skewed income distribution. Most charities are small with very limited resources, there is only for a relatively small number of big ones. So many probably do use the entry level option.

(I run a charity in the UK)

It's launched in the US, Germany, and France so far. It started in the US, and Germany and France both have elections coming up. Launching depends at least on having factcheckers or mainstream media outlets doing factchecking active in that country and willing to join the scheme.

(I work for a factchecker in a different country).

I second the Two Scoops book. Django documentation is excellent (try the tutorial if you want a quick sense of django). Two Scoops help you understand why to do things in particular ways and make good design choices within all the things django can do.

If you're interested in this problem, there's a roadmap for automated factchecking from UK factcheckers Full Fact here (I work there): https://fullfact.org/automated, which has just got some funding from Google. The roadmap includes a summary of a lot of the work in this area and a breakdown of what many of the challenges are.

It's not going to be solved in a 36 hour hackathon, but it's good to see what they came up with.

We (I work there) don't have one yet but we wanted to get this line of work in the open asap.

The next steps are (glossing over enormous amounts of work casually): 1- Test that untrained coders have a high level of agreement in how they code different debates the same way 2- Do the same test with people who use Hansard (the record of Parliamentary debates) professionally 3- Iterate the set of categories if necessary to make sure they work as well as possible, given our two tests of (a) distinct and (b) useful categories 4- Code a set of training debates 5- Start developing a machine learning approach to automated coding

That said, I think there might be a shortcut available for at least some categories of applying some simpler heuristics.

So we're working to push this into a useful public system but it's likely to take money and/or expertise we don't have in house and so it will move slowly. In the meantime, we hope doing it openly might encourage others to get on board or explore this approach independently.

Our skillset will help a lot with getting to stage 4 and as we will be able to release the methodological bit and the training data hopefully that will encourage others to build on it.

It's likely that this will be an extension of s63 of existing 'extreme pornography' ban in s63 etc. of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/4/part/5/crossheadi...

That only covers images (including video) and does not cover films that have been classified as a 15, 18 etc., i.e. most commercial/cinema films.

I get to take part in a lot of these discussions and find the following response handy (via http://newsmary.tumblr.com/post/32264906546/your-approach-to...):

    Your post advocates a

    ( ) technical (X) legislative () market-based ( ) crowd-sourced

    approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the rapaciousness of modern publishers.)

    ( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
    ( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
    ( ) No one will be able to find the guy
    ( ) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste
    (X) It tries to prop up a fundamentally broken business model
    (X) Users of the web will not put up with it
    ( ) Print readers will not put up with it
    ( ) Good journalists will not put up with it
    ( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources
    ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
    ( ) Many publishers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left
    ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business
    ( ) Even papers run by trusts and charities are already going bankrupt
    (X) It will destroy the competition that makes journalism great

    Specifically, your plan fails to account for

    ( ) Readers’ unwillingness to pay for just news
    ( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
    ( ) Unavoidable availability of free alternatives
    ( ) Sources’ proven unwillingness to “go direct”
    ( ) The difficulty of investigative journalism
    ( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
    ( ) The high cost of investigative journalism
    (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
    ( ) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too small to do real reporting
    ( ) Legal liability of “citizen journalism”
    ( ) The training required to be even an rubbish journalist
    (X) What readers want, in the main, is celebrity and football
    ( ) The necessity of the editing process
    (X) Americans’ huge distrust of professional journalism
    ( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by two guys with a blog
    ( ) Inability of two guys with a blog to demand anything
    ( ) How easy it is for subjects to manipulate two guys with no income
    (X) Rupert Murdoch
    (X) The inextricably local nature of much newsgathering
    ( ) The dependence of all other forms of news media on print reporting
    ( ) The dependence of national press on local press reporting
    (X) Technically illiterate politicians
    ( ) The tragedy of the commons
    ( ) The classified-driven business model of much print publishing
    ( ) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for small sites

    and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

    (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
    ( ) That the US press dropped the ball on Iraq is a symptom, not a cause
    ( ) Print advertising pays so well because advertisers *can’t* work out the return they’re getting.
    ( ) Information does not want to be free
    ( ) Society depends on journalists producing news that few readers are actually all that interested in, quite honestly
    ( ) That your friend was misquoted once in a paper does not mean journalism is bunk
    ( ) Everybody reading the same story is a feature, not a bug
    ( ) Having a free online “printing press” doesn’t turn you into a journalist any more than your laser printer did
    (X) Wall Street won’t allow newspaper groups to back off from 20% profit margins
    (X) Newspaper executives are second only to record industry executives for short-sighted idiocy
    ( ) E-paper still doesn’t give publishers back their ad monopoly and hence its revenue
    ( ) You can’t charge for online content unless all your competitors do it too, all at once.
    ( ) Ethics are hard to hold up when your bills are due
    ( ) Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists
    ( ) “Gatekeepers” can help keep out undesirable things
    ( ) Publishing less often makes you even less relevant
    ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
    ( ) Free society depends upon a free press
    ( ) Democracy is bad enough with the press we’ve already got
    ( ) You think print is bad? Imagine Fox News, as a blog. That’s what your idea will turn into.
    ( ) Reader-generated content is to professional news what YouTube is to big-studio movies.
    ( ) Have you read the comments on news websites? They make YouTubers look like geniuses.
    ( ) You are Jeff Jarvis
    ( ) Or Dave Winer

    Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

    (X) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
    ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
    ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

It's a bit more limited than that: during election campaigns (which last a few weeks in the UK) it's illegal for anyone to lie about other candidates' personal character with the intention of affecting the vote.

e.g. s106 Representation of the People Act 1983 ("False statements as to candidates.") http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1983/2/section/106

Everything else is fair game and "personal character" is narrowly construed — it's about "the man beneath the politician" as one court put it.

There's also no legal bar to lying about your intentions in your manifesto, despite a few attempts to persuade the courts to create one.

This from the High Court of England and Wales — "Can a promise of this kind give rise to an enforceable legitimate expectation? Even if we had accepted that the relevant ministerial statements had the effect of a promise to hold a referendum in respect of the Lisbon Treaty, such a promise would not in our view give rise to a legitimate expectation enforceable in public law, such that the courts could intervene to prevent the expectation being defeated by a change of mind concerning the holding of a referendum. The subject-matter, nature and context of a promise of this kind place it in the realm of politics, not of the courts, and the question whether the government should be held to such a promise is a political rather than a legal matter." (Wheeler v PM, a case about whether the PM was legally obliged by a manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on an EU treaty http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/...)

(IANAL).

Not just good, outstanding, and despite their technical sophistication, bytemark is still run by its founders, who you're quite likely to deal with personally.

(I have been a happy personal customer for years, and have recommended them to others and used them for the organisation I work for (and started) but I should disclose that they recently donated hosting to that organisation).