lessnonymous

For those outside Australia, you can pay most bills at the post office (Australia Post) or online via the post office's PostBillPay service. Basically, AusPost act as a middleman between the biller and the customer. But AusPost only accept Australian Dollar payments.

So from my reading of it, Ryan's project takes a bitcoin payment from the customer, converts it into AUD, then connects to PostBillPay and pays the bill, then send the customer the receipt from PostBillPay.

Bill payments 1.0: Customer -> Biller

Bill payments 2.0: Customer -> PostBillPay -> Biller

Bill payments 3.0: Customer -> BitBillPay -> PostBillPay -> Biller

It's a great idea .. but I imagine if it takes off, AusPost will implement pay-by-bitcoin in their own service.

Shhhh! Don't bring rationality into this HN anti-LinkedIn Circle-jerk!

I don't get why this is any different to anything else. What's to stop Microsoft backdooring the next Outlook, MSWord or Windows itself? Why is there so much ZOMG-FUD over this from LinkedIn than there is over anything else?

"Most users" blindly type the same password into Facebook that they do for Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, OK Cupid, eBay and PayPal. Any of those services can (and do) get hacked and the password opens all the other services. Should we shut them down too?

Sorry .. I did not intend to imply the flamewar detector was going to delete anyone's comment. It was going to do one of two things:

1. Turn off comments

2. Turn off comments and hide all comments to date.

You can't have it electing to remove one comment or another. At most it could delete a top level comment that was the spawn of the flamewar. But still, I say hide all comments and turn off further comments. That way we still get the benefit of the story.

I dunno. I haven't either. :-D

So the article might be useful to people building businesses in the tech space, but because some users decided to air their petty grievances in the _comments_ to that story, the story itself got buried?

Seems like the flamewar detector would be better aimed at closing comments rather than burying stories.

Which is kind of my point. Flagging stories just because you don't like Microsoft is counter to the site's purpose. Even downvoting because you don't like Microsoft doesn't improve the site.

If I'm building something, and I'd benefit hugely from some Microsoft news, your disdain for the company has just hurt my project.

Flag or downvote a cat picture. But not because you happen to dislike the camera the picture was taken on, but because cat pictures aren't relevant to the site.

In this thread: People getting confused over what Hacker News is.

We're not the OSDN. In fact we (as a collective group of users) are not related to the open source movement in any way. Why should MS's closed-source viewpoint matter to us? Are we not here to build businesses in the tech space?

Sometimes the right tool to use is made by Microsoft. Sometimes it's open source.

Major Philippines news org.

Thanks Rob. Yes, it has been updated. Your post makes sense now.

Hi Rob,

Has the headline on HN been updated? Because both you and brongondwana talk about it being sensationalist, where I see it as just being a summary of the most salient part of what you have to say.

Do you have Australian legal advice to back up your conclusions? (I agree with them, but would like to make sure we're talking more than the "gist" of the law)

Oh God .. what a dumb idea. Until I got to that bit it sounded great. Whether it's FIA or someone else, if it can get a following then the innovation the teams will develop will be massive for electric cars. And that it IS FIA that's organising it, it's got a good chance of being at least very interesting.

But if you're going to let the audience VOTE on the outcome I might as well go watching survivor. Maybe they'll let us vote asshole drivers off the island?

This is a great idea, but Lucid Charts is available as a Google App in Chrome and is MUCH more polished than this.

You can only get 60 elements on a page in the free edition, but after months of using it I finally had a diagram hit that limit.

That infinite scrolling is AWESOME. I absolutely HATE everyone else's version that makes dragging the scrollbar useless as it jumps around.

> she and most othe rreligious still advocate over population and against several sane health treatments. not to mention education

What you talkin' 'bout Willis?

Would you not get the mean height above sea level of all points along the border and divide that by the mean height above sea level of the entire state (which I guess is really an average of some sampling of points)?

Well you gave ME a laugh.

"My friends and I bought 5 acres and dug a moat around it."

Yup, that's a +1 there.

Sounds interesting, but .. anyone got a real translation?

Homeland made me sad.

In the book, the DHS's surveillance is revealed .. and everyone goes apeshit and protests. In real life it seems 90% of the population just keep drinking the Cool Aid

Not quite about surveillance, but a great hacker book:

"The Eudaemonic Pie" is a 1985 book by American author Thomas A. Bass, about a group of University of California, Santa Cruz physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp,[1][2] that roulette wheels obey Newtonian physics, and that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos. (from Wikipedia)

This is one of those ideas that look good on paper (or youtube) but just isn't practical. There's absolutely no spare space in a modern phone. If you make it modular, each 'module' has to have enough space for its component, PLUS space to bring it up to the next module size. This will make the phone HUGE.

The concept of an upgradable device is, however, great. Just not in the manufacturer's interest. Apple lose out if they offer a storage upgrade. Motorola don't sell another phone if they make the screen swappable to the next technology.

That's what we like to call "the point"

Sorry, I take my policy queues from Abbott and Turnbull. I haven't really thought it that far through. But if you vote for me I can probably muddle through.

I love that both Turnbull (who will be the internet minister) and Abbott (who will be prime minister) are both back pedalling saying they didn't have time to read it properly.

IT'S THEIR FUCKING POLICY.

https://twitter.com/TurnbullMalcolm/status/37555537509050777...

Blackouts don't make much sense in our always-connected world, but I think they should be swapped for "all policy must be announced 7 days out".

If you have no economic policy announced the Saturday before the election then you're going in to the election with NO policy and you're not allowed to talk about what you'll be doing in regard to the economy in that last week.

The sneaky fucks think they have carte blanche from the electorate and so are releasing policies either after the blackout or possibly not at all.

"Vote for us to end the deficit. We'll work out how if you vote for us."

(IMHO more likely to send us into the recession we've avoided thus far)

I think all business-to-consumer calls should be charged a premium rate that's passed on to the consumer in question as a credit off their next bill.

Rather than telling this guy he's rorting the system, we MAKE this the system.

The "Fishiest" part of this response is how many people he was able to interview about exactly what happened, and the speed at which he was able to get source interviews.

I mean he's a blogger, so just like you and me, he'd have to put in requests to all those agencies for information, and then have to re apply when they lost his paperwork. Then they'd say no in a hundred different ways. And about five years later everyone would have lost interest.

It didn't happen.

There's only two possibilities: 1. He made it all up, or 2. They gave him the story

Off topic, but here in Australia if the landlord entered a the apartment without sufficient notice or permission from the tenant, then he DID break in (well, not 'break' in, but certainly entered illegally)