skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Downsides of your idea:

1. Not everyone has, or wants, a smartphone. My phone doesn't even have a camera. People who work in certain high-security environments aren't even allowed to own phones with cameras.

2. Supposing hypothetically that I'm gonna have to "upgrade" to a smartphone at some stage, do I want to carry it around all the time? I always take my wallet, but I don't always take my phone. A phone is a much larger, heavier thing to carry around than a credit card.

3. When I do have my phone with me, it always seems to run out of batteries at an inconvenient time. I'd hate for the "completely uncontactable" problem to be compounded by the "you don't have any money" problem.

4. What happens when my phone (which I am now forced to carry around all the time and religiously keep charged) gets stolen? What authentication system proves that the person holding the phone and scanning the register is actually me? There's always "Enter your pin..." but that brings me to the next problem:

5. People paying with credit cards is slow enough already... I think your system would probably slow transactions down even more.

Anyway, to me it seems you're trading in a small, light system that works adequately for a heavy, bulky one that may be less secure.
Rebooting RSS, pulling it together
Your idea sounds great from a consumer perspective, and it's an absolute nightmare from the merchant's perspective. Merchants have a lot more money sitting in their bank accounts (on average) than consumers. The last thing they want is everyone knowing their account numbers.

Besides, the issue of who scans whose barcode is a red herring. Either way, the barcode (or RFID signal, or bluetooth signal, or whatever) establishes a bi-directional transaction, and at some point your account number will be transmitted to the merchant. How else would they know whose account to debit?

If you are simply suggesting using your bank as a proxy to hide that number, then you should look at NACHA's SVP:

http://securevaultpayments.com

No one uses it because the general problem of security isn't totally solved by introducing the bank as a proxy, and may actually just put more accounts at risk depending on the implementation because the bank has to be that much more open with the API.

You can see what you've paid for on your phone after it rings up with our system, which no other system lets you do. As it rings up, why not just look at the register?

Until consumers foot the bill for merchants' IT projects, I'm afraid what you're talking about just won't happen.
No what 4chan is doing is akin to telling a white person to go to the back of the bus in retribution.

Of course nothing is perfect, which is why if you don't believe in the democratic and judicial process then you might as well have anarchy and take everything into your own hands. We don't have a government because it's perfect. We have it because it allows us to funnel all problems with respect to it. A standardized process with which to improve society instead of having mobs act on impulse everytime they get angry.
There's also the concern of just how securely these sites treat your credit card data. I know of one that ignores your "forget my card after this transaction" preference, and has you type your password in normal text field, and may possibly have led to fraudulent charges. Maybe this experience isn't typical but cough the user in question was hesitant to pay on other sites after that, even when the price would be totally reasonable.
The biggest change for me is the broadening of focus away from just startups. I like it because I'm interested in broad stuff, but it leaves a hole. So we created http://techstartu.ps for the startup piece and now I regularly visit both sites. Reddit subreddits are also good for other specific knowledge domains, e.g. netsec.
Didn't know that. And this isn't the first time.

Is there somewhere to read up on all the rules of HN? I figured out a few things on my own (like that you have to have 200 rep to downvote), but once in a while I come across something I don't understand (like, it seems that you can't downvote immediate children of your comments?).
Internal and external recruiters often reach out to prospects through the groups they belong to. Problem is they're not very location specific.
Absolutely hilarious way to use the latest CSS3 features
"I consider it extremely important–perhaps vital, even–to spend time engaging others intelligently who have diverging views from one’s own. I think that this is, on the whole, one of the most valuable uses of one’s time that exists. "

This should be the reason he has comments closed. Walk your talk.
I have access to most of these API's, if you want to use my details to fill your site while you get accepted, ping me an email dominichodgson@gmail.com :)
Cool. Fork on github and send any pull requests. The issues right now are that it only works with ff3 and chrome. I'd have thought safari would work, but it doesn't (didn't for me). Some integrated browser detection to offer transparent reduction for images on compatible browsers would great.

Let me know how it works out for you :)
Media, be they iPads or Kindles or paper, are not nearly so important as content. For the average student, I doubt that either the Kindle or the iPad can add any content that will offset the cost of the device.

The cash-strapped college student would be best served by a cheap netbook, or if the student insists on a variety of media appliances, perhaps a laptop with a large screen. That should be adequate for any sort of interactive content, and a plethora of free content.

And of course, the student will require a healthy amount of discipline. Both the iPad and the Kindle make great publicity stunts, but neither is going to make a significant difference in a student's ability to learn.

There are a variety of interactive demoes that do help, but personally I think people should be making those demoes available in cross-platform form, or on some Linux/BSD variant so any cheap computer can be repurposed to run the software. If you convince yourself that the iPad or the Kindle or the Courier is the best device for education, I doubt you really have any insight to offer on education.

