Barcodes are about to go extinct | Hacker News Reader

Barcodes are about to go extinct

thehustle.co

76 pointsrmason110 comments

> No one is talking about it. It feels like a meteorite is hitting the planet and no one is paying attention.

An unintentionally appropriate metaphor. How many of the ~17 meteorites that hit the planet per day do you pay attention to?

GS1 Datamatrix is what I see here locally (Switzerland) starting being used for fresh food like sandwiches which makes sense as it contains the sell by date. This allows them to quickly scan items and sort out what has expired or needs a discount because it's expiring soon.

Sadly food tracking apps still don't read these codes. They are vibe coding new features constantly but not working on adding what is actually important.

Yazio, im talking to you...

They mention QR code being a link and companies having to store data on their side.

Surely the actual data will be stored in the QR code and available offline

As I understand it, The key bits of data are in the QR code, they are just encoded as a URL - a highly structured URL that point of sale systems can decode without visiting the URL.

Doing it this way means the QR code is directly usable by consumers to get to a product info / marketing page, and directly usable by the POS systems.

Edit: I looked it up. An example URL:

https://example.com/01/09521207311511/21/1234ABDE1235

01 is a marker before the traditional barcode.

21 is a marker before the serial number.

There seems to be many other codes like 17 (expiry date) and 10 (batch number).

This is correct. The canonical reference is: https://ref.gs1.org/standards/digital-link/uri-syntax/

It just encodes...codes?

We have the technology to encode a short, plain human-readable description of an item into a 2D barcode, with born-on and/or sell-by dates, and/or things like serialization and/or lot codes, or other useful things.

Brevity is important; fields can have a standardized-but-flexible format that fits the particular item's needs.

A single-quantity small Fuji apple, picked today (October 3, 2026), with a PLU of 4129, and a magic-number lot code of b29sF, distributed by Stemilt Growers might present as such:

  Apple Fuji Sm,B0261003,P4129,Lb29sF,MStemilt

A single 1.5 liter bottle of Crystal Geyser spring water with a UPC of 07514000500, a best-by date of January 12 of 2028, and a lot code of kek67:

  Water Spring 1.5l,D0280112,U07514000500,Lkek67,MCG

We can even add more real information and still have less data to encode than:

  https://example.com/01/09521207311511/21/1234ABDE1235

...but, I mean: A coded URL for a website that might be designed to avoid being forthcoming with information isn't necessarily any better for consumers, long-term, than the UPC we've had for over 50 years. It's still just a pointer that relates to someone else's database. It has no informational value on its own.

Absolutely - I 100% expect the links to lead to feel-good marketing fluff at best and end up being useless for consumers, but the stated goals are at least good.

It's just that, sadly, we can no longer have nice things.

I'm glad to see this. Switching to a new standard barcode format that can hold more data and enable better tracking of physical consumer goods seems like the sort of thing that will have a large number of small benefits pervasively in the economy, one of the many small improvements of human technological civilization that in the aggregate results in a better world today than in the past.

I also like the aesthetics of QR codes better than traditional barcodes. They do kind of invoke the look of a Go board partway through a game, which is more visually interesting than the boring straight lines of the traditional barcode.

thank you, Claude, very cool.

At family mart in China, some of the pastries are in bags with a QR code and a bar code. If it accidentally scans the QR code the self checkout (not in English) goes into a weird mode and I have to get help. So I just learned to cover the QR code for any packaging that had both it and a bar code on the same side.

What a bad piece. Optical is obsolete. Decathlon (here in France at least) has RFID on all their products, they're used as anti-theft, automatic tilling: you just put them in a box at the register and it knows what it is (also kills the chips once paid) and very likely they're used all along the logistic chain.

Decathlon does it in every country, not just France. Same with Uniqlo and a few others, but it's still only very large chains that can afford it

Uniqlo does it in the states now. It’s the first time I encountered it though (well, except for Uniqlo in Japan, even Muji is still using bar codes).

Merchandise point-of-sales tags isn't the only use of barcode or QR codes. Hospitals aren't going to start putting RFID for all equipment, files, and patients.

I thought that was exactly one of things RFID was used for?

Perhaps not for files, but definitely for equipment.

Putting a chip on everything sounds wasteful and worse for the environment than a printed piece of paper. Not the right direction to go in.

The chips are sub-cents per unit in terms of cost and weigh milligrams. RFID chips come in many flavours the ones most used are passive, i.e. basically just a bunch of wires printed on a tiny piece of carrier material. The label on a shirt contains more resources by weight.

While it can indeed be helpful as an indication, cost often doesn't factor in externalities such as pollution during production, and recycling after use. Paper has much fewer problems in those areas.

