Read till the end. The government seized all his money, and even though he was acquitted (or never tried), they still kept it. And the IRS is after him too.

If you go against the government, you almost never win, regardless of how innocent you are.

"Impressive" is one word for it, I guess.

Faked video.

I downloaded it and went frame-by-frame and you can see the card display contents move around with changing margins. It's all CGI.

Not that it's inherently wrong to do simulations, but this is notable because they don't include a "this is a simulation" disclaimer (AFAICS).

The ridiculous number of features on this card makes it really hard to believe that an unknown startup has the resources to pull it off in the form factor as thin as a credit card. Coin still hasn't gotten there yet (they claim it works at 85% of the locations they visited). Adding more features including wireless charging coils and unknown method for duplicating chip and pin makes me really skeptical that this will ever make it to market.

I'm glad to see something like this. People often take the typical optimization mantra too far. The minute you mention optimization on most internet forums (especially StackOverflow) you get slammed for promoting "premature optimization."

That's not to say premature optimization doesn't exist. Sometimes writing faster code is the difference between using a hash instead of a list. Sometimes it's spending an entire day optimizing a function that's called once. The former is performance aware, the later is premature. It seems as though most would have you believe that they both fall into the "premature" bucket.

It's as though people are using it as an excuse for their personal ignorance and would rather continue to revel in this ignorance than expand what they know. As far as I am concerned these "unimportant tidbits" about performance are gifts that keep giving.

/somewhat offtopic rant

> This is for the MVP, and shouldn't take a competent developer more than a week working with Google APIs or equivalent. A good developer should be able to crank this out in a day or two. I'm tempted just so I can use the functionality to plan my trip!

I assume you're not a developer?

If you present a conclusion, your opponent can claim it's an invalid conclusion based on faulty premises. However, if you only present evidence-backed facts, your opponent can't argue against the evidence and you force your opponent to reveal their hand earlier. In this case, the hand being revealed is ultimately one of national security... but by structuring the argument in this way, they are likely to avoid a prolonged argument with the government over the conclusion's validity.

Before I sound too negative, I would like to say that it does look like a lot of hard work went into this, and I really do think it’s a good product. Unfortunately, it seems like another solution looking for a problems. From what I can tell, this product has little to no compatibility with Cakes and Deserts. At Small Startup – which this entire comment was written to promote – we heavily utilize Cakes and Deserts and can’t really imagine releasing a product in 2014 under the food category that doesn’t fully integrate with Cakes and Deserts. Is there any hope for updating compatibility in future releases or is this just another product that doesn’t even look at market needs before releasing a product?

EDIT: I was able to find a tutorial online for integrating Carrot with Cakes and Deserts, which may work until a better solution is found:http://www.chow.com/recipes/21792-moist-carrot-cake-recipe . I would still like compatibility with some specific use cases like Scones and Tiramisu.

Yes, but it's unlikely that someone asking "is it faster to concatenate strings in C# using the + operator or StringBuilder" on StackOverflow is someone that is writing a low-level database engine like SQLite. In my (totally anecdotal) experience the people who are more concerned about performance are beginners, because that is something that they can grasp, and this is where the "don't prematurely optimize" people are coming from. Obviously someone who is writing a low-level database engine knows that performance matters, and likewise, is likely to be running benchmarks rather than asking vague questions on SO.

I'm sorry you just invested a lot of time in scraping. I know from experience what a pain that is. We said several times that the API was coming, and I've made it clear to anyone who asked, but there's just no way to reach everybody. All: in the future, please get answers to questions like this by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

Re write access and logged-in access, if that turns out to be how people want to use the API, that's the direction we'll go. But we think it's important to launch an initial release and develop it based on feedback. There are many other use cases for this data besides building a full-featured client: analyzing history, providing notifications, and so on. It will be fascinating to see what people build!