Hacker News: havaloc

Tesla March car registrations soar in key European markets

havaloc — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 02:02:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/tesla-french-car-registrations-triple-march-2026-04-01/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47622467

Points: 41

# Comments: 6

New comment by havaloc in "Newly purchased Vizio TVs now require Walmart accounts to use smart features"

havaloc — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:52:14 +0000

You sort of have to admire what a clever purchase Vizio was for Walmart.

New comment by havaloc in "Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine"

havaloc — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:29:44 +0000

Exactly. If some sort of random Dell model has a failure, you'll never hear about it because there's only a few thousand or so in circulation. But if any Apple product which sells in the tens/hundreds of millions has an issue, you'll hear about it whether you want to or not.

New comment by havaloc in "Can I run AI locally?"

havaloc — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:34:59 +0000

Missing the A18 Neo! :)

New comment by havaloc in "Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine"

havaloc — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:36:54 +0000

There was quite a bit of discussion about that when the M1 first came out, but none of it really seemed to have happened six years later. The target audience isn't in danger of wearing it out and the ones that will push the limits will grow tired of it and sell it in a year or two or move on to the Neo 2, which might have 12gb of ram due to the expected chip.

I still think it's a great machine, but I think all these worries about NAND dying really haven't come to fruition, and probably won't. I have about a hundred plus of various SSD Macs in service and not one has failed in any circumstance aside from a couple of battery issues (never charged and sat in the box for 2 years, and never off the charger).

New comment by havaloc in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

havaloc — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 02:30:27 +0000

I think this is a great generalization, I'm not sure I would have bothered with a PC if I had a smartphone as a child/teenager, but I also have no regrets about the smartphone free era I grew up in.

New comment by havaloc in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

havaloc — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:49:52 +0000

My boomer dad does more things on his phone than I do and I'm Gen X. It's actually astonishing how much he does on his iPhone. I'm dragging out the laptop and he's on his iPhone happy as a clam.

New comment by havaloc in "Big data on the cheapest MacBook"

havaloc — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:33:10 +0000

That's not what the video insinuates.

New comment by havaloc in "Flash media longevity testing – 6 years later"

havaloc — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:36:38 +0000

I bought about 20 flash drives in 2019 at work to parcel out when needed, once or twice a quarter for users.

I needed one last week, and had to throw most of them away, they had all died from presumably dormancy, even new in the package.

New comment by havaloc in "MacBook Neo"

havaloc — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:02:47 +0000

Exactly, this is good news, it'll force them to keep 8gb in mind. It essentially restarts the clock on 8GB machines for the next five to seven years.

New comment by havaloc in "Payment fees matter more than you think"

havaloc — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:29:14 +0000

If a restaurant runs on a 9% net margin and pays around 3% in card fees, then roughly one-third of its net profit is going toward payment processing.

New comment by havaloc in "Payment fees matter more than you think"

havaloc — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:24:36 +0000

The Stripe rate is a careful blend. There are many cards that are cheaper to process and there's probably a few that are more expensive to process at that rate, it works out in the wash in favor of Stripe. Also, that 30 cents is a large percentage if you're looking at a $5 transaction, for example (6%!)

See the "raw" rates here: https://www.mastercard.com/content/dam/mccom/us/business/doc...

New comment by havaloc in "MacBook Air with M5"

havaloc — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:26:24 +0000

I don't get it either. I've rolled out well over a hundred of these in a higher education setting and I have never had one have a hardware issue or needed to retire it other than wanton damage. I still have a ton of M1s in circulation and they are great still. I had to just replace a Dell with only 2.5 years of service, they tend to fall apart.

New comment by havaloc in "Vykar is a fast, encrypted, deduplicated backup tool written in Rust"

havaloc — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:15:41 +0000

Yeah, I love the original name, but it would have been problematic potentially with copyright. As for breaking the format, sometimes there's good reasons for it. I can tell you that it really flies though, when compared to Borg/Vorta. I can't tell if the speed improvements are from the Rust front end or the back end format changes, but it's a lot faster than Vorta/Borg and certainly way faster than Kopia on restore.

New comment by havaloc in "Welcome (back) to Macintosh"

havaloc — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:12:58 +0000

I wish I could say Samba worked properly under Windows. I've been migrating file shares to Teams/OneDrive sync as Samba is not reliable anymore. Too many "Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user" or variations on that theme.

New comment by havaloc in "Vykar is a fast, encrypted, deduplicated backup tool written in Rust"

havaloc — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:21:22 +0000

It’s centered around a simple YAML configuration format and includes a desktop GUI and webDAV server for browsing snapshots. Developed by the same team that created Vorta and Borgbase, I’ve been testing it and it’s quite fast and user-friendly.

Vykar is a fast, encrypted, deduplicated backup tool written in Rust

havaloc — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:21:22 +0000

Article URL: https://vykar.borgbase.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223541

Points: 4

# Comments: 4

New comment by havaloc in "After 800 episodes, 'The Simpsons' creators look back and ahead"

havaloc — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:49:57 +0000

I have a lot of respect for the actors at the Simpsons, but listen to some clips of their voices now versus when they were in their prime. They can't go on forever.

https://youtu.be/0H2KAtsSI3A?si=n_JI9FpmI2xy92IY&t=518

New comment by havaloc in "Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users"

havaloc — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:08:08 +0000

I switched from Fastmail to Gmail/Workspace a year ago. I think but cannot conclusively prove that Gmail drops Apple transaction emails on occasion ( like receipts ). But I also think Fastmail dropped other emails too.

New comment by havaloc in "NetNewsWire Turns 23"

havaloc — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:27:25 +0000

I was on Google Reader, then Feedly for a long time, until the Feedly iOS client just slowly degraded and got buggy. I'm not opposed to paying for a good RSS set.

I finally switched to NetNewsWire as the front end and FreshRSS on the backend, and could not be happier. NNW being free is just the icing on the cake, it's really great, and FreshRSS was also really easy to install.

What I like about FreshRSS is that it's PHP and will install on any old shared hosting plan and uses Sqlite as the database, super easy.