Hacker News: rowls66

New comment by rowls66 in "Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees"

rowls66 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:23:24 +0000

In the US, charging more for credit card is allowed. Charging more for debit card is not. If paying with a debit card you should demand the cash price.

New comment by rowls66 in "Visa, Mastercard, Major Banks Facing New Litigation over 'Anticompetitive' Fees"

rowls66 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:13:01 +0000

I would guess two things. First, continued growth the percentage of sales where a card is used for payment. Approaching 100% for many businesses. Second, emergence of high interchange premium rewards cards from Mastercard and Visa. The merchants pay 3 - 3.5% on these.

New comment by rowls66 in "Visa, Mastercard, Major Banks Facing New Litigation over 'Anticompetitive' Fees"

rowls66 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:38:34 +0000

Wow, 10% is way more than any interchange. So I suppose it a 10% discount because the cash goes right into the owners pocket, and is never taxed. I do wonder to what extent small business complaining about card interchange, are just small businesses complaining that business was so much better when many cash sales were never reported as revenue and never taxed.

New comment by rowls66 in "What Meta got right with Muse"

rowls66 — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:43:15 +0000

Boomers are not a very valuable market for advertisers. The youngest boomers are 60 or older, and old people are mostly set in the products they buy and less influenced by advertising.

New comment by rowls66 in "How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer"

rowls66 — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:55:42 +0000

Card network rules in the US prohibit merchants from adding a surcharge for payment with a debit card. Most merchants are either unaware, or prefer not to care. If you are using a debit card at a business that assesses a card surcharge, point out that your card is a debit card when paying and refuse to pay the surcharge. If that does not help, there are online forms available from both Mastercard and Visa where you can submit a merchant complaint.

New comment by rowls66 in "SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?"

rowls66 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:19:45 +0000

Sounds like a good job for AI. I do fear that the future will involve deploying AI do deal with the mountain of slop produced by other AI's.

New comment by rowls66 in "Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28"

rowls66 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:33:13 +0000

There is no requirement in the Java language to use getters and setters.

New comment by rowls66 in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

rowls66 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:37:36 +0000

Or when IBM renamed everything Websphere.

New comment by rowls66 in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

rowls66 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:49:15 +0000

I have not had much experience with DB2, but given that the relational data model and normalization was invented at IBM (Codd) and IBM's implemenation of those concepts was DB2, DB2 performing poorly with a normalized data model seems strange.

My recollection was that DB2 did not support multi version concurrency control like Oracle and Postgres did. The result was a lot of lock contention with DB2 if you were not careful. MVCC was eventually added to DB2, but by then it was too late.

New comment by rowls66 in "US Job Market Visualizer"

rowls66 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:17:34 +0000

Maybe it’s because you are really a computer programmer. Computer programmer employment is expected to decline by 6%.

New comment by rowls66 in "10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13"

rowls66 — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:25:24 +0000

My initial reation was 'What is a CMS'? Naming your company or an initialism and never saying anywhere in the product description what the initials mean is not welcoming. Now I know that anyone who does not know that a CMS is a 'Content Management System' is probably not a likely customer, but you never know, and expanding the initials somewhere shold probably be possible.

New comment by rowls66 in "Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at SFO"

rowls66 — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:28:49 +0000

You don't have to tip an Uber or Lyft driver either.

New comment by rowls66 in "UTF-8 is a brilliant design"

rowls66 — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 19:44:30 +0000

I think more effort should have been made to live with 65,536 characters. My understanding is that codepoints beyond 65,536 are only used for languages that are no longer in use, and emojis. I think that adding emojis to unicode is going to be seen a big mistake. We already have enough network bandwith to just send raster graphics for images in most cases. Cluttering the unicode codespace with emojis is pointless.

New comment by rowls66 in "The startling rise of disability in America (2013)"

rowls66 — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 18:33:52 +0000

This article is nearly 15 years old (2013). According to center on budget and policy priorities, the number of SSDI beneficiaries has fallen from is peak in 2014. So this article was written about a trend that peaked a year after its publication and had reversed over the past 15 years. Odd that it would be reposted today.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-securit...

New comment by rowls66 in "Defold: cross-platform game engine"

rowls66 — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 12:19:52 +0000

Why would anyone buy their game engine when it is available for free? Seems like a solution for a problem that doesn't/won't exist.

New comment by rowls66 in "Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?"

rowls66 — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:07:38 +0000

Can a systems programming lanugage use garbage collection? I don't think so.

New comment by rowls66 in "What Was Chevron Deference? (2023)"

rowls66 — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 19:44:17 +0000

Seems to me that if Congress would prefer that any disputes arising from the implementation of their laws be handled by the admistrative agency charged with enforcing it, all they need to do is say so in the law. Not sure how the courts could get around that.

New comment by rowls66 in "Just Enough Software Architecture (2010)"

rowls66 — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 23:19:56 +0000

I found 'A Philosophy of Software Design' by John Ousterhout to be useful. It contains alot of solid easy to understand advice with many examples.

New comment by rowls66 in "Unit Tests Considered Harmful"

rowls66 — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 13:10:21 +0000

I think whats more harmful than unit tests are code coverage metrics for unit tests that devs feel compelled or are required to achieve. The easiest way to achieve code coverage goals for tests is to write lots of small tests that test individual methods, but test very little of the interaction between them.

I feel that the goal of unit testing should be to test the largest unit possible without requiring external dependencies. In the language of domain driven design, this means to test the domain model. If you can get extensive coverage of the domain model as a whole, system tests can be used to test the complete system.

Alas, I have seen very few software systems with high quality domain models. It is not an easy thing to achieve.

New comment by rowls66 in "Anatomy of a credit card rewards program"

rowls66 — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 01:01:52 +0000

You need to spend $16,666 just to cover the $500 annual fee. That’s a lot for many people especially when many low end retailers don’t accept AmEx. As already state rewards cards are a subsidy for the rich, or at least for people who spend a lot.