Every device has strengths and weaknesses. I'd say the best devices to allow skilled educators to create novel educational software are those that place the least restrictions on the educator. That's neither the iPad or the Kindle.
Google isn't going to rock the carriers' boat, but any significant kernel contributor could step up to the plate and fix the locked bootloader problem at any time.
The technology implemented by Shazam reminds me of an older art project that was never released. Scrambledhackz:

http://www.popmodernism.org/scrambledhackz/index.html

Has anyone heard anything on this?
What is this clout, and where can I get some?
Ask HN: Where do you find survey respondents?
I'm trying to find 50 respondents for a survey I create. The problem is: I need them to be a specific "type" - art lover/artists, 13-50 years old, and from the United States.

Are there any good online services that could help me with finding surveyees? (Free is better; paying is an option.)
Thanks for pointing out the username. Personally, I can see what he's talking about. This is the last thread drew commented on:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584474

About 5 levels down you'll see a 20-point comment that's unnecessarily nasty. I think that's exactly what the author is referring to, and I agree - I don't like it.
Maybe I'm being a prude, or maybe it's just inertia, but does everyone have an easy time replacing a textbook with an electronic device? An argument can probably be made about how ever-advancing technology might make note-taking (and the like) easier, but I often have a hard time detaching myself from the (very) personal experience a book ends up being. I don't just mean the contents of it, but also the feel of having a book in your hand and it being a companion. So much so, that there are times when reflecting back to certain textbooks, I'm reminded of the how the book 'looked' and 'felt'. Almost like how face-to-face conversation differs from over-the-wire.

Do most people feel otherwise?
As much as I hate to link to a competitor, Cushman's idea is similar to what Cimbal is doing:

http://www.cimbal.com

Cimbal has all of the same downsides you describe here (and more--it's only on iPhone and no merchants accept it). FaceCash, which uses a consumer-side 1D barcode rather than a merchant-side 2D barcode, solves all of them.

1. We let you print your barcode (like a boarding pass) on a piece of paper that you can cut to business-card size so you can carry it with you in your wallet. No phone required, which also means no cameraphone required.

2. See 1.

3. See 1.

4. Your account is linked to an image of your face that shows up on the register whenever it's used, and it's pretty unlikely that a random phone thief will be mistaken for you.

5. It's the same speed as credit cards or faster.
nice url, decent design - most you see her are not consumer friendly, but this is.
the copy sells th idea well, though since I am from the UK I don't totally get usa mobile plans.

good luck!
Yeah but you're just imagining ONE part of a really complicated system changing. In fact, when life expectancy goes up and elder quality of life with it, you'll see a shift in society. People will work far longer, they will have multiple careers, etc.

Laws will change when the population changes enough.
Clever idea however also like Match.com I envision 90% of the users here to be the male, aka non-technical types with an idea and no engineer to implement it. The other 10% is mediocre looking women maybe looking to mingle if something extraordinary comes around, aka a half decent engineer who just might partner if something exceptional comes around. But hey what do I know, I met my wife on a dating site and I couldn't be happier right now.
I cringed when he described engineering "being able" to listen to support people talk with clients all day long.

There is nothing worse than hearing one side of phone conversations when I'm trying to concentrate; it's like having a power drill grinding into my temple.

It seems like a lot of management types love open-plan offices because of the opportunities for serendipitous communication. I understand that, and can see the value if you're a CEO and your job is to be on top of things.

But a programmer's job is to be on the bottom of things. Hearing about some change to some component through the office chatter is completely immaterial to me and my day unless I'm actually working on that specific piece of code at that moment. All "being on top of things" means is that I'm distracted from the stuff I need to focus on.
Ask HN: request HITs on mturk.com from outside the US?
I live in Canada and am intrigued by Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. I actually want to do some market research, but am a bit stumped as to why only US residents are officially permitted to sign up and use the service (from a requester's point of view).

I don't particularly advocate this sort of thing, but is there any reason why non-US residents can't just put in a fake US address and proceed to get the results they need? Has anyone living outside the US successfully used mturk.com directly rather than one of the 3rd-party wrapper services?

This has been asked on HN once before (that I'm aware of) but with no responses - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624053.
Megan McArdle is Always Wrong...
great idea, I am very close to beta launching a London centric site with the same concept, guess numbers is the biggest issue in this game. can have the best ebay killer but if too few use it, it's pointless.
Contact them here:

http://who.is/whois/cuil.com/
You can use Amazon's Mechanical Turk Service to hire people to take surveys. Read this earlier post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668588
It's interesting they chose to interview a professor from Reed given that the CEO of Apple dropped out of Reed and Reed has always been rather Apple centric when it comes to computing platforms for students (
http://www.reed.edu/cis/about/computing_faq.html#typesused). It would have been interesting to see if the opinions given here were shared with other institutions that are participating in the iPad/Kindle trials.

