Hacker News Reader

havalocon New iMac with M6

Don't forget a decent webcam and pretty good speakers. I roll these out at work and I don't like retiring them after seven years; however monitors don't last forever either.

There's something to be said about the aesthetic of having everything in one, not having speakers and Webcams strewn across the place.

havalocon New iMac with M6

They also have fans in them, that's not necessarily good for longevity. Thermally, yes, until the fans clog up or start making noise.

havalocon Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

Users are coming back. These aren't the sort of users to come back to a dying platform

https://x.com/firefox

https://x.com/marcoarment

https://x.com/viticci

https://x.com/CaseyNewton

https://x.com/gruber

havalocon How Block Blast harvests its players for ad money

If you're playing an ad supported game, you kind of know the deal already. It still is sad of course, but it is what it is.

havalocon Chirp Pong – uses microphones and audio for networked game play

Simon Willison:

Another game experiment - I wanted to see if it was feasible to have a two player game on two separate phones running in static HTML where the networking code uses chirps sent via the microphone. It seems to work!

Build a two player competitive pong like game where two players use their phones close to each other and the game state is sent via audio noises which the web microphone API can interpret - but add graphical and gameplay twists to make it a lot more fun and intertwine than pong

Claude Opus 5.5 Extra in Claude Code.

Tags: game-design, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude-code

havalocon Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees

A reminder to listen to the Visa episode of Acquired Podcast if you truly wish to understand the scale of Visa and how it all works. Even at 3+ hours you'll love every minute of it.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/visa

havalocon Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died

When searching to verify the veracity of this, this post made me laugh: https://www.cringely.com/2020/01/23/not-dead-yet-what-bob-cr... (Circa 2020).

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).