Hacker News Reader

havalocon Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees

Listen to the Visa episode of The Acquired Podcast, and you'll change your mind.

havalocon Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees

That could be part of the reason, but also I think insisting on chip all this time just really slows down a store that doesn't really spend on cashiering all that much. Tap to pay can shave off a few seconds on every transaction (ever been behind someone in the store who finally pulls out their wallet, finds the business end of their card, inserts it, waits 20 seconds...).

Millions of transactions a day, over thousands of stores, it can make a huge difference in time saved.

havalocon Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees

I get why the banks are not happy, but I can tell them that I am not going to use Chase Wallet, Bank of America Wallet, Citi Wallet...just pay the fee and be thankful for the reduced payment friction, which they invariably make money from. PS: Nobody is going to use Paze (yet another half baked wallet), other than to collect the free $10 to sign up for it.

Somewhat related, even Walmart relented and now supports Apple Pay/Contactless. Every big merchant has now relented (Kroger, Home Depot, Walmart).

havalocon Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell

When I read this post earlier, I immediately thought, "don't cross the streams."

havalocon Back and shoulder surgery is often worse than useless

https://www.howardluksmd.com/sometimes-our-joints-just-hurt-...

Many MRI “abnormalities” are, well… normal. “Age-appropriate” findings on MRI readings are vastly under-appreciated. If you are over 50, have no pain, and place you into an MRI, you have at least a …

A 20% chance of having a meniscus abnormality. An 80% chance of something being listed as an abnormality in your knee. A 10-15% or higher chance of having a rotator cuff tear. An 80% chance of having a disc bulge in your back or neck.

havalocon Making Tailscale Faster

I use an Island Router with Wireguard server built in, it handles DDNS and even the base Island router is beefy enough to give me up to 954mbps or so of Wireguard to right inside my home network. It took 2 minutes to set up.

That being said, I do understand the appeal of Tailscale and have used it.

havalocon Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices

I live in a small midwest market, and all the landscaping companies are locally owned and awful.

PE bought two of them, combined them into one, and now they, at about the same cost, do what they say they are going to do, answer the phone, hire competent people, and do a good job.

Likewise, PE has bought up most of the local plumbing and HVAC, and that's been a bit of a bummer, and gotten more expensive, but if you need someone right now, they are there (and answer the phone, etc), as opposed to the local concern who may be on vacation and can get back to you in 2 weeks.

There are some really good local small businesses/trades people, but like the 1950s, in a lot of aspects they are overly romanticized.

havalocon Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)

Author authorized epub available here: https://github.com/gfscott/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aest...

havalocon Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)

Being of that age, hearing about and then using ethernet in the dorms was sort of like discovering Oz after living in Kansas. I had so many questions! How did they manage all that traffic? It was like having a firehose after using an eye dropper all your life.

havalocon Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

Firefox/Mozilla really lost the plot.

Remember when it was the fastest thing around and simple?

Now it's an also ran. AI doesn't help here. Focus on what made it great in the beginning, make it the most performant browser around. Put Fable on the case if need be. Do the browser thing well!

havalocon AirPods 5

$49.99 a month, up to six family members (uses previous family sharing system), unlimited devices (with some carve outs for Vision Pro). Limit of six total claims a year seems low until you realize that's every 60 days.

Available starting September 14th, 2026.

havalocon Apple Watch Series 12

I imagine it was ran past their likely large legal department.

havalocon iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max

Having used a Z Fold 8, it's sort of a Mini. I'd love to see a non-folding phone in the same passport form factor, I think they'd sell a ton.

havalocon iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max

You can easily turn it off - it's a security feature:

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/change-face-id-and-at...

havalocon The car industry A/B tested selling a car with and without CarPlay

Saying you're not going put in a very popular feature (CarPlay) that probably doesn't cost that much to put in is one of the biggest self owns I can think of, especially when saying "we're going to do a better job." Has any OEM done a decent job with navigation, ever, perhaps aside from Tesla.

