Hacker News: phoenixy1

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years"

phoenixy1 — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:31:36 +0000

My whole life, my mom would talk about how much she hated the suburbs, how she lived in a Chicago suburb and it was a miserable experience, she would never do it again, etc., all the while praising the time that she lived in Tiburon.

I finally went and visited the house where she had rented in Tiburon (it was just a block from the Paradise Loop path, a pleasant bike ride from SF), and I was like, "Mom, Tiburon is totally a suburb." And her response was "Oh, well your sisters could walk to school and I could walk to the grocery store, so it didn't feel like a suburb to me."

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years"

phoenixy1 — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 06:16:15 +0000

Interestingly, "went to a bar in the past year" is one of the few questions in the survey whose answer basically didn't budge (52% in 1995 vs. 49% in 2026).

New comment by phoenixy1 in "I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again"

phoenixy1 — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:24:37 +0000

AI actually is decently good at updating docs. But the kinds of problems that are being described in this thread, like documentation that varies wildly in tone and target audience or that describes different versions of the same service, or where how to do something is covered across multiple semi-overlapping pieces of documentation (some of which are up to date and some of which are not) are all a real strong indicator of inadequate centralized ownership of the docs. And the AI ain't gonna update the docs if nobody tells it to. (And AI still requires a great deal of micro-management to be used effectively in docs authorship.)

New comment by phoenixy1 in "The Loss of Changelogs"

phoenixy1 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:54:36 +0000

It depends. For stuff like npm packages, where the downstream consumers have to make a conscious decision about whether to adopt the update or not, I absolutely think it's worth getting it right, especially for major version bumps. I myself am the user of an open source code gen tool that does not have comprehensive changelogs, and it makes me want to tear my hair out because we can never be confident when upgrading whether or not we're going to end up with changes that will break our workflows or our customers' workflows.

But for consumer apps, honestly, maybe not? Even at companies that do good consumer changelogs, they're generally considered marketing content. Other posters in this thread made the points that most people updating consumer apps are not even going to see the changelog message, and that app stores have effectively punished companies for providing detailed changelogs by holding app store releases over them.

And given that for larger companies so many of them are actually controlling their feature releases on the backend and not on the client side (you might add the capability for a feature on the client months before you actually set the rollout to 100%), trying to convey those updates in the client-side changelog can be hard to do in a way that consumers will understand and can often generate a lot of confusion and support tickets. After all, we don't expect a changelog entry every time a website updates, and I feel like every day mobile and desktop apps are getting closer and closer to that category.

New comment by phoenixy1 in "The Loss of Changelogs"

phoenixy1 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:03:36 +0000

Changelogs are really difficult to do properly. The concept of a "release" is fuzzy in a world of continuous deployment, and feature flags and experiments mean that different customers are seeing different features. The release of the client that can support the feature is often very divorced from the enablement of the feature. This is not a new phenomenon and has been something we struggled with way back in 2013 in my first SaaS job. Even if you do have a defined set of changes, the way modern software releases work means that the changelog is often the only reason to collect and document those all in one place, and not always a sufficiently compelling one to justify gathering and coordinating this information across teams in a large organization.

Anyway, time to go go see if Claude's done drafting that changelog I asked it to do...

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?"

phoenixy1 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:44:57 +0000

The GitHub bot situation is so frustrating! A good ~50% of community traffic on our repos is spam and bots and to report them I have to fill out a lengthy form and MAYBE GitHub will ban them six weeks later. And I also can't tell whether our repos are being used (and thus worth investing in): GitHib only shows two weeks of traffic data and what they do have is completely useless because they can't filter out bot traffic.

New comment by phoenixy1 in "The Harajuku Moment (2024)"

phoenixy1 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:18:15 +0000

This rule of thumb, when used correctly, is supposed to refer to womens' dress straight sizes. As in, for an average height woman, losing 10 lbs is roughly equivalent to going from a size 8 to a size 6. It doesn't refer to clothing that is sized as "medium", "large", etc. (I did not read the article; it seems from the quote that the author was using this rule of thumb inappropriately and out of context.)

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?"

phoenixy1 — Wed, 27 May 2026 01:22:31 +0000

These are really good changes for your overall health, but what I hear anecdotally is that a lot of the young adults diagnosed with colon cancer don't have traditional colon cancer diet/lifestyle risk factors. There's even a theory that healthy activities like long distance running might be contributing to cancer risk.