I can't say for sure, but this article seems awfully close to this:

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
How We Pay Attention
Matterhorn 1.0,: open source academic webcasting solution
Sometime it is better to employ a taoist strategy of doing nothing and let them create their own demise. If they are targeting P2P users, than it let them know not to pirate that content and consume somebody's else. If that somebody else is smart, than he could enter into a mutually beneficial relationship rather than wasting money to try to fight piracy.
Don't let all of these naysayers slow talk you out of your crackpot proselytizing. Here, have a downvote.
For what it's worth, my personal PayPal account, to which I accept "donations" for my work on jailbroken iPhones on my website, saurik.com, was recently restricted for what sounds like very solar reasons. Rather than getting angry and throwing a public fit, I calmly assumed that there was some reason this happened. I then called PayPal and had an hour long conversation with one of their representatives, during which I was not angry and asked for help. I explained the sitauation, explained my confusion, and explicitly asked what I could so in this situation to have similar functionality to what I had previously. It was determined that the main issue was that I was using the term "Donate", which carries particular meanings and connotations. After having a rational discussion of various options, including using a different part of PayPal to handle these "contributions", it was determined that I could provide a custom button image that used my own text, an option he didn't suggest immediately because most of their users, especially of this feature, have no technical knowledge. I then updated my website with this new wording, and the support guy put it back into the queue for me to have their appeals department recheck it. After the call, I sent an email to the support department's "kudos" address, explaining how wonderful working with this representative that morning was, without first waiting to see if I got the result I wanted: if I didn't, it certainly wasn't his fault. Later that day, my account was reactivated, and I have had no troubles since. (Note: typed on my iPhone, so please excuse some shortness and typos. ;P)
Maybe we can collaborate.
This is the first I've heard of your product, but I agree it does solve all the problems I mentioned.

I'm actually curious as to what the point of the phone-based side of your product is, then... surely pulling a barcode out of my wallet is quicker than loading up the facecash app on my phone?
Just because there are lots of ads for Viagra in your in-box doesn't mean the pharmaceutical industry loves the Internet.
Craigslist is minimal but reasonably well-designed. Amazon on the other hand I would go so far as to call awful. The #1 thing I'm looking for when I open a product page is the details about the product and it's below the fold. But still, they know far more than me about what sells, so I bow to their judgment.
This is cool, but it solves the wrong problem.

The two biggest sources of credit card fraud are:

1.) Credit card numbers stolen from merchants with insecure systems.

2.) Credit card stripe information stolen by skimmers installed on legitimate terminals.

To combat these, you either need an entirely new system, (which would require every bank, everywhere, to buy into a new system, and thus will never happen) or something that generates new credit card numbers on the fly.

Hey, that would actually make this workable.

Have your bank generate ten one time use credit card numbers. Upload them to your smart credit card. Each time you swipe it, it uses up a CC#. After ten swipes, it's an inert piece of plastic until you reauthorize it.
Well as a programmer I won't dispute your assertion, but what I heard at a keynote from a very prestigious scientist is that we will actually start targeting the patient, not just the specific cancer. He cited some examples where certain known therapies that starve tumors are disastrous in a very small percentage of patients due to certain genetic differences. It was like hearing science fiction. This is certainly a great time to be in this field.
Why Building a “LinkedIn Killer” on Top of Facebook Will be Tough
I don't know enough about the field, but I'm throwing out this link, since I saw it earlier this week - Brain JS http://harthur.github.com/brain/
this office is in India in part of a city with high noise pollution, high enough that it comes into the office.

When I lived in a small apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area, I bought a bunch (~9) of bargain-bin flat king-sized sheets (the flat sheets only, not the fitted ones) and copper piping cut at the store to fit the lengths I needed and closet supports. Some sheets come with a fold at one end that will work to slide a pipe through. Others, you can have it customized for very little money at a tailor shop. Alternately, you can buy clips to hang the sheets as curtains without any modification. I found that having them tailored, so I could wash them frequently, worked best for me. For one especially long wall, I bought a hook for a middle support. Some of these curtains were used to separate rooms (the living room from the dining room, the dining room from the kitchen) but others were hung flat against a wall solely for decoration and sound-proofing (between the master bedroom and kid's bedroom). I think I spent roughly $100.00 for the whole thing, plus a few bucks more later when I took them to a tailor to modify them because I was sick of dealing with the clips.

