Hacker News Reader

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

I respect that. FWIW I just use three cards:

1. Apple Card which is 2% back on all Apple Pay

2. Costco Visa that does 3% on restaurants and travel

3. Amazon prime visa, 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods. (This is just saved to my Amazon account so I don’t have to think about it.)

It’s pretty easy to remember to use the Costco card at restaurants.

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

We’re talking about the consumer benefits here. It’s true Apple extracted some of the most consumer-friendly terms in the industry.

abaloneon Prostate cancer cases worldwide likely to double by 2040, analysis finds

Agreed, prostate cancer is rare under age 40. 45 to 50 is a good age to get tested if there is no family history.

Other things:

- There is a very new multi-cancer blood test called Galleri that might catch it, but I think you have to be above age 50.

- You could potentially do genetic testing to look for markers but it's probably not worth the expense unless you have family history.

- There's also the old fashioned Digital Rectal Exam that feels for abnormally sized prostates, but chances are your PSA would already be elevated.

abaloneon Prostate cancer cases worldwide likely to double by 2040, analysis finds

There are conflicting studies. This is common. It's tough to put together randomized trials over a multi-decade period to get the highest quality data. But among oncologists there is very widespread agreement on the benefits of PSA testing.

https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/healthy-aging/the-psa-debate/

abaloneon Prostate cancer cases worldwide likely to double by 2040, analysis finds

Yes but it is still an excellent first-level screening tool. A few things can cause elevated PSA. Typically you will get retested a bunch of times to see if it comes back down to normal levels. But if it stays up you may be a good candidate for an MRI-guided biopsy to look for tumors.

abaloneon Prostate cancer cases worldwide likely to double by 2040, analysis finds

This is so very rare that I doubt it would move that statistic.

abaloneon Prostate cancer cases worldwide likely to double by 2040, analysis finds

Yes, the absolute number of deaths is significant. There is a debate within the medical community over whether the slower growing type should be relabeled as not-cancer / pre-cancer, etc., as surveillance is the more typical treatment plan these days. This in turn will increase the death rate percentage of the remaining (fast growing) cases.

Also worth mentioning that it's not just about surviving it, there's also quality of life. The earlier you catch it the better the outcome.

abaloneon Prostate cancer cases worldwide likely to double by 2040, analysis finds

Prostate cancer survivor here, AMA.

Tips:

* I recommend everyone with a prostate get their PSA tested by age 45, or earlier if it runs in the family. It's a simple blood test but sometimes you have to ask for it.

* Early detection is key. A biopsy can assess how aggressive it is (the Gleason score). They can even genetically profile the tumor to further gauge risk (the Decipher score).

* Most cases are slow growing and may never escape the prostate. These are usually treated by simply monitoring them with more PSA testing, imaging and the occasional biopsy. Years ago these cases uses to be over-treated but now they have high quality data showing the safety of monitoring.

* If it hasn't left the prostate (stage 1 or 2) and they think you need treatment there are a few options. In lesser cases you can do focal therapy which is like zapping a small tumor. But it tends to be a multi-focal disease, so often you'll end up getting "definitive treatment": removing the prostate surgically or saturating it with radiation.

* Surgery typically uses a cool-ass remote-controlled robot called "the DaVinci" that operates through a set of small incisions.

* Radiation is done either via external beam -- you just lie there and get zapped -- or by inserting radioactive seeds directly into the prostate (brachytherapy).

* The main side effect of surgery is erectile dysfunction, because the nerves that control that run right along the prostate and nerves do not like getting manipulated. Recovery can take up to two years and you don't always get all your function back. I think that stat is something like 1/3rd get back to baseline, 1/3rd get there but with the help of meds (Viagra), and 1/3rd suffer permanent decline / need other interventions. There is also some incontinence but that typically resolves within weeks/months.

* Radiation also causes ED, as well as urinary bother and potentially some other issues. But these typically kick in later, possibly years later. There are also some short term side effects while undergoing treatment. It's a good option for older patients for sure but "younger" patients (<60 y.o.) have to consider the effects of radiation on healthy tissue decades out. You may also have to undergo a 6-18 month course of hormone therapy which I'll discuss next.

* If it escapes the prostate (stage 3 or 4) then there is an awesome new scan called a PSMA PET that can locate where it is with radiomarkers. They might do focal treatment on hot spots, but the main course of treatment is hormone therapy.

