Fantastic read. I did most of my web development between 1998 and 2012. Reading this gave me both a trip down memory lane and a very digestible summary of what I've missed since then.
All the Spanish cities I've visited have looked "perfect", but there's a lot I don't see as a tourist, e.g. that Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe (10.5%).
I'm a huge fan of You Need A Budget, it was instrumental in giving me control over my finances. It feels like a superpower to see all my money in one place and not care which bank account the dollars actually reside. Also makes it easier to take advantage of various offers (Credit card or things like HYSA) since I know all the records will live in YNAB and I have full control there, even if the individual banks I use have terrible UIs.
Someone else mentioned this up the thread. I am a huge fan of YNAB too, but I just gave Actual Budget a try and I'm hooked. Some things are better and some things worse than YNAB, but it's open source and self-hosted. I'd recommend either.
I love the idea of keeping my finances private while still having a useful tracker/planner. And I love that this would give me some protection against a new version making things worse. I also love the option to write my own plugin or to hack the source code itself (even though I probably wouldn't).
But I don't think I'm willing to give up fully automated data refreshes at this point. I have too many accounts to track.
> I love the idea of keeping my finances private while still having a useful tracker/planner.
YNAB4 was a local client, but with YNAB5 they sadly (to me) went online and subscription.
I happily paid for v4 (one-time purchase), but was/am not willing to pay for v5 because (a) I don't like renting software, and (b) I have no need for syncing (which a subscription could justify to pay for ongoing server costs).
I second that. Switched from ynab4 (used some version since 2011) to Actual Budget a few month ago. Some tiny ux issues, but improvement in many more areas. Don't regret finally kicking ynab out.
Odd, earlier this week I was cleaning up some ooooold VMs/docker stuff and came across something I was using to try out actualbudget, so it's an interesting coincidence hearing it mentioned again today.
IIRC I was pretty impressed with it back then. It looks like there are more non-direct install options now. (Flatpack, appimage, etc.)
Yeah it's just a data store. I wish it was end-to-end encrypted, but otherwise it works pretty well as a drop-in replacement for YNAB. At least as well as you can expect in a browser -- I miss the quick-entry button in the YNAB 4 app, but that's harder to pull off here.
A while ago, I wrote a ruby gem to convert my banks’ csv export to the format ynab4 expects to import all transactions automatically. It even does currency conversion using the rate at the time of transaction (I have accounts in several currencies).
It uses a plugin structure so if your bank is missing you can contribute your parser.
sort of different but I built https://paperright.xyz budgeting app to address some of my frustration with budgeting apps, bank connections, ease of use, privacy, etc. It doesn't connect to your bank or take any info other than your email (+stripe if you sign up for pro). I built it because i needed a budgeting app for my brain. Also research shows AI/automated financial management doesnt work you need to manually track things to really understand whats going on.
Yeah, makes sense. I’ll probably toss in an add-on or optional integration with an account aggregator later, so folks can either opt in or just stick with a local-only setup if they prefer.
Happy to help build an integration with [Lunch Flow](https://lunchflow.app), which aggregates multiple open banking providers for global coverage behind a single API.
It’s great that you have coverage across multiple countries. I’ve noticed most budget apps cannot handle multiple currencies at all, much less automated sync across multiple countries.
that's indeed the idea! it started with me finding out that I'm missing on a lot of great personal finance apps because bank sync is mostly catered towards the US, and mostly use a single provider, so wanted to change that :)
I manage all of my finances with Beancount (https://github.com/beancount/beancount). It has a native document store and I primarily use it to archive all of my statements to share with my accountants via Fava (https://github.com/beancount/fava). It’s not pretty, but it’s all in one (local) git repo.
Language models are great at turning those statements into Beancount postings and fixing errors, but the local ones not so much yet.
>A double-entry bookkeeping computer language that lets you define financial transaction records in a text file, read them in memory, generate a variety of reports from them, and provides a web interface.
It's just a way of keeping track of your finances. If you just have a single bank account and nothing else, then it probably doesn't give you much. But if your assets and liabilities are spread across multiple bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, loans, P2P/angel investing platforms, etc, then it can be a good way to get a holistic overview of your finances in one place and can help with things like tax returns.
(I don't use beancount but I use GnuCash which is a very similar concept.)
I use it primarily to categorize spending to know things like “how much money did I spend on electronics doodads in the last year”.
