He's probably thinking of some similar situations in the US where certain types of clauses are automatically void. No court appearance needed, no waiting, no nothing. It's as if the clause never existed in the contract, no matter what people sign.
For an example of this, see non-compete clauses, for most types of employees in California.
EU doesn't exactly make law. They make more of suggestions. Some of the countries do the drastic opposite of the EU "laws", even if on paper they're saying they don't.
For example, many types of racial discrimination are technically illegal in many EU countries. But look at what actually gets enforced, it's unfortunately made to look like a huge joke.
> many types of racial discrimination are technically illegal in many EU countries. But look at what actually gets enforced, it's unfortunately made to look like a huge joke.
The problem with that specific topic is that it can be very difficult to prove discrimination; also, legislation can pave the way but it's up to people to actually walk it. It's the same in some US states, really, and elsewhere is usually much worse.
Generally speaking, EU Directives (which must be implemented in local state law) are respected, and they can be vigorously enforced when people appeal to them. Like all laws and tribunals, EU ones are not perfect (some countries just ignore contrary verdicts, preferring to pay continuous fines; and some bad local laws are not appealed against nor closely scrutinised), but they are better than the alternative anarchy. Most EU directives did an inordinate amount of good for "retrograde" countries (Italy, Spain, Ireland, Britain etc), but sometimes it takes a generation to appreciate changes in law.
> "EU doesn't exactly make law. They make more of suggestions."
(a) The EU can make "Regulations" which come into force as laws in each member state. But those are rare.
(b) ... The more common form is "Directive", and member states are legally obligated to implement into national laws. This is effectivly "EU law".
(c) ... membership of the EU, also requires membership of the Council of Europe, and European Convention of Human Rights, and European Court of Human Rights, who can make judgements against a member state to force them to do things.
Each country has it's own laws but I think they'd get their money back in most places including the UK. Usually if there's a credit card involved it does not get to court - the credit card company refunds.
In many parts of Europe (among the countries I've worked) the written word of contracts is worshiped as the ultimate authority. What's "the right thing to do" means nothing by comparison. You sign, you're bound by it, unless you put up a massive legal fight. Not only that, but signed contracts are expected to be used vastly more than in the US.
It's a bit of a culture shock when you see the sharp difference in this respect from how the US treats contracts, at least it was for me.
On both sides you have people saying that the business world will collapse if you treat contracts the way that the other side is treating them. I'll refrain from saying which side I think is right, but I guarantee you that these differences are strong and real.
I'm not sure what countries you've been in, but British culture is definitely not like that.
B2B transactions do have more emphasis on following the rules of the contract, as two businesses are seen as being on a more "even playing field".
B2C transactions, however, rely heavily on consumer protection legislations (Sale of Goods Act, Supply of Goods and Services Act, Unfair Contract Terms Act), which recognise that most consumers do not read contract terms at all. In addition, there are a number of regulators and public bodies whose sole purpose is to provide free legal advice, and to fight cases on behalf of the consumer. Hell, there's a ton of morning television dedicated to hunting down dodgy builders and shaming them publicly.
My point is that contracts aren't as integral to everyday life as you assume, and most people will freely sign them in the knowledge that any bad terms are mostly unenforceable.
Indeed. Also, under British law, a contract is not enforcible if the person who accepted a signature knows that the contract's preconditions weren't met - for example, if you sign a safety waiver which says "I declare I have not been drinking" and you clearly have, the waiver is void and the fairground are up for damages if you hurt yourself on their ride.
Thanks. I flagged yours too. I want the mods to pay attention and find a way to reduce the hostility of Hacker News.
Several people I know in real life have told me that they perceive Hacker News comments as very hostile, so I know it's not just me. Nothing significant has been done to try to correct it.
We care about this a lot, pay close attention, and have been working hard on it.
> Nothing significant has been done to try to correct it.
That's a misperception, presumably because perceptions lag even after changes occur. But one needn't look far to see some: two inappropriate comments upthread have been killed by user flags and clearly marked as such.
Sidepoint: ALL contracts I've ever signed, both in Europe and in US, and across oceans, have a clause that says "If anything in this contract was missed or is in violation of the law, the law prevails. The contract is ruled by laws of X country"
And really, both here and there, contracts are treated more like guidelines than actual rules. What you agree on with a handshake matters far more. Especially with contracts under 5 figures because enforcing them would be way too much hassle and in case anything goes wrong it's easier to just write them off as cost-of-doing-business and move on.
have a clause that says "If anything in this contract was missed or is in violation of the law, the law prevails. The contract is ruled by laws of X country"
Yeah, I've also seen this in many contracts. It's silly. The law prevails whether you write it in the damn contract or not. That's why it's The Law. (You can also try the opposite test: "If anything in this contract is in violation of the law, this contract prevails over the law" --> yeah, right)
It's not really silly at all. It is there for two reasons.