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Anthropic acquires Stainless"

phoenixy1 — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:57:32 +0000

Yes, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cloudflare, among others.

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Anthropic acquires Stainless"

phoenixy1 — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:55:04 +0000

I think what you're missing is that prior to the acquisition, Anthropic was a customer of Stainless. They did not need to "rummage through [their] data and workflows" to understand the quality of their product.

New comment by phoenixy1 in "The Zulip Foundation"

phoenixy1 — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:27:29 +0000

The front page of Hacker News was not exactly the place where I was expecting to discover that you were changing jobs, but congrats, Tim!

New comment by phoenixy1 in "OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid"

phoenixy1 — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:41:48 +0000

You totally could, but the purpose of the OpenAI/Plaid integration is to help you analyze your spending and finances with OpenAI (using it as a budgeting/financial planning app), so if your spending isn't actually in the account you connected, it's not going to give you any value.

New comment by phoenixy1 in "OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid"

phoenixy1 — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:30:14 +0000

This is a common belief, but the CFPB has stated your bank is still legally required to make you whole in the event of fraud even if you handed over your username and password to a third party, and that any bank TOS stating otherwise are not valid. This is covered on the CFPB Electronic Fund Transfers FAQ, under the Error Resolution: Unauthorized EFTs, Question 8: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/compliance/compliance-resour...

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?"

phoenixy1 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 20:47:11 +0000

We just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, I posted some details below.

Actually, as part of publicizing our new hobbyist-friendly onboarding, we're looking to work with hobbyists who have created Plaid-powered apps and would be interested in making a short video about their app and their Plaid experience to potentially be featured on the Plaid blog -- if you're interested, shoot me an email at ahoffer@plaid.com and I can send you the details.

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?"

phoenixy1 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 20:41:28 +0000

So you don't have to be a business to use Plaid, but you do have to be a business to buy Plaid via the Sales channel rather than via the self-serve channel. Admittedly, when folks reach out to Sales and ask to buy Plaid and are told they're not eligible because they're not a business, this nuance is sometimes not communicated very well (or at all). We're working on it. :-)

In fact, we actually just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, so try checking it out -- after you go to dashboard.plaid.com and create an account, you should see a "Free trial" button show up on the homepage with a link to use the hobbyist onboarding flow.

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Show HN: Trackm, a personal finance web app"

phoenixy1 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:35:01 +0000

Plaid has a pay-as-you-go option that's only about $2/month for this use case. (I believe the current rack rate PAYG pricing is 30 cents per month per connected bank login).

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Ask HN: General API for accessing bank transactions?"

phoenixy1 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 02:55:47 +0000

Thanks for the details! Glad to hear you've got full Production access -- if any of the security attestation requirements seem unreasonable for your use case, feel free to reach out to us directly (you can email me at ahoffer@plaid.com and let me know you're the person in this thread) so we can look into it.

You do need to set up Link, but it's pretty easy. The Tiny Quickstart(https://github.com/plaid/tiny-quickstart) has a bunch of minimal examples. If that's too much we have a super-minimal, no-code set of instructions for making API calls in the Postman Quickstart (https://github.com/plaid/plaid-postman?tab=readme-ov-file#ma...).

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Ask HN: General API for accessing bank transactions?"

phoenixy1 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:01:59 +0000

Plaid does support personal use (including personal use access for Chase). I'd actually be interested in seeing where you saw that it doesn't support Chase for personal access so I can make sure our messaging is clear and consistent on that front!

It's true that the current onboarding flow is not designed for personal use cases; we're currently in the middle of revamping it to make it less onerous for non-business users. In the meantime, I recommend you just fill out the questionnaire as well as you can. We know that some of the questions don't really make sense in a personal use context -- just try to answer them to the best of your ability and you should be fine.

Is RAG Dead?: Building a smarter chatbot

phoenixy1 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:30:48 +0000

Article URL: https://plaid.com/blog/smarter-chatbot/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47254174

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

phoenixy1 — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:52:48 +0000

Plaid does have products that do request bank credentials, but those products are not used for age verification. It's very common that a given customer-facing flow will use multiple Plaid products together to handle multiple different customer needs, so it's likely that the flow you were working with was using multiple Plaid products and requesting bank credentials, but for a different reason than to perform age verification (for example, KYC + bank account ownership verification or KYC + bank account validity verification).