Hacker News Reader

GregorStockson Plaid co-founder William Hockey is leaving

Well, I don't have experience with the quality of Yodlee's data, but I can certainly confirm that around 2014 there were Plaid competitors who had much worse support for big banks than Plaid did. Compared to Yodlee, Plaid might have just been competing on price, developer experience, and support.

GregorStockson Plaid co-founder William Hockey is leaving

I would assume most of their early customers were not using Plaid exclusively, because they only supported a handful of very big banks. Every company that I've seen select Plaid as a vendor has either done so after considering many alternatives, or used Plaid data alongside data from other providers.

GregorStockson Plaid co-founder William Hockey is leaving

When Plaid originally launched, their value proposition was much higher-quality connections to the top dozen or so most popular institutions in the United States - fewer data quality issues and better integration with MFA than you could get by screen-scraping. Since those banks have about half the bank accounts in the US, that's pretty nice. They later started supporting long-tail banks (the 15,000 or so other institutions in the United States), although without the same data-quality advantage as they have for the big banks.

From the perspective of a new startup, Plaid also has a much more modern API and treats documentation as a much higher priority than most of their competitors - you can get up and running in an afternoon, which is absolutely not the case for every provider in the space.

Plaid also had much better support, at least in the early days - level 1 support was a native English speaker with deep technical knowledge of the product, level 2 support was a founder of the company.

GregorStockson Amazon.com Credit Builder: Build credit with no annual fee

Well, if you never put any transactions on the card, it's liable to get closed by the bank without notice - I had that happen with my oldest credit card after a few years of not using it, which hurt my credit score because you want your credit lines to be as old as possible.

GregorStockson Truffle: Finds business deductions in your personal spending history

Is this powered by Plaid? What's the user experience when you can't pull a full year+ of transactions?

GregorStockson Build your own Mint

In production, the delay I'd expect is about six hours, but for certain institutions it'll be much higher. Pending transaction support doesn't exist for all institutions, so in the worst case you could swipe your card on a Friday afternoon and not see it in Plaid until the transaction actually clears early Monday morning.

GregorStockson Build your own Mint

Yeah, good point - I figured Auth wouldn't be enabled on a free developer account, but it looks like it actually is these days: https://plaid.com/pricing.

GregorStockson Build your own Mint

It looks like the credentials in credentials.json are your Plaid access key/secret/etc, not your bank account username/password. If an attacker gets them, they'd have read-only access to your bank account until you rotate your Plaid creds, but they wouldn't be able to do anything as simple as logging into your bank account and transferring all your money out.

EDIT: It's actually worse than that, see comment from erichurkman below.

GregorStockson Ripple fined for acting as a money services business without registration

The current global currency is the US dollar. Most countries do not allow you to pay taxes in dollars. Why are Bitcoins different?

GregorStockson Stop Misquoting Donald Knuth

A ton of carbon sounds like a whole lot, but according to the EPA (http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/refs.html), a typical coal-fueled power plant puts out 3.8 million metric tons of carbon per year. Kinda puts it in perspective.

GregorStockson What Organized Crime Pays

You can configure Vim to put the swap files in your ~/.vim instead of the directory of the file you're editing, which in my experience is much less annoying - see https://github.com/GregorStocks/configs/blob/35ab5c3c45e5cfa...

GregorStockson iPhone 6: Comparing InvenSense and Bosch Accelerometers

1 Hz is one update per second, not one update per millisecond.

GregorStockson Navdy

Video game HUDs are pretty distracting, though. I think the farthest I've driven a car in a video game without hitting something is about a mile.

GregorStockson Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter

That sounds like it'd encourage misleading clickbait even more than the current Internet.

GregorStockson Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft

That's not all. Let's say that software developer would have produced $200k in value for Lyft. But that 200k could hire two more software developers! By induction, Uber has cost Lyft an infinite amount of money.

GregorStockson Eight Years of College Lets Finns Hide from Labor Market

But it is free of charge, which is what the post you're replying to actually said.

GregorStockson A URL shortener service in 45 lines of Scala

I believe you'll have a lot of collisions that way, as two URLs with the same 7-byte suffix in base64 will have the same key. The Scala version uses 7 random characters, which I think will lead to a collision after about sqrt(36^7) entries due to the birthday paradox (62^7 if alphanumeric includes both uppercase and lowercase). That's better, but I'd recommend just using something autoincrementing instead, which in theory makes collisions impossible.