CarPlay is sort of like Apple Pay / Tap to Pay, even Home Depot, Kroger, and now Walmart capitulated. I hope there's fire to the smoke that Tesla will add Carplay, and I suspect if they do, Rivian won't be far behind.

havalocon Htmx 4.0

It's day job tasks/database CRUD, so I tell the LLM what I need. I used to write all my work apps in plain jane PHP/MySQL and I use that as a guide for the LLM, as in use this app as a guide on how I want things. The bonus of using plain PHP/MySQL/PDO is that the apps are small, so no issues with context windows or using complex frameworks.

havalocon Htmx 4.0

Before vibe coding was a thing, HTMX made it super easy for me to implement Ajax like features. It was the most approachable library I've ever seen, and I'll always be grateful for it.

havalocon New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

The Neo keyboard just feels nicer than even an M5 Air.

havalocon Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

Just because it's easy for say you and me, does not mean it's easy for others to do. Helper seems like a more appropriate word here, consultant being a loaded term these days!

havalocon Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

Something seems off here, I don't see a huge climb in pricing. I feel $9 a month a seat is inline with SAAS pricing.

Today's pricing: https://www.getharvest.com/pricing

Pricing in 2023 (I looked at various years): https://web.archive.org/web/20230530052857/https://www.getha...

havalocon Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

I do some tech consulting on the side and beg people (literally) to switch from Comcast (US TV and Internet Provider) to say YouTube TV, saving them hundreds of dollars a month. They WILL NOT do it, even though I would do all the work, show them how to do it, explain how it's essentially the same but much cheaper, how to use it, and not charge very much to do so (I bill typically less than $60 an hour, and it would only take a few hours to do all that).

havalocon Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

In general, I would agree, but I think some small businesses are romanticized.

I have a house and have been with every small/medium local landscape company in town, finally settled on a landscape company that was bought by private equity.

The pricing is about the same, but they actually do a good job, the employees are nice, and they answer the phone. You don't have to beg them to come do work and hunt them down, and they can usually come out pretty quick.

havalocon Pixel 11 Pro Fold feels like the end of an era

I picked up a Z Fold 8 for a test device, in order to optimize my app for folding phones (also in anticipation of Apple's folding phone), and the squat form factor really seems like something out of the future (certainly something different), I like it way more than I thought I would, the front is convenient for a lot of quick scrolling, checking things, and the wide 4:3 inner screen is really great for content viewing and web surfing. Even the front screen alone is better for content viewing then the traditional slab phones.

I like it so much I'd consider a non folding phone in the squatter form factor as well.

havalocon An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

I would move back to Fastmail if they offered it. Yes, I could muck about with MCP but give me AI light features, such as categorization and perhaps AI conditional rules.

havalocon An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

McDonald's. I wish I was kidding. https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/faq/can-i-change-the-emai...

havalocon Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

I have an elderly client who sends me links of stuff to buy all the time. One day it's one of these streaming sticks, the next day it's half-price stamps, and I tell her every time, please don't buy this stuff. And yet she does anyway, as if I was almost being mean and saying no just to say no.

So yes, I do want to blame the purchasers of these things, sometimes. To prove her point that her stamps were legitimate, she mailed me a card using one of her half priced (but likely fake) stamps and it made it through!

havalocon Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

This bubble too will pop, and life will go on. Costs will slowly drop down, just like the dot com days, but some useful things will be come out of this.

havalocon John C. Dvorak has died

I loved reading his columns at PC Magazine growing up, it's an end of an era. He had such an interesting view of the PC industry as a whole and his column was almost always the first thing I read when a new issue would arrive at my house.

havalocon The Future of Email

I really like Fastmail, but I wish they offered a lightweight AI feature. Their filtering system is unmatched, yet I’d love a basic, privacy-focused AI filter powered by a small, private model they run.

For example, I could set rules like “if an email looks like a promotion, move it to the promotions folder.” I could roll my own MCP server sure, but that’s not the direction I want to go.

havalocon Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM

Come on, a one gigabyte Pi is under $50. There's no plot lost, it's just expensive RAM. 2gb is $75. That's where Pi plays well.