Sadly the better experience is at odds with most business models these days...

You may have missed it, but Australia's banned card surcharges and tightened the interchange fee caps, but it's not really solved the problem. Someone's still paying.

Australia already has fantastic banking infrastructure. PayID lets you instantly transfer money between banks using a phone number or email, generally for free. We've also had eftpos for decades, a domestic debit card network that competes with Visa and Mastercard.

Surely we can make paying a merchant directly from your bank account as easy as tapping a card with proper fraud protection baked in?

I appreciate Visa and Mastercard provide genuine value, but like why should moving my own money attract a commission on the transaction? If I sell something for $10k, why should the payment network earn more than if I'd sold it for $10?

This is essential infrastructure. Governments and banks could fund it without taking a commission on every transaction. It doesn't have to be free to operate, just free at the point of use.

It's 2026, for fuck's sake. Surely there's a better way.

Flowstate (https://www.flowstate.inc) is building infrastructure for the emerging human + AI workforce.

Companies are rapidly adopting Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot and internal agents, but most still have very little idea what that AI is actually doing, what it costs, what work it contributes to or whether it is making the organisation better.

We’re building the systems underneath that: an AI router and proxy, native macOS and Windows apps, attribution infrastructure that connects AI activity back to work and tools for understanding how humans and AI should operate together inside a company.

We’re a small early-stage team and this is a genuinely broad founding engineering role. You’ll work across product, infrastructure, integrations, desktop apps, AI systems and whatever else needs building. We’re looking for someone who has worked in an early-stage startup before and actually enjoys the pace, ambiguity and ownership that comes with it.

Details: - Location: London, UK - Working style: Hybrid, with regular time together in the office - Salary: £100k–£120k - Equity: 0.5%–1.5% - Benefits: Gym membership, breakfast and flexible hours - Role: Full-time

Apply: https://www.flowstate.inc/careers/

There’s a wide range of political motivations for this sort of thing too. Not just AI taking jobs, but convincing people to vote against their best interests, or even supporting radical religious groups whose values would persecute you. This sort of rhetoric feels noisier than it ever did decades ago.

Everybody gets a platform now, even the bots.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49848227

Points: 67

# Comments: 19

It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_n1FZaKzF8

Instead of testing mainland China as a whole, the OECD allows these four specific provincial-level jurisdictions to represent China in the triennial PISA rankings for 15-year-old students.