Hacker News: phoenixy1

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).

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

phoenixy1 — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:11:36 +0000

I work at Plaid. Plaid's KYC product doesn't ask for bank login credentials. (EDIT: I originally had a line in here saying "nor do any of our competitors' KYC products, that I know of." but then someone in this thread linked to Stripe documentation saying that Stripe does use this method of age verification in Australia, so TIL.)

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"

phoenixy1 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 08:09:33 +0000

My heuristic is that if your interlocutor asks follow-up questions like that with no indication of why (like “why do you want to do X?” rather than “why do you want to do X? If the answer is Y, then X is a bad approach because Q, you should try Z instead”) then they are never going to give you a helpful answer.

New comment by phoenixy1 in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"

phoenixy1 — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 17:38:30 +0000

I work at Plaid, so this got me curious about who their provider was -- per Wikipedia, Mint used Intuit's internal account aggregation tools from ~2010-2024. It's possible that Mint swapped out to some other third party provider and Wikipedia doesn't know about it, but based on both internal and external records, I'm pretty sure it wasn't Plaid. (Intuit's Credit Karma, which was marketed to Mint customers as a replacement after Mint shut down, does use Plaid.)

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Show HN: Check Supply – Send Checks in the Mail"

phoenixy1 — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 18:55:17 +0000

TD Bank has signed a data sharing agreement with Plaid: https://stories.td.com/ca/en/news/2023-12-14-td-bank-group-a...

New comment by phoenixy1 in "Lessons from a Private Equity Earn Out: How I Lost £550K Due to a Lowercase 'C'"

phoenixy1 — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 22:17:26 +0000

From the article, it's not clear that the prevailing reasonable meaning was Connected Parties. In fact, it sounds like the author thought the meaning was connected parties -- otherwise he would not have bothered to disclose the relationships of the two shareholders who were connected parties (lowercase) but not Connected Parties (uppercase).

New comment by phoenixy1 in "What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)"

phoenixy1 — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 07:55:36 +0000

These were popular at my workplace maybe seven years ago, and while I was into the idea at first, IMO it was impractical most of the time. Turns out it's a pretty unreasonable burden to place on people that they should read and follow instructions in a document in order to communicate with someone and to personalize their work approach for every person they interact with.

The main context these make sense in is when written by a manager (or maaybe by a direct report for their manager). They can be useful to establish expectations for a team around things like "is it ok to message me on the weekend" and "here's what you should have prepared for our 1:1s".

New comment by phoenixy1 in "I now lack the juice to fuel the bluster to conceal that I am a simpleton"

phoenixy1 — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 01:16:17 +0000

The context isn't fully spelled out, but Powell is describing the inspiration for "The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?" Those lines are the beginning of his novel and the novel itself is entirely in the form of questions.