It's ok, these will go right next to the trillions of cigarette buds thrown in nature each year and probably the trillion of trillion microplastics and nanoplastics shed each year.

Nothing to see here and there can't be any possible negative consequences when people are making so much money.

Too pricey for food, it’s cheaper to print.

Printed Chipless RFID Will solve that problem if the tech really works.

Passive ones can be less than a cent per unit.

Ink is cheaper.

Not if you include the cost of the employee scanning the bar codes.

Even if the customers does it, it still takes a lot more time and space than scanning a basket full of RFIDs labels. It literally takes seconds.

I am quite sure they still use optical on the German shops.

Nope, at least the Berlin shop is on RFID on all products.

Yeah, unless they changed on NRW shop on my area since August.

My diving mask and backpack certainly went through optical.

Not in Berlin, not in Hamburg

I guess NRW is exceptional, or had broken devices in August.

And what is average price of one product in Decathlon compared to Lidl? Apples and oranges. How do you put RFID on fruit, vegetables and pastry btw. or you propose wrapping everything in unnecessary packaging?

So, depending on the place you don't weigh your vegetables in the aisles anymore, you know: low trust society and such. Either the cashier does it or yourself under the eye of the automated register CCTV. For places that still does they can just migrate to do it at the register and save the price of the barcode stickers and the printer. Pastries are either in boxes already barcoded so just stick an RFID instead or counted at the register by the cashier or yourself too. And nowadays RFID stickers cost nothing at that scale.

We must create a barcode reservation to preseve the last of the species before they go extinct!

Hopefully they can reproduce and ensure the survival of their species.

An infinitely wide but infinitely short world should suffice.

consider digimarc barcode too. qr code is nice, but nicer is it if you even not see it.

How to i keep my thumb off it during scanning?

JAB Code (color bar code) can fit more data into the same space: https://jabcode.org/

It's not easy to print in color on some products (e.g. products that use thermal printer labels).

I love how the website shows examples and comparisons with the codes it claims to be better than.

where?

That's the joke.

I don't see how this is better, my first thoughts: more difficult to print, more difficult to scan, vulnerable to light shifts (imagine trying to scan a can with colored bar code in a club with flashing lights) and impossible to print in some technolgies.

Bar code won't go away exact for the reason it's super simple to scan and print. Even QR codes can't stand that (and if you tried scanning yourself grocery in soft bag with barcode in the corner which gets crumpled you know what I mean).

I think this is great! i've long wanted a future where i can stock my fridge and cupboards with goods and scan the barcodes in and be tracking what their expirations are to better manage when i need to restock or throw things out

They aren't. Sage.

Not what I see in shop at all, I can't think of literally ONE product I bought which wouldn't have barcode.

Reminds me of RFID labels pipe dream.

In the UK I've noticed some items having 2D barcodes instead of 1D ones lately. Of course, all the scanners have been able to read them all for years now. They're not all QR codes, though. Other 2D barcodes exist.

> Reminds me of RFID labels pipe dream.

Visit a decathlon when you have time, they’ve been using that since a long time, it’s neat

I am the creator of https://www.closient.com/ - a GS1 Digital Link Resolver (still building it, be gentle).

I have been deep into this space for a fair bit of time now. The real power is in Recalls and Return Fraud. There a ton of other nice things that this will empower of course. AMA - I will do my best to answer.

For some other stuff to read about how they can help have a poke at https://blog.closient.com/

Not advertising - just trying to get the word out on 2D codes and RFID and what they provide consumers.

For those saying "Why not something else?" - it comes down to adoption - QR was just the more popular winner. While the register/till is where most of the scanning is happening the QR is just a normal URL and consumer can scan them.

Interesting, but your website looks completely AI-slopped.

At a fundamental level, if the website isn't the product, the product has been public-facing and/or created post-2025, and it's not coming from a multi-million funded tech business, I wouldn't dock points for a slopped website — let the team focus on maintaining and using skills related to the actual product, while still having a working website. Even if the visual and textual tone may be off-putting, a decent-looking slopped website is better than no website, I prefer being able to discover and interact with them at all than not.

Just don't bury the core concept of your product in marketing-slop on your website (this site is certainly pushing that limit for me).

Interesting, but your website looks completely AI-slopped.

HN readers are probably much deeper down the AI rabbit hole than people who buy barcode software. The fact you see and judge an AI-created website poorly doesn't mean customers of the product will.

It's possible that you're in the middle of the Venn diagram of barcode software buyers and HN readers though. In that case your comment is very insightful.

You need example product pages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com