The double-entry part is a fanciness for checking that all money in (paychecks) equals all money out (spending, taxes). You can selectively disable it by “padding” balances.
I have it on for my checking account and it catches duplicate postings for transfers between my Venmo and my checking account. I can also put the initial/final balances from the bank statements as “guards” to verify that it all adds up.
This sort of structure is really helpful for a human or language model. You can break the translation work down into subunits with fast correctness checks.
Have you considered https://tiller.com/ ? They can pull feeds in and refresh automatically but have a big privacy play so that only you get to see your finances (and display and manage it in Excel or Google Sheets).
I went through this rabbit hole. I liked Mint (I know it wasn't private, but I liked it), I tried Personal Capital / Empower because I had a retirement account with them, I tried Monarch. But none of them had the one killer feature I needed — my wife and I both have individual accounts and we also have a joint account for household expenses. I want to track all of those separately.
The I found Tiller[0]. I've been really happy with it so far.
It basically syncs your transactions to a Google sheet you own. It comes with some basic things like budget and auto categorization based on fuzzy string matching, but because it's Google sheets you can play with it and do whatever you want with it.
But the nice thing is that you can dictate which accounts go into which sheet. So I have two sheets — one for household accounts and one for personal. And I don't need a separate subscription, which would have been required if I used any other service I had looked at. I can't remember exactly how much the subscription was, but I don't remember it being unfair.
This is one where I don't quite get the angle of hosting locally to preserve privacy.
By nature of the economic system, you must interact with 3rd parties, unless you somehow live a life where you can manage to be all crypto or (increasingly harder) cash based. At that point, there is no real benefit to privacy outside of ensuring that whatever institution(s) you work with aren't doing anything odd.
Trusting some random VC-backed SAAS not to sell my data is (to me) as mad as trusting that the tide won't come in - it would be astonishing if they _didn't_ sell my data.
My bank has both commercial & cultural reasons not to sell my ID & transaction history. They might still do it anyways, but it's at least plausible that they wouldn't, if only due to the harm to their reputation if it ends up in the papers.
I'm a founder in this space (Fulfilled - posted above). Here's the reality:
You're right that incentives matter. But selling your data would be idiotic for us, same reason it would be for your bank in that trust is the entire business model.
If we want to monetize insights from aggregated data, we'd do it in-house and offer you better products. Example: Why sell your mortgage readiness data to some broker when we could source competitive mortgage offers and present them directly to you? Keep you in our ecosystem, add value to your experience, and build a revenue stream that doesn't destroy the core product.
The wealth space is crowded. Companies that burn user trust get exposed fast and die faster. The only sustainable path is treating your data like it belongs to you and not us. Any company here who doesn't get that is building on quicksand and I'd be very surprised to hear any of the larger players engaging in those practices but maybe I'm naive.
Either way, it's why we're a Fiduciary and that blankets the entire product suite.
"...Selling your data would be idiotic...same reason it would be for your bank [to sell your data] in that trust is the entire business model." I'm afraid that ship has sailed and taken your data with it.
I really don't think you read this article beyond the headline because that's not what it's about or implying...literally in the slightest.
That article is about JPMorgan being able to charge Plaid or other providers for the middleman access. They used to be operating almost for free, now Plaid has to pay for access the same way companies like mine pay Plaid.
So you don't think Plaid sells customer data? And by extension charging for customer data requests by Plaid and other aggregators isn't in fact charging for it?
So you didn't read the article and now you're just throwing out statements without validation? Great, if JPMorgan is selling your data then that's their decision and that's beyond the scope of this convo. We work with partners (Plaid, Snaptrade) who explicitly state that they DO NOT sell user data, and we maintain the same principles:
Here is the quote if you're too lazy to read this one too:
Does Plaid sell my financial data for advertising or marketing purposes?
No, we do not sell your financial data to third parties for marketing or advertising purposes.
Plaid only shares your data to power the services and products that you choose or to protect you and the Plaid network from fraud.
Plaid was founded on the principle that you have a right to your financial information and we are focused on providing products that allow you to safely and conveniently access your data and harness the power of Plaid’s secure financial network.
As Plaid develops more products and services, you may ask Plaid to share your information in ways that benefit you and that you control.