(1) The law requries it to be stated in contracts [at least partially because of (2) below].
(2) Case law develops and can mean that something in a contract was previously enforceable but due to a test case or other development, it is no longer enforceable. Rather than companies having to watch every test case go through the courts and have lawyers rewrite contracts every few weeks just in case something needs updated, the catch-all allows for a more reasonable update cycle with rewrites only happening when there is a significant change to legislation or a number of cases has resulting in significant numbers of terms being invalidated. Pending the rewrite, the term makes it clear any updates to legal interpretation are honored.
In the EU there is also a choice of venue available to consumers so often the 'rules of country X' are not so readily enforceable for companies when they deal with consumers across EU borders. But that's a whole other complicated area.
Actually, the clause usually says that if any particular clause in the contract is deemed invalid under law, then the rest of the clauses are not also automatically invalidated. Like you say, stating that the law takes priority over the contract is a redundant statement.
Actually what most of those clauses are about is stating that only the contractual clauses that are inconsistent with the law are to be ignored, as opposed the entire contract being considered void.
It is true for business contracts that the written word is considered the ultimate authority. The principle is called 'caveat emptor' which can be translated to 'buyer beware'; essentially a business that enters into a contract is expected to read that contract and consult legal advice.
That said, there is protection for consumer contracts. In the UK you have the Unfair Contract Terms Act that protects consumers against businesses attempting to discharge liability to negligence. Europe wide you have the Unfair Terms In Consumer Contract Regulations which prevents businesses from inserting onerous terms into contracts with consumers that are not 'individually negotiated' (eg. almost every contract that a consumer signs without using a lawyer).
Am I reading this correctly? Looking at the benchmark code, Why not do a comparison versus the default Tornado setup, which is to fork one process per core? So STM Tornado is allowed to use multiple cores in this benchmark, but vanilla Tornado is not allowed to?
http_server = HTTPServer(Application(),
xheaders=True,
)
http_server.bind(port)
http_server.start(0) # Forks one sub-process per core
The problem with multiple processes is the "share nothing" model. It works for some problems, but it blatantly fails for a whole variety of other problems. STM tries to address those problems where "share nothing" does not work, e.g. because there is interesting data to be shared (albeit with few conflicts) or the memory overhead of N processes is just too much.
I really wish that there were canvas (non-svg) alternatives to flot, with many graphing features. Flot's performance for frequently updating graphs is awesome.
Some nice stuff here. My feature request: this badly needs a vertical crosshair for the multi-line charts, to see what are all the values at that point on the x-axis at once.
Wow, didn't expect this. The original founding team of Reddit were awesome.
1) Personally responded to feedback emails.
2) Actually cared about sensible moderation, instead of the terrible moderation practices that have taken over in recent years. Examples of reddit's recent problems: certain subreddit moderators perpetrating massive multi-million dollar scams by banning people who warned about scamming businesses. Moderators spamlisting competing photo sharing websites so that their own sites can get more traffic. All kinds of shady non-transparent moderator actions. I doubt these would have happened under the original founders' watch!
There were a few Bitcoin/dogecoin scams, unsurprisingly.
Two incidents I remember are a) /r/hearthstone, where a moderator who owned a fansite killed links to other fansites and b) a moderator of /r/tumblrinaction posted a link to a MLM on the top bar.
Don't forget when it was revealed that a moderator on /r/adviceanimals also owned quickmeme.com. He apparently ran bots that downvoted any non-quickmeme images and upvoted quickmeme images.
In the long term, all stocks become worthless and the heat death of the universe occurs.
If you can't state a particular time period over which a finance model's prediction should be valid, then you haven't actually made any prediction at all.
The efficient market hypothesis presumes that you can't affect the performance of the market (except possibly the shirt term price action). Bailing out Coca Cola presumably entails gaining enough control to drive the future directin of the company.
Very interesting. I bet that will be a big selling point for people considering this hosting service. Seems that it will be harder to put pressure on hundreds of individual residents, than it is to do so to a big centralized datacenter provider company.
Realistically speaking, I suspect that if this does take off (and it is a very cool idea), they won't actually install those things in living rooms due to noise concerns. Those racks are going to be in the basement where the other heating equipment typically is.
So police are going to get a warrant that is limited to the basement room containing the racks. the home owners will be slightly annoyed and inconvenienced, but they aren't going to put up a fight against the warrant. They'll be more than happy to cooperate with the police.
For an example of this, see non-compete clauses, for most types of employees in California.