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"ISIS" is an acronym and should be capitalized. (Isis is an Egyptian goddess of no relation to ISIS.)
by Robotbeat 6y ago
"ISIS" is an acronym and should be capitalized. (Isis is an Egyptian goddess of no relation to ISIS.)
- mikeyouse 6y agoIsis is also an unfortunately common name. Most of my coworker's apps stopped working and her banking became much more difficult sometime around 2012.
- FooBarBizBazz 6y agoThis seems dumb on the part of the bank. Unless terrorists are really, really stupid, classifying the first name "Isis" as "terrorist" is bound to have a 100% false positive rate.
- mikeyouse 6y agoYou're not wrong - but try to Venmo somebody funds for a "Cuban Sandwich" or an "Iranian restaurant" and see what happens though.
- creddit 6y agoI just did the Cuban Sandwich one without a problem. What should I be expecting?
- macintux 6y agoI did that with PayPal a couple of years ago and the transaction was flagged for review.
- leereeves 6y agoNot long ago there was a similar discussion here because > PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450828 And one of the top comments said: > PayPal gets a list of banned strings from the Office of Foreign Asset controls. If any match those strings it's flagged for a review.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoUSA had (has?) sanctions banning trading with Cuba.
- creddit 6y agoI know. I'm just not sure why the OP is so confident that me putting "Cuban Sandwich" in the memo is going to get me flagged. Still good so far.
- dilyevsky 6y agoDunno why this is being downvoted - i once jokingly added a note mentioning “meth” paying someone for dinner (in reference to our conversation at said dinner) and google suspended my account temporarily and cancelled the transaction
- 29athrowaway 6y agoPersian food is kind of a synonym
- na85 6y agoAre those phrases some kind of slang for drugs or fraud or something? Or is it just because they contain the words "Cuba" and "Iran"?
- detaro 6y agoJust because of the country names.
- booleandilemma 6y agoI recently used paypal to send a dollar to a coworker with the description of “tardigrade”, after reading a story on HN about how they were blocking transactions containing that string. Sure enough, the transaction was blocked, my account was disabled, and I had to send paypal an email saying that I wasn’t an arms dealer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450828
- aaomidi 6y agoIt's cause the banks keep getting sued by the US govt and the US govt keeps siding with the US govt that the banks violated sanctions. So banks then do ridiculous things like checking your timezone and checking your name and the memo fields so they get to have a stronger defense in court.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gnat 6y agoClassic case of the Scunthorpe Problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoIt was (probably) capitalized in the original submission. But Hacker News's title autoformatting screwed it up, again. It's known to capitalize individual words but removing all-caps acronyms.
- BenJong-Il 6y agoUS ist still capitalized. Or am I missing something?
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoIt's the annoying part. The anti-all-caps-clickbait system knows some common abbreviations, but not others. For example, on multiple occasions, "MIT" was not unaffected but "CSAIL" was turned into "Csail", see [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20482855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20482855
- TeMPOraL 6y agoIt's the first time I hear HN has title autoformatting.
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoThere is definitely some find-and-replace code. After you click the submission button, the title is immediately "corrected" (submitters can manually edit the title back later), with good intention - anti-clickbait. It basically does three things: remove superfluous words, remove superfluous caps, and properly capitalize the title. Most of the time it works well, but annoying when there's a false-positive. Examples I've seen so far (note that it's not always triggered, there must be some "if" conditions here. It's not always reproducible). * All lower-case titles are capitalized. Generally good, but not always enforced, it's strange. * Unnecessary caps are removed. Many false positives. "MIT CSAIL" becomes "MIT Csail", DARPA becomes "Drapa", etc. * "%d Ways To Do X" and "How To Do X" becomes "Do X", per Guideline. It misfired when I tried to submit "20 °C – A Short History of the Standard Temperature for Dimensional Measurements" by NIST. The "20" was removed and I had to edit it back! A submission of "How we threat model" by GitHub became "We threat model", makes the already-short title unreadable. * Clickbait words are removed. Generally good. But false positives exist. For example, "Massive Parallel" is a legitimate concepts in computing, but the word "massive" will be removed. I just tried "Massive MIMO", which is similarly a legitimate concept in communication, got removed as well. Try submitting this paper "Pilot Optimization and Channel Estimation for Multiuser Massive MIMO Systems" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.0045 https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.0045), you'll see that the word "massive" is deleted immediately after submission (but as I said, the reformatter is not always triggered and not always reproducible, perhaps your high karma will stop the filter from doing it). * "Your Statement is 100% correct" becomes "Statement is 100% correct". This is a good one, the unnecessary personal element is removed.
- bassman9000 6y agoAnd we should use Daesh anyway.
- dmurray 6y agoPlenty of style guides [0] recommend lower case or title case for acronyms or initialisms pronounced as words (e.g. Nasa, Opec, scuba, radar in increasing order of how likely you are to actually see them written that way). It's silly to insist that HN follow your preferred style. [0] one example: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a
- jimbob45 6y agoI thought we agreed on ISIL? ISIS doesn’t make any sense to me since they clearly haven’t succeeded in taking or holding Syria.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoNor the Levant, nor Iraq, and they're not a state, either. The name is clearly aspirational.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoAnd because of that it is also a given name for many people, believe it or not.