skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Yeah, it's been on the way for the past 10 years, but nothing's changed yet!

Along with transistor counts, other technologies follow a Moore's Law like improvement curve. Network (bandwidth) technologies are among those, but they have a strong step-function characteristic to their improvement. This accounts for the delay in end-to-end deployment of hardware improvements needed. This also creates a perception of sustained changelessness followed by rapid change (e.g. dialup modems to DSL/Cable).

Any improvement to payment infrastructure suffers from a much more entrenched form of the network upgrade problem. This stasis works to the benefit of companies (e.g. Square) who can provide value without having to move the world. Coin also fits into this opportunity/risk model.

The risk, which that quote hits on, is that Coin is already too late: if a payment network transformation lands too soon, it could leave Coin's bright idea in the dust. In that light, saying "it's been on the way for the past 10 years" is more worrying rather than less.

But there are upsides. Imagine that Coin grows into its meta-card future, eventually supporting EMV[1] as well as easy revocability and reissuance. Lose your Coin? A quick report and it's revoked and all of your cards are reissued onto a new Coin.

[1] Per Coin's FAQ, they do not support EMV, aka "chip and pin", yet. This is problematic for non-U.S. usage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV
When I went to the doctor's office for a shot as a child, they offered me a choice: you can get the shot in the arm like the doctor would prefer, or you can choose to get the shot in the leg, but then the doctor has to go get a bigger needle. This could work the same way. You can forgo the bag, but then we have to put you in the centrifuge.
Safe my big ol' butt. You're inflating something against baby's head and pulling on it. You're also losing tactile feedback that you'd get by direct contact with baby, which may cause you to inadvertently pull harder than you intended to.
Python 101: How to Write a Cleanup Script
This jumped out at me too. GCC's documentation says:

Data prefetch does not generate faults if addr is invalid, but the address expression itself must be valid. For example, a prefetch of p->next does not fault if p->next is not a valid address, but evaluation faults if p is not a valid address.

This seems to make the code as presented incorrect (i.e. it results in undefined behavior).
ag80: That's one of the motivations behind lobsters. I think if HN were a little more transparent, it would mitigate the cold feeling of being hell banned. When I thought I had been shadow banned, it was like being banished from the internet. It really felt horrible.

Knowing that I'd have gotten a warning/notification means if the site is slow, I'd brush it off as high latency. Now every time the site is a little slow, I panic and think I've been slow banned.
For me, it's like the classic Spolsky critique of the "Cue Cat". It's solving a problem that I don't have. I carry a wallet anyway to contain my ID, my cash, and other cards that are not credit cards. Carrying a couple of credit cards along with all that is not a problem.

I personally don't have any hate for Coin or what they are trying to do; I hope they are successful. But it's not something I would buy.
> Some people who collect images of child sexual abuse are caught with hundreds of thousand of images.

The effort involved in collecting images does not scale linearly with the number of images collected.
i cant wait for this to come out
Here it is in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW-n914Vqtc
That apparatus would seem to make the unpleasant experience (for most) of childbirth even more unpleasant.
Try reading the FAQ before your vomit more words onto the screen.
So, this product is new. Nobody has used yet. However, it already got a bunch of bad reviews.
Why try to put a not even born yet business down if you are not even competing against it in the first place?

I'd be interested to see a business coming up from the article's author from the ideas he put in the article. But I guess writing a blog post is much easier than investing time and money to build up something new to make some people's life easier.
Awesome, i'm quite happy to see how far they're going ! Docker is a great tool and used here with greatness !
wow, I think this seems to be HOT Topic, took a while for me load this.

I know of an alternative that I bookmarked a long time ago. Have just submitted a link to their landing page, they're practically doing the same, but allow more card types to be fused and it's a mini-computer. They were on the market much earlier than Coin and it looks very prestigious & elegant.

The alternative card can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6736606

(A post, because I'm curious how the Echo is worse or better, without interrupting the Marketing of the Coin, on this board)

I am not sure how to think about this in general, but @nlh has really good points. I agree with him that he needs the imprints, but to be honest, those imprints don't guarantee security.
He wasn't hellbanned. So your rant is misplaced.
And I'll have it back in under an hour.

Unlike this battery system where I'm probably unable to fix it.
This is one of the worse ideas I've heard of; security wise. Not even at a tech-level. All your data and credentials are a robbery away. Of course, if you get robbed you can probably call in your credit cards from your cellphone... oh...
Now, on the tech side... magnetic? Really? We've been through this, it's not secure. It might sound secure in an ideal world where the user doesn't do stupid things like handing over both the card and the phone to someone just to avoid getting the notification or to be shown how it works... or because it's a "store requirement". But we are not in that world, nor we will be.
I don't think it's reprehensible. Any user can from their settings select the option 'show dead' to see hellbanned comments/submissions. Often, you'll see people alert those hellbanned if they deserve to know. This is a free service open to the public with almost no effort required to post, so I understand why this type of moderation is done.

