Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213495

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

- Microstamping requirements for guns—printing a unique barcode on every bullet casing (Glock gen3 cannot be retired, thus, the auto-mode switch bug cannot be patched...)

- 3D printers should have a magical algorithm to recognize all gun parts in their tiny embedded systems

- Now, you need to verify your age... on your microwave?

At this rate, California should just go back to the Stone Age. Modern technology is simply not compatible with clueless politicians who are more eager to virtue-signal than to solve any actual problems or even borther to study the subject about the law they are going to pass. There will be more and more technology restrictions (or outright bans on use) in California because it's becoming impossible to operate anything here without getting sued or running afoul of some overreaching regulation.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946676

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361527

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164110

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44697834

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175201

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43841735

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43757783

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649711

Points: 95

# Comments: 49

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43374110

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

If you are okay with Plaid[1], many of their bank connections are now using OAuth-style authentication instead of password sharing. I actually added a new feature called Direct Connect[2] a while back to allow any plaintext accounting book users to pull CSV directly via Plaid API through BeanHub. We don't train AI models with our customers' transactions, and if we want to, we will ask for explicit consent (not just ToS) and anonymize customers' data.

If you're okay with the above, the key to achieving a high automation level is the ability to pull CSV transaction files directly from the bank in a standard format. Maybe you can give it a try. We have 30 days free trial period.

I am not so familiar with the CMMC requirements, as you mentioned, but for us to access transactions from some banks, such as Chase, Plaid requires us to pass an auditing process about our security measurements. Is the CMMC compliance your company needs to meet to take a third-party software vendor into considerations?

[1]: https://plaid.com

[2]: https://beanhub.io/blog/2025/01/16/direct-connect-repository...

I get where you're coming from. My books are also growing big right now, and indeed, they have become slower to process. Some projects in the community, such as Beanpost [1], are actually trying to solve the problem, as you said, by using an RMDB instead of plaintext.

But I still like text file format more for many reasons. The first would be the hot topic, which is about LLM friendliness. While I am still thinking about using AI to make the process even easier, with text-based accounting books, it's much easier to let AI process them and generate data for you.

Another reason is accessibility. Text-based accounting only requires an editor plus the CLI command line. Surely, you can build a friendly UI for SQLite-based books, but then so can text-based accounting books.

Yet another reason is, as you said, Git or VCS (Version control system) friendliness. With text-based, you can easily track all the changes from commit to commit for free and see what's changed. So, if I make a mistake in the book and I want to know when I made the mistake and how many years I need to go back and revise my reports, I can easily do that with Git.

Performance is a solvable technical challenge. We can break down the textbooks into smaller files and have a smart cache system to avoid parsing the same file repeatedly. Currently, I don't have the bandwidth to dig this rabbit hole, but I already have many ideas about how to improve performance when the file grows really big.

[1]: https://github.com/gerdemb/beanpost

Many customers have asked me about AI offerings, and I am considering them. While this is doable with modern LLM technologies, I need to consider many issues.

The first is that nobody, myself included, likes their data being part of someone else's machine-learning training pipeline. That's why I promised my users that I wouldn't use their data for machine learning training without asking for explicit consent (and, of course, anonymization will be needed).

While I know everything involved in AI sounds cool, do we really need LLM for a task like this? Maybe a rule-based import engine could kill 95% of the repeating transactions? And that's why I built beanhub-import[1] in the first place. Then, here comes another question: Should I make LLM generate the rule for you or generate the final transactions directly?

Yet another question is, everybody/every company's book is different from one to another. Even if you can train a big model to deal with the most common approaches, the outcome may not be what you really need. So, I am thinking about possibly using your own Git history as a source of training data to teach machine learning models to generate transactions like you would do. That would be yet another interesting blog post, I guess if I actually built a prototype or really made it a feature for BeanHub. But for now, it's still an idea.

[1]: https://beanhub-import-docs.beanhub.io/

So BeanHub is built on top of Beancount and uses double-entry accounting. It's one of the benefits of double-entry accounting. Many accounting software are not good at dealing with multi-currencies or custom currency. With Beancount, you can define any commodity you want, create transactions, and convert them with different currencies easily. For example, you can define a commodity TSM and create transactions[1] like this:

2025-01-01 commodity TSM

2025-03-05 * "Purchase TSMC"

  Assets:US:Bank:WellsFargo:Checking                        -2,000 USD @ 100 TSM
  
  Assets:US:Bank:Robinhood                                      20 TSM

[1]: https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_language_syntax.h...