* Hormone therapy is essentially chemical castration. It removes all the testosterone from your body, and this weakens prostate cancer cells. By all accounts it is not fun: kills libido, saps energy levels. But it's also not as rough as chemotherapy, so we're "lucky" prostate cells work that way. There has been a lot of development here; often when you hear there's a new prostate cancer drug it's for hormone therapy.

* We all die but you don't want to die from prostate cancer. It's typically drawn out and painful. I watched my dad go through it, and it's why I got tested early. Fortunately it is very treatable if caught early.

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

I don’t know where you are but NFC terminals are extremely common here (I’m in CA). And Apple Pay doesn’t track your transactions. It actually protects you better than a regular card by using a distinct number tied to the secure element in the phone, and thus your passcode/biometrics. Even if the merchant is hacked your number is useless.

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

Yes, merchant fraud is what I was referring to with “to some extent.” And you’re correct that card-present fraud is more likely to be borne by the bank these days (this was not always the case). But typical e-commerce fraud is usually eaten by the merchant.

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

I agree except for the part about monopoly. There are in fact competing card networks.

The bitter pill to swallow is that consumer preferences played a role in evolving this system. Card networks are managing a two sided market, and that means offering value to both the merchant and the consumer. Reward programs are examples of consumer value. If Visa decided to kill its “signature” interchange tier, those customers would move to MasterCard.

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

Why do you say they cause higher prices for rewards recipients? Is there evidence of this?

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

What do you mean by “spending time working to scrape back money”? Cashback rewards are fairly automatic. Maybe some have a simple redemption step. Apple Card’s is 100% automatic.

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

> and this is considered competitive

Stripe is hella expensive! But they are easy to get started with.

Competitive rates depend on the type of business, i.e. their volume and their fraud risk. The most transparent form of pricing is called “interchange plus” where it’s a flat markup on the interchange schedule. High volume merchants should be able to find a markup in the fractions of a percent.

It is my understanding that the big Stripe customers negotiate lower rates with them as they scale.

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

You should try Apple Pay (or maybe Google Pay?) It addresses all those pain points and more, while still giving you the consumer protections and fast transactions of cards.

abaloneon Develop in Swift Tutorials

Are you suggesting iOS developers should use another language (Flutter? Objective-C?), or that it’s a sucker move to become an iOS developer?

abaloneon Develop in Swift Tutorials

One of my more unpopular opinions is that Swift would’ve made a good successor to Java for server development. Syntactically I feel it is in that smalltalk-inspired vein and feels like a pretty elegant balance of simplicity and robustness (strong typing, concurrency friendly primitives etc etc). And the reference counting based memory management is really interesting for servers where consistent latency is desirable. I know there’s a working group on it and a small community, but it never seemed to take off and get the kind of Linux optimization needed for high performance. Am I wrong?

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

Also true for Australia! When they regulated interchange, merchants did not pass the savings on to consumers.[1]

[1] https://laweconcenter.org/resources/the-effects-of-price-con...

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

I wouldn’t assume everyone is happy with it. Consumers are going to prefer rewards programs over no rewards programs. And before you say it results in higher prices, that’s not necessarily true. Australia regulated away interchange and it didn’t result in lowering prices. Merchants kept the profit.

A lot of times these regulations are pitched as helping consumers, but it’s really merchants pushing for them. You could make a similar observation about the EU regulatory fight with Apple et al right now. It’s actually Spotify fighting for it, and they have different interests than consumers.

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

Interchange is regulated in Europe. You would likely run into legal issues if you tried to jack up merchant fees via a novel payment method.

However, even if it were legal, I don’t think this would counter my claim. I’m merely saying that you’d need to match existing rewards schemes in markets where they are established. Introducing them into a new market is an entirely different matter. The system we have today evolved through many decades of negotiation and deal making among merchants, issuers and card networks.

You’re right about consumer protections —- it would be very expensive for a crypto-based system to provide those without an intermediary that can adjudicate and reverse transactions (chargebacks).

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

A valid interpretation but not the only way to describe it. If a merchant offers a 10% discount for spending $1000 or more, are they making lower-spending customers subsidize the purchases of higher-spending ones? Are they transferring wealth from poor to rich?

Technically yes. But what would the impact be of outlawing the practice of volume discounts through a “policy change”?