People who are used to seeing upvotes on their comments and submissions will notice when they have a long period of no interaction with the community and probably figure out they've been hellbanned. I'd guess most hellbanned users (who deserve it) find it comforting that their comments stopped getting downvotes and angry responses, so it might even be more humane moderation then letting the community rage at them.
In Australia, we've even moved beyond EMV; the majority of merchants now accept Visa PayWave and MasterCard PayPass for tap-and-go.

[edit: Oh, and all my debit/credit cards are now paywave/paypass enabled, and they are all from the big 4/5 banks]

The Coin page doesn't mention this at all; does it have this? If not, it sounds like a step backwards.
The problem is any time you edit some of them out, you realize soon after that you don't have the one you need. If I don't carry around the cards I will need every day, I am likely to forget to take the ones I need only occasionally when I do need them.

The problem is that Coin doesn't really solve this. It only encodes credit cards; most of the other cards either don't have mag stripes or require other information on the cards than just what's on the mag stripe.
Here's the key difference: If I play a video game I KNOW the characters aren't real people. If "they" are soliciting a child thinking that it's a real child, then yeah I think that should be a crime.
Bank of America has a similar one too, and it doesn't have a yearly fee.
For an urban school district, San Francisco isn't that bad.

http://www.greatschools.org/find-a-school/moving/slideshows/...

Amusingly (considering how unlikely SF is to implement libertarian ideas), reason magazine kind of liked SF's approach

http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-...
In the UK at least this is not true. The bank have to demonstrate you did not take reasonable care to protect your PIN (e.g you left it written down in your wallet).

See some of the following case studies by the FOS that support the fact that the customer is not always liable even if the PIN is used:

http://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/publications/ombudsman...
I feel like a lot of feedback could be useful if it was framed differently. Everyone talking about the potential to lose multiple cards at once, or fraud, or theft, or the 8-card limit seems to come at it from a position of snark and sarcasm.

If you're smart enough to realize potential risks, you're probably smart enough to ask if Coin's considered solutions to that use-case, or offer up a suggestion. They've clearly spent more time thinking this through than we have, and I doubt they've detailed everything on a marketing page and F.A.Q.

Personally, I'd be worried about travelling and my phone dying or disappearing and effectively locking my card when that pre-determined time elapses. But I'm sure that could be configured in the app, or workarounds created once this goes live and more feedback comes in. (Web login, a friends' phone, etc.)

As for the product itself, I'd love to see it work. It would solve a problem for me, and I'd happily replace my wallet with two of these and my driver's license. Is it the best technology for solving consumer-merchant interactions? Maybe, maybe not. But I'd rather see 15 companies develop divergent ideas until a clear winner emerges than see everyone forced to Bitcoin, NFC, etc.
Umm, 'direct contact with baby' like when pulling his head with an attached suction cup and the damage often caused by that?
This is not true at all. Apps on Heroku are built on open source software (Rails, Postgres, etc). You can always decide to host it all yourself without too many issues.
Im thinking it might appeal to the average (non-technical) European who is upset about the Snowden revelations
Bitcoins: Coming soon to a campaign near you?
cashiers have never so much as glanced at my cards.

In fact my impression is that in the vast majority of stores now you swipe your own card. The cashier never touches it.
The only one I recall it being mandatory on is Quora. Most offer Facebook as an alternative.

And as a result, I never used Quora.
Thanks for letting me know. I've never used the service, but it's good to know that they thought of that.
Programmable mag stripe cards are really nothing new. This implementation is quite nice and sexy though. I can see immediate problems with it though:

1) Card thickness. Most makers of programmable mag stripe cards try to make their card the same thickness as a normal sized credit card. Why? Because thicker cards might scrape or get stuck in credit card readers (as old Amex black cardholders know). Unfortunately it has to be think because of the following:

2) Older iterations of this idea usually involved the bank/card issuer supplying cards with multiple card numbers preloaded on it. This card in novel in the sense that it has some writable memory that you can personally store your existing cards to. However this involves a few elements that add to the thickness of the card: It involves a non-volatile memory module for storing the cards, it involves a volatile memory module for holding information about new cards, it involves a bluetooth module for communicating between the volatile memory and your smartphone and it involves a battery to run it all.

3) The battery is non-rechargeable (because any existing type of charging point would add too much to the thickness), so the card only lasts for a specific length of time before needing to be replace.

4) There is a move away from mag stripe everywhere in the world but the US as mag stripe is really shit compared to chip and PIN for security. Even in the US, mag stripe will be phased out within the next 10 years. This card can't even store CVC security codes (the 3 digits on the back of your normal card).