If you do this to divide spaces, you do need to consider that air flow may be an issue. But if hung flat against an exterior wall just to block out noise (and assuming the wall itself has no air vents), this shouldn't be an issue.
About page size... I wondered when the iPad first came out about the screen size vs paper textbooks. I thought it would be too small given my memories of carrying all those big, painfully heavy books around.

But I wanted to check my intuitions against some facts. And I happily remembered that I have an old _An Introductory Course in College Physics_ from 1958 on the shelf. The pages from 1958 measure 5 1/4" by 8 1/4". Much much smaller feeling than the (typical from my college time) Tipler, _Physics_, with pages of 7 1/2" by about 11".

But the diagrams are not worse in any substantial way on the smaller pages. And the text is all quite clear and elaborates things quite well. Only very few of the larger tables, like the one showing the moments of inertia for various shapes, take up the entire, larger page in the younger book.

So I guess my point is, textbooks can work just fine with smaller pages if they are laid out with that in mind. The benefit of focusing the reader's full attention on a few diagrams and explanations at a time might easily outweigh being able to pack more information on a larger page.
Thanks for sharing, I had not seen that!
I don't have access to IE9, but maybe it's possible to create the necessary meta tags using javascript to clone a <menu> (or <nav> or a list with links for that matter) the same way jQTouch creates the apple meta-tags on the fly?

I'm guessing this will be in a jQuery plugin very soon.
With appropriate vectoring of requests and server-side state (i.e. having an indirection at the appropriate point), you can do live upgrades almost anywhere. I was doing it with ASP.NET years ago; concurrent versions of the application running, new sessions getting the latest version, while old sessions ran with whatever version they started with, all on the same machine, in the same ASP.NET worker process etc. as desired.

Of course, if you want to maintain things like existing TCP connections while not having multiple versions of application code running simultaneously, it gets much harder, but that approach also restricts how drastic an upgrade you can perform - ultimately, all the socket handles, file handles, etc. need to be assigned to all the right fields.
The Haskell Alphabet
If you look at riaa.org with the intention of helping out the DDoS, it is illegal. If you do it innocently, it is not.

The question of whether your mens rea can actually be proven is an entirely different question from whether it is illegal.
Bots playing the market make some bizarre patterns
"How else would they know whose account to debit?"

I hate to pull a single sentence out of context like that, but this misunderstanding is exactly the problem with the current system. Why should the merchant be debiting my account?

When you write someone a check, do you sign it blank, hand it to them, and then make sure they wrote in the right thing when it shows up on your statement? When you pay in cash, do you hand over your wallet, let the cashier remove the appropriate number of bills, and then look to see how much they took? That's what you're doing every time you use your debit card.

The reason we do it that way is because it's attached to this legacy system of what used to be literally credit cards. I* would purchase something "on credit", handing over my card so that the merchant knew I was vouched for by a reliable creditor. They would copy down the number and bill my creditor for the money later.

It almost makes sense for that kind of relationship. Debit cards were the first misstep, but at the time it was necessary to get around the logistical nightmare of checking my exact balance and debiting my account on every transaction. But now we're moving on to personal computers, and for some reason if I want to pay someone I still need to give them my bank account details. That's dumb and broken, and I can not believe that telling my bank to deposit an amount of money into someone else's account instead is a massive logistical hassle for retailers.

*I was born long after it stopped working this way, of course.
Hey, thanks for the reply! Hardest part is knowing what other people think, as I have a tendency to be biased towards my own ideas. Thanks for taking the time to check it out, much appreciated. By the way, I'm actually targeting Canadians (I know, it's sometimes hard to make the distinction). Maybe I should be a bit clearer on that point.
His solution is to put the menu in the page content, and use a CSS work-around to not display it. What about screen-readers? I don't think he thought this through.
You don't torrent porns but you go to porn version of youtube to watch it.
Hm? I have combined and separate Visa- and MasterCard-branded chipped cards. Insofar as I know, they work as credit/debit normally does.
I'm seeing people in other countries, I could really do with filtering them out.
Google needs to keep pressure on the carriers, or they will turn Android in to a glorified featurephone platform an inch at a time.
You're referring to:

Since you've simply flat-out contradicted a research paper with nothing more than assertion, I find it unlikely your upvotes represent anything more than a set of people who found their preconceptions tickled by your post. Do you have any sort of actual other study to back you point up, or are you just stating your own biases?

I am not sympathetic to the notion that this is an unreasonable nasty comment, given some of the arguments I've found myself embroiled in on HN recently.

I'm not arguing with Drew, though. He's an interesting guy, and he doesn't like commenting here anymore, and that's a shame --- though, again, talking about colonialism on HN is not a good way to moderate your blood pressure.