Plaid still rubs me the wrong way. Not selling to 3rd parties is great. But, everyone uses it, so that's still a lot of people getting data I don't necessarily want them to have. If I want to link a bank account to a credit card account in order to pay my bill, there's zero reason for that credit card company to have access to my bank transaction data. I still do the ACH deposit verification method where I can in order to avoid Plaid. I'd love more granular controls here or an audit log of what was pulled in.
SimpleFIN¹ looks compelling. Actual Budget can use that and it seems to work more like a privacy-oriented Plaid. But, now you need to trust a much smaller player. Really, I wish this were all standardized with strict privacy requirements.
Also, even if you trust the startup's current management and investors... a lot of those virtuous promises aren't enforceable in bankruptcy, and they may be in some legal jeopardy if they safely dispose of those "assets" before they are liquidated into the hands of someone without scruples.
I trust that the VC-Backed SaaS will be beholden to not wanting to get cut off from the bank(s), meaning not selling that data. If they sell aggregate anonymized transaction data, I'm also not sure I give a shit.
At a certain point paranoia gives way to practicality.
My threat model is one well placed technical employee who knows a buyer that will pay fuck you money. Judas can work at any organization and frequently does.
Yeah I was taken a back as well, "sell gold? To whom??" To the people buying gold, is not reasonable to have to pinpoint who exactly that might be given there is not shortage.
That is because of both of your biases (which is understandable) and me, not specifying why I am asking.
"it would be astonishing if they _didn't_ sell my data."
If the "who" was answered with "... to Kim Jong Un, glorious leader of the DPRK" you might raise a brow. That is probably not what they meant.
Maybe the author meant "... to the legal buyer of the new company, as part of the content of the company"? Maybe they meant "... to anyone willing to pay a price, legally or illegally"?
I wondered what scenario the author had in mind. It's a reasonable question. To me, the implications are quite different. You might of course disagree.
Obviously to anyone willing to pay a price. Have you ever looked at those cookie banners? "In order to give you the best experience, we share your data with our 759 partners..."
I’m not sure why you read their question as being either surprised or disbelieving?
I’ve worked in marketing enough to know that all sorts of less-interesting data gets bought and sold, yet alone financial data, but even if limiting the context to “for marketing purposes” I wouldn’t know, and would be interested in being told, which companies actually are buying that sort of financial information.
And as the user has now explained in a comment further down the thread, they weren’t limiting their curiosity to just marketing profiling so there’s an even wider scope to their question.
But hey, easier to just call them naive than to give them the benefit of the doubt and engage constructively.
Well, one of the benefits is that it won't go away.
I used Mint for years, and I LOVED it. Hooked it up to all my accounts, it could track purchases and spending and kept everything up to date automatically. It would remember how I categorized things.
Of course, then Intuit decided to get rid of it and force everyone to move to Credit Karma, which doesn't do the same things AT ALL. I don't care about tracking my credit scores, and I pay off all my credit cards every month, I don't need help finding a loan for anything. The only thing it does is try to offer me loans and credit cards. It doesn't have any transaction history, so it doesn't do the one thing I care about.
The decade+ of transaction history I had in Mint was just GONE. It really sucked, and I have not found a replacement yet.
I don't mind if it is hosted, or even if I have to pay for it, but I would like to be able to keep my historical data, and for it to automatically populate from my accounts, and not go away if a company decides it can't make money from it anymore.
Did you find a suitable replacement? What do you use now? I'm interested to hear how big of an sticking point this still is with this a verbose range of options now.
different poster of course, but actualbudget (free selfhost) + simplefin (paid api for transactions) has been really good. faster and more features than the commercial options had. simplefin can also be used for your own local projects
It’s more about having the optionality to not be tied to a SaaS provider and trusting them with all your financial data and bank credentials.
Having options to:
1– Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud 2– Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet 3– not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do 4– Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers.
Actual Budget uses SimpleFIN [1] in the US. The integration is pretty good. The big alternative is Plaid and I don't trust them at all. It's a shame we don't have a standard for electronic banking yet.
It's just the mindset. The "oh well 'they' already have all my data anyway" mindset leads to more and more individual steps of giving up privacy even if you could do something about it.
It might not protect any more data, but not attempting is a guarantee that it won't.
self hosted ActualBudget and SimpleFin for fetching data automatically works great for me so far. You can also setup multiple instances and tune them separately if you like.
I'd love that too, but I'm not sure it's even feasible or possible, at least in the EU country where I live. I, like most people (I think?) need to file taxes each year, and those include my new positions, or what positions have disappeared, including how much I have in savings. And, the only way for me to keep savings without losing money, is to keep it in a bank, so it's again not private.