5) They have added a security feature that ties the card to your smartphone such that it becomes "deactivated" (locks the non-volatile memory) once it is loses contact with your smartphone for too long. What this means in essence is that you cant use your card without your smartphone. So that begs the question: Why would the consumer adopt this instead of adopting a smartphone based NFC wallet if its available to them? Google Wallet stores any credit card I put on it, and if the merchant doesn't support NFC Google Wallet still displays an image of the card for manual number input. You might say that a merchant might get scared away from a transaction if you ask them to do that, but a merchant might get scared away by asking them to run a unfamiliar looking unmarked black card.

Regardless of the above, it is cool stuff and there is a niche that it will be useful for, at least until chip and PIN / NFC wallets become widespread in the US. I'm working on some similar ideas so I thought I'd toss in my two cents.
Building a Test Data Builder Symphonize.js with Chance.js for node.js
Their FAQ says that future versions will support chip cards.

https://onlycoin.com/support/faq/
When Parents Yank Their Kids Out of Standardized Tests
I've been working on adding configuration management via environment variables at work. We allow setting configs via the command line, but it posts a notification to our devops room in Hipchat showing who made the change, and which config was changed, but not the new value.

This means that people can see what is going on, without having full access to the settings which may be sensitive.

I suppose you could also set sensitive credentials in a one on one chat with Hubot.
I don't have a use for Coin - I have few cards, but the product reminds me of a quote often attributed to Henry Ford, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." While I think it's great for people who have many cards, and there are probably tons of customers like that, it doesn't seem that interesting from a tech point of view.
It's to replace the vacuum extractor or forceps. Nobody uses any of these tools if you can do it by hand. Both have their own risks (and forceps are going away because the skill required is high and not enough doctors know how to do it to teach new doctors).
I'm intrigued as to what happens when no-one 'takes responsibility' for a non-optional task. Like a compliance issue, or that tax return.

Who assigns the shit task to whom?
Oh the good ole' deep psychological personality trait evaluation handed out because of an opinion.
I am about the same as you. Nearly three years of full time Django. Looking at Hacker News makes you feel dumb in comparison to some commenters, but looking around my colleagues at work, I realise I am reasonably good. I would be able to build the bulk of a complex database for them but I am worried if they asked for something I haven't done, like a billing system.

I liked someone's suggestion of a fixed fee so you take the hit on learning stuff, but how do you counter the problem of feature creep in that case?
Absolutely not. The old crusty layer is everything you don't see running in the background. The banks, the payment systems, the clearing houses, the entire system as a whole.
Spot on. What you're describing is leadership, which is pretty deeply wired into human nature. We don't try to avoid this; rather, we want to recognize it as a discipline, and help people become better at it.

Authority, however, is totally different. It's the power to make someone do something they don't want to, and we try our darnedest to avoid that kind of situation. (Also note that "having authority" is different from "being authoritative".)
Are binaries usually downloaded directly from SourceForge?
I always end up using a mirror provided by a sponsor
The answer is actually no

Q. Where can I use Coin?
A. You can use a Coin everywhere cards are accepted including dip-style card readers and ATMs. Use a Coin just like you use your cards now at gas stations, restaurants, the mall, the gym, or other places you frequent.

Dip-style card readers do not pull the card into the machine.
No, we should just always be careful with new technology.
Upvoted because I came here to post the exact same thing.

The easiest marketing lesson I ever learned was to make sure to have a 1 sentence explanation of what your product does on every page where you talk about the product.

Your example sentence is the perfect length (unless they can make it shorter).
> I've watched stable projects either wither and die

Can you cite this or comment on particular projects? Centralized repo based projects seem to be struggling in comparison to the DCVS based projects.
It's not bad, but I feel it will be short lived. Like other pointed IC cards are standard in many countries and are coming to the US.

Moreoever, I'd rather have my smartphone do it all, and by all I mean all: cc, id, insurances... Most places I care about now accept IC cards and RFID, which means I should be able to pay directly by pointing my phone at something while punching an sending a encripted 4-digit pin.

Using Google Wallet, Paypal, Square and others would be even better. It's coming and the pace is just accelerating...

Have a good one!
The comment I was responding to wasn't about DRM, it was about the possibility of someone else hacking into it. That same issue applies to every person who hasn't disabled OnStar (and I mean physically disabled, since GM can turn them back on by court order, I assume a "hacker" could too).
Exactly. Currently in my wallet: a California driver's license, a Green Card, a medical insurance card, and a gym card which works via barcode. There's also a credit and a debit card. Thats's just 2/6 which I could replace with Coin.
Do we know this is really the case? I am skeptical about whether this guy had already discovered the vulnerability the day before the event. Fuzzing a browser can take a few hours running all the valgrind suites and analyze each failure can take a while. The article makes it seem he did it very quickly. What tools did he use? I am new to fuzzing browser.
Coin is absolutely a step in the right direction for one simple reason: it offers a convenient transition option.