GregorStockson Autistics in the Silicon Valley

From the article, just below the fold:

> You might have noticed several unusual things about how I discuss Autism. I’ve capitalized Autism, and I have not once used the word “disorder” or “syndrome” in tandem with it. I also say Autistic, rather than “person with autism” -- the term Autism Speaks, an organization despised by most Autistics and many of their parents, would prefer you to use.

GregorStockson China's Underground Wholesale Markets

Bitcoin does not support chargebacks, which moves most of the risks associated with fraud from the merchant to the customer. This means it's no longer insane for merchants to sell to places with a lot of fraud.

GregorStockson Maps of the Roman Empire

That's fairly common. For example, hello.jpg (of goatse fame) is a gif as well.

GregorStockson YC Demo Day Session 2

> Sliced democratizes access to hedge funds.

To be clear, Sliced is open only to accredited investors and has a minimum investment of $20,000.

GregorStockson YC Demo Day Session 2

Here's the link: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/08/01/1914342/the-hare-gets-...

And here's the best part: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/files/2014/08/Screen-shot-2014-08...

GregorStockson Bitcoin’s Price Falls 12%, to Lowest Value Since May

Why do they do it that way? Just because it's simpler to implement?

GregorStockson Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

When you're managing more than a handful of servers, you very quickly start wanting to be able to run the same command on multiple machines - "upgrade all my API boxes to the not-vulnerable nginx", for instance, or "push this binary out to all my database servers". These sorts of services make that straightforward, and generally provide a large library of prewritten modules to do moderately-complicated things without having to write a lot of boilerplate or read somebody else's Bash scripts or Perl.

GregorStockson Friendship Paradox

The shape of the distribution affects the value of the introvert/extrovert distinction pretty strongly, though. If it's strongly bimodal (so a random extrovert is very different from a random introvert), then it says a lot, while if it's unimodal with a small variance (so a random extrovert is only a little more extroverted than a random introvert) it doesn't say much.

GregorStockson Stellar

I registered for this and got 5,000.999999 Stellars. Kinda curious about the 0.999999 part...

GregorStockson Facebook Reports Second Quarter 2014 Results

Could be - I think my memory of the non-Page account dates to mid-2011, and that's plenty long enough ago for my memory to play tricks on me.

GregorStockson Facebook Reports Second Quarter 2014 Results

That's not how Facebook Pages work - a Page isn't an account you log into, it's something your main Facebook account can have admin rights to (and a Page can have multiple administrators). I have admin rights on a few Facebook Pages but I only count as a single active user, and I don't have to log out of my Gregor account to administer them.

Historically, some brands did create full Facebook accounts, but Facebook now discourages that and as far as I know most brands are using Pages now. For a while Zuck's dog, Beast, was a notable exception (he had a Facebook account long after that was discouraged) but it looks like he's just got a Page now.

(I used to work at Facebook.)

GregorStockson Terminal – Virtual computers that start, resize, and scale in seconds

After a few years, it's a safe bet that updating will break something. At that point, assuming you even notice the brokenness, you've got to either fix it manually (without necessarily knowing how to distinguish a working system from a somewhat-broken one or where to start debugging) or give up. I'd expect most users to give up.

GregorStockson Terminal – Virtual computers that start, resize, and scale in seconds

"Publish a fully functional working machine with your project on it

Don't worry about complex package management systems, or what environment a consumer of your program might have.

Just give them a copy of your environment: it will always work in the future."

I'm not convinced that a virtual machine snapshot is an adequate replacement for wrestling with a package manager. If all you distribute is a VM image, then:

- Users can't easily run your software without provisioning an entire virtual server and, as far as I can tell, giving Terminal money and their email address.

- Without active maintenance on your part, the other software on the image will get out of date. Security holes will be discovered in the versions of nginx and openssl that your image uses. Have you ever tried to upgrade a Linux box that hasn't been touched in a few years to the latest version? After a few years, every potential user of your software will have to go through that first.

- If Terminal goes out of business or pivots, your image will no longer work (I think?).

- Your software will not fit naturally into your users' deployment environments. It will not by default show up in their administration tools, know about their VPNs, integrate with their logging infrastructure, or appear on their graphs.

I think this makes a lot of sense as a low-friction way to distribute software, but if you're writing code that people will care about in a few years it shouldn't be the only way.