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

Fun fact: this is why crypto never took off as a replacement for credit cards. Too many entrepreneurs focused on “lower fees” as if it were some technical property. But it was never about the technology.

Interchange fees primarily fund consumer rewards programs and benefits. To become an appealing choice for consumers, any new payment method has to offer competitive benefits. Those benefits are funded by the fees.

Visa/MC/AmEx have essentially created a system whereby higher-spending customers are able to wrench more value from merchants in the form of higher fees. This is reflected in the fee schedules that slice and dice merchants by category and customers by card tier.

If you want to build a new payment system it is important to understand that it’s not just a negotiation between merchants and issuers. It’s a two-sided market where customers also leverage their spending power, directly or indirectly.

abaloneon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

> But how far does this go in explaining why merchants "choose" to participate in this program. The obvious answer would seem to be that they get no benefit from the system as it exists but have no real choice, but maybe there is a better answer?

The simple reason why issuers don’t make every card a signature rewards card is that merchants would revolt.

The interchange fee schedule[1] is fascinating. Dozens of categories of merchants with different rates. There is no technical reason for this. Fraud costs are borne by merchants and to some extent processors, but not the issuer banks that receive the interchange fee.

The fee schedule reflects a kind of battle for customers. It’s worth repeating that most of interchange for these higher end cards is passed back to the customer in the form of rewards. Essentially, merchants are willing to pay higher fees to support the cards that higher spending customers prefer.

But there is a limit. We can observe that not all merchants accept AmEx, which has some of the highest interchange rates. If every visa/MC card were a signature card, more merchants would push back.

[1] https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/vis...

abaloneon Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy

OAuth 2.0 is perfectly fine for privilege management. The problem is they granted read access when all Netflix needed here was write access.

An analogy would be granting full access to a Gmail inbox in order to merely send an email. It would not require “scope explosion” to isolate the email sending permission. That’s just one OAuth scope. They just didn’t isolate it.

The more interesting question here is how this interacts with supposed end-to-end encryption. Clearly the messages Netflix sends cannot be E2EE (right?). The whole point of E2EE is the service provider doesn’t have your keys. If Facebook is letting 3P send messages on your behalf, they must be unencrypted.

Normally, ideally, in an E2EE system this should set off alarm bells. If you get a message from someone that’s not actually signed/encrypted by them, this should be very clearly alerted. Otherwise it’s a privacy attack vector. You could be downgraded to an unencrypted channel without your awareness.

So, what’s the Facebook messenger user experience here?

abaloneon Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

Clearly one of these two scenarios happened:

1. The waymo made a left turn into the space occluded by truck, seeing there was no vehicle behind the truck when committing to accelerating through the turn, but not seeing the bike in the adjacent bike line proceeding through the intersection.

2. The bike made a left turn from behind the truck into an occluded space, which would be suicidal.

While we can’t rule out the latter until we see video, the former seems much more likely. And that strongly suggests it accelerated too quickly. All the talk about the bike not stopping is beside the point — Waymo is supposed to be able to safely handle such situations.

abaloneon Winter & Cold Weather EV Range Loss in 7,000 Cars

It's literally about EV range loss in the winter. The journalist put Tesla's advertising to the test and took a drive up the east coast. Experienced massive range loss and had to sacrifice speed and heating. Was not instructed to plug in overnight. When he woke up he was dangerously low and only trickle charging was available at his destination in the country, which couldn't help him.

Musk tried to do damage control by attacking his reputation. For example he claimed "the data showed" the NYT journalist circled one of the charger stops to run down the battery on purpose to make a juicier story. People ate it up. But turns out he just had a little trouble finding the charger in the dark.

abaloneon Winter & Cold Weather EV Range Loss in 7,000 Cars

I remember when Elon Musk slandered a journalist who reported on this in 2013, back before people generally knew it was a thing.[1][2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/14/tesla-pos...

[2] https://archive.nytimes.com/wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02...

abaloneon Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups

How did they take ten steps back?

abaloneon Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups

Fun fact, they can’t exfiltrate the key because it’s burned into the secure element coprocessor and unreadable by software.

abaloneon Welcome Home, Garry Tan

He is 100% that petty. He literally mass blocks people who have simply liked or followed anyone he disagrees with, no interaction. Not an exaggeration at all.