Feels like "private finance" been dead for a long time, unless you start using cryptocurrencies specifically for privacy, like zcash, otherwise you'll be having non-private data at least somewhere.
What you describe sounds more like keeping your assets a secret... and if you feel defeated because the government can know, how do you feel about hiring an accountant? Or executing stock trades? You can't keep those activities a secret from those agents working for you. You would probably expect them to keep their privileged information about you _private_ though, right?
And I think that's what the parent post is talking about. Today's companies make you agree to 3 50-page documents which they can update at any time and your continued use after such silent updates constitutes consent.. and at some point they will sell your financial status/well-being to people for profit. So the more you feed them the more of your data that is being easily sold.
We ultimately probably can't stop that, but we can make it more difficult. Many apps like this would take your information and sell it.. having an option that lets you track your own finances without becoming a product is nice.
Right on. In this case, I used "private" to mean "the makers of this particular product don't have a ton of my financial information." I don't expect a product like this to prevent my government, or my brokerage, or my bank, or even a middleman account aggregator, from knowing about my money. But something like this can be one less thing, at least.
Also it’s more about having the optionality. There are tons of cloud-based and connected SaaS trackers out there, but very few local ones. Having options to:
– Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud
– Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet
– not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do
– Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers
Pimsleur is the best thing I've found for my first ~30 hours of learning a language (Courses 1 and 2, basically). It gets to the (IMO) most important words/phrases/interactions first, and the spaced repetition works well for me. It almost feels like magic is happening in my brain. In find going past 1 and 2 is still worth my time, but I usually start to sense diminishing returns, and at that point I start to look around for other options to supplement it.
Pimsleur's implicit way of teaching grammar works well for me for the most basic stuff, but as it gets into more nuanced grammar, it gets a bit less helpful for me. It also feels less magical to me once it gets past the first couple hundred words.
> What? I think someone needing this level of instruction would be better served by basic mindfulness and small, manageable exercises in active listening or empathetic dialog, rather than a grab bag of non-contextual tips like this.
Look, when you say "someone needing this level of instruction," it comes across like needing detailed, step-by-step help is weird or a problem. But plenty of people with ADHD, autism, or other brain differences don't just find this helpful - they actually need it to make sense of things.
And suggesting they'd be "better off" with mindfulness or simpler stuff? That assumes they haven't already been down that road. Maybe those approaches just don't click with how their brain works.
Calling it a "grab bag of random tips" really undersells what's going on here. For people who need things spelled out clearly and directly, those specific tips might be the difference between something being useless and actually doable.
The whole thing reads like it's written from the perspective of someone who finds this stuff obvious, then judges other approaches as somehow inferior. That's the ableist part - acting like there's one "right" way to understand things and anything else is just... less good.
> when you say "someone needing this level of instruction," it comes across like needing detailed, step-by-step help is weird or a problem
That wasn't my impression at all, to give another perspective. "This level" indicates me that instructions are too specific or too detailed to be of any help.
Not at all. But you might know them or they come to you naturally.
See I asked someone at a training course on this stuff once to give me concrete things to do instead of the two days of blah blah in the course that basically boiled down to "you just gotta figure it all out yourself" - gee Thanks!
So the guy told me to use people's names when talking to or about them because most people, even if they don't realize or are outward extroverts, like hearing their own name.
Never in my life would I have come to that realization by myself because I'm the exact opposite. I hate it when other people do that with me but now I use it with others.
Atlassian was bootstrapped to high eight-figure revenue and profitability before they took investor money, much like GitHub. They very much won on their own.
Waymo is doing alright in San Francisco as well. That's not directly comparable to Tokyo, either, but I expect it's a much less distant of a comparison than Phoenix.
In SF you still have clearly delineated sidewalks with curbs and crossing lights. Japanese side streets are basically equivalent to alleys and cars are guests. There aren’t too many streets like that in the US at all.
> and so many traffic violations and crashes that they were (eventually) barred from expanding their testing by the state.
As far as I can tell, that literally didn’t happen. Instead, they both got approved for a major expansion this year and have no new restrictions on any future expansions.
CPUC approved a major expansion this year, some local agencies raised issues and called for a rehearing, and CPUC reheard it and approved it again. There’s a member of the state legislature that has proposed a bill changing the process for such expansions to a less favorable one in the past who talked about maybe reintroducing it this session in response, but nothing like that passed that I can find.