Its most immediate use is to consolidate physical cards into one, but its true killer feature is the ability to instantly act as a physical proxy to a digital account (i.e. BitCoin, Paypal).

Do you own a Blu Ray player? It's more than likely to also play DVDs. If it takes a lot of time to get consumers to change over their media collections, I can only imagine how much time it takes to move the financial industry.

Coin is sorely needed.
The justification people have for their actions is interesting. The mother thought she was "outfoxing" the rich, the writer gave himself rules to follow. I can feel a little empathy for being vulnerable to tricking yourself like this.
Do attempted murder charges typically have a less extreme penalty than actual murder charges? It is my impression that is the case, but I can't find much that actually supports that notion.

This is a concern to me because it doesn't make sense to me that somebody who tries to kill somebody but does a poor job of it should be punished less harshly than somebody who tries to kill somebody and manages to pull it off. Nobody should get off lighter just because their victim was particularly hearty.

Of course on the opposite end of the spectrum, if I try to break the speed limit with my beat up '65 Volkswagen beetle, but fail to do so, obviously I don't deserve a speeding ticket. Attempted speeding isn't a crime, not all "attempted [whatevers]" need to be punished.
I've seen this done by locking the room, too. That way, everyone in the room when you make the change sees everything (and can check your work), but it's not recorded in the transcripts.
Instead of posting their problems, I think it'd be more effective to have explanations of current theories intended for people who don't understand it at all. You'd establish a single rule: the expert isn't allowed to expect full comprehension from the layman.

It would be, really, university for people interested in mental tinkering and disinterested in certification of any kind. A salon, perhaps.
Funny, couple days ago I was wondering why zach stopped talking about the github internal.. which I found illuminating and highly entertaining, and then, a couple days later, boom an amazing presentation.

If I may add a question: How do you manage to keep a consistent design across all teams considering that there's no manager and that most teams have different designers?
Your core premises are flawed:

1) The internet and the apps built on it still run just fine.

There is very little maintainership and investment in core difficult technology development. Most core projects that make up the foundation of the internet subsist on the oft-dwindling maintainership of what you seem to consider to be a legacy generation of engineers.

Outside of areas where companies hold direct commercial interest, many core technology projects are withering or stagnate. There are an infinite variety of new JavaScript frameworks, however.

2) Hundreds of thousands of usable and awesome open source projects available to use and contribute to

We're reinventing wheels at a prodigious pace, but your comment demonstrates and underlying shift in the opensource mindset that Github has invoked. Whereas open source was previously something to be produced as a stable, reliable entity, and consumed by users, it has instead become an expensive participatory process for all comers, in which stability and reliability and even documentation is discarded in favor of quick fixes and local patches and increased expenses for the entirety of the ecosystem.

3) More people are getting their code out to the world than before Github.

It's the conceit of every generation that they exceed the previous, but this statement (and the implication that this is due to Github's introduction) is simply not true.
To put more people in jail. It is the American way.
here I am thinking magstripes are obsolete. where I stay (Singapore), most transactions are done via EMV. Its rare to find the use of magstripes.
This would be like saying, in 1994, that Amazon was a step in the wrong direction for selling books online instead of realizing that physical books would stop existing altogether.
I managed to cut down the bulk in my wallet by 3 cards by photocopying the barcode side of my loyalty cards and sticky taping them to other cards which don't need to be swiped (nfc based transport card, nfc based car share card)
Why does the article say "clearly they created their own fork of Postgres"?
That is definitely the case. The one extremely important part though is that even the standard library source is readable and the documentation is incredible. There are a few books around including on on leanpub (https://leanpub.com/go-thestdlib). Effective Go (http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html) is a great lesson for syntax also.

EDIT: add links
Useful PostgreSQL extensions
Thankfully Visual Basic seems to be dying off. Unfortunately so does Perl. I did get offered a Perl job recently but felt it was a better for future job prospects to stick with Python for the time being.
"I think google wallet, square, and other RFID/NFC technologies are thinking about the future... The problem with these technologies is vendor adoption. It’s not here yet, but it’s on the way."

The author is incredibly underestimating the difficulty of driving vendor adoption of a new payment system.

Google just spent years and enormous amounts of money trying to drive vendor adoption of Wallet, and has more or less given up on the NFC part.

Square's achieved the most so far, but only by bundling it with its POS & processing service, which not all vendors are going to switch to (or even if they took over the POS world it would take a decade).

Considering that's the crux of his argument, it's entirely unsupported.
I didn't say "the crime" I said "a crime". As is typical for hackers, we are in "violent agreement" :-)