You're confusing us with Cruise. Lots of reporting did the same, but we're expanding a lot across California. For example, now anyone can use our service in Los Angeles:
> One of the world’s first fully-driverless taxi firms has been blocked from expanding its business in California, where several of its vehicles have recently been involved in accidents.
> Waymo, which is the driverless car division of Google parent Alphabet, currently operates in parts of San Francisco. Attempts to roll-out its robotaxi service to Sunnyvale and Los Angeles were suspended for up to 120 days following a ruling by the California Public Utilities Commission’s Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division (CPED).
Unable to respond to the instructions of a police officer and it taking a minute and a half for employees to manually control the car: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ix98jFVyGxs
...and then a few minutes later, illegally entering an intersection and stopping, then continuing to block the intersection because someone made a u-turn 30 feet in front of it while it was stopped: https://youtu.be/CHEtQ3Egt0c?t=474
And here's the icing on the cake: your company harassing reporters, calling the police on them because reporters were following it: https://youtu.be/spw176TZ7-8?t=170
My very personal opinion is maybe it shouldn't be ok for humans either. Maybe the benefits of cars absolutely don't outweigh the contant risk of deaths and injuries they pose (especially in metropolitan aeras where they are easily replaced by other modes of transportation)
Reality is "because humans can take responsibility for their actions". And it seems the way our society is built, we'd rather have individuals take responsibility than question the system
But we see bad driving whenever we are out ambulating in the streets, anyway, even in a world with vehicles that are almost always operated by humans.
In this world we have today, illegal things happen on the road all of the time.
(And we've always seen it, at least in quasi-modern times. It isn't something recent. I'm absolutely certain that we saw it in the horse-driven era, too; we just didn't have much in the way of pocket supercomputers back then to record it with.)
I literally just watched a video of a Waymo vehicle driving through and over the debris of a fresh car accident. Sorry, one day this technology will be ready for primetime but it currently is not. I think its complete BS that Waymo and others get to operate and test on public roads. The decision to prototype and test novel technology in public spaces where it can and will kill innocent people should be determined by a public referendum in elections, where I would vote NO.
The US is, like in several other public welfare stats, a bad outlier in traffic deaths among industrial nations. Thank your corpo overlords. Create the problem, sell the solution.
Since this has been updated with a link to info about the “barred from expansion” that was referenced, note that the arricle with actual detail notes that it was an “up to 120 days” suspension by CPUC in February of this year (which would have expired in June at the latest), but CPUC actually approved a major expansion in March (and, after a challenge to that decision and demand for a rehearing, approved it again on a rehearing in June.) [0]
So, the idea that they are fleeing to Japan because they’be faced some kind of permanent, or even significant, barrier to expansion in California is wildly incompatible with the facts.
> How are things going in Arizona? So badly they pulled their fleet (before state regulators could) and a federal investigation was announced right after:
They didn’t pull their fleet, and the article you posted to support this doesn't say they did. It says they did a safety recall to fix an apparent software error; the service is still in operation, and the implication that they ran away in fear of state regulatory action is as baseless as the idea that they have been blocked from further expansion in California. For someone who is accusing everyone who disagrees with you of being an astroturfer or dupe of Waymo propaganda, you seem to be very fond of promoting arguments that twist what is in the notionally-supporting sources to the limit of what would be plausible taking them entirely out of context,and which rely on ignoring every other piece of information ine existence, as if you were not presenting good faith arguments but desperately constructing anti-Waymo propaganda of the same type you accuse your opponents of doing in support of Waymo.
I saw a video of a bunch of Waymos backed up on each other being too hesitant to make a turn. Kinda reinforced a fear I have of these things. Not to mention I would hate to try and wave one of these things to turn before me... or wink my headlights.
IDK, like I get the appeal for driverless cars, I just still don't like them.
Seeing something once doesn’t make it a real phenomenon.
Besides, if that is common, Waymo will have data on it and if it’s common enough, they’ll fix it.
I’ve sat in Waymos on 2 occasions, each on a separate ride, in which the car avoided collisions that would have happened due to bad human drivers. Your fear is worth examining closely as it’ll hold you back from enjoying this amazing technology.
I think you may mean something other than phenomenon ("an observable fact or event"). Seeing anything more than zero times makes it a phenomenon by definition.
