
Show HN: Watchmespendmoney - anderjaska
https://watchmespendmoney.com/
======
p0llard
Do we get to see the sudden enormous AWS bills as HN overloads your site?

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anderjaska
Yeah of course, I'll be sure to add it.

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anderjaska
Unfortunately vercel does not store logs for you, lesson learned. I can't tell
if the email signup isn't working. Please use the link here:

[https://emailoctopus.com/lists/589a8309-b670-11ea-a3d0-06b46...](https://emailoctopus.com/lists/589a8309-b670-11ea-a3d0-06b4694bee2a/forms/subscribe)

Apologies for the outage, this has been educational. Thank you for the hug of
death :)

~~~
Ave
Sidenote but the vercel <-> logstash integration is really easy to set up and
will persist your logs.

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marcinzm
I have a suspicion that making spending public would increase spending rather
than decrease it. People already spend money on expensive items for social
signaling of how well they're doing but there's always ways around that
(bootleg items, sales, etc.). With this they'd have no choice but to actually
spend the money for social signaling.

~~~
eugenekolo
Or just push a fake message?

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jaywalk
Might want to spend some money on a better server so that we can actually
watch you spend money.

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anderjaska
Hey guys! Sorry for the downtime. Working on a fix!

~~~
anderjaska
It appears that Plaid is rate limiting and mongodb is at max number of
connections.

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anderjaska
Going to update mongo. There isn't much I can do about plaid

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devadvance
Maybe a quick cache in front of Plaid for now? Even in-mem might be a decent
short term solution.

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anderjaska
Ah if only I wasn't using vercel and serverless functions!

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styfle
You can add a `Cache-Control` response header with `s-maxage` in your
Serverless Function to cache at the Edge.

[https://vercel.com/docs/v2/serverless-functions/edge-
caching](https://vercel.com/docs/v2/serverless-functions/edge-caching)

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control#Expiration)

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krm01
Interesting idea. When people post stuff on Linkedin, under their public
“professional” persona, they tend to behave in a certain way. I wonder what
would happen if this was a social network, where your posts consist of stuff
you spend money on. How much would it change the way you handle your dollars.

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sjtindell
Venmo surfaces something along these lines, there is a social “feed” of your
friend’s transfers and messages to each other.

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bdcravens
It hasn't always been this way, but the current default is to set transactions
to private. I've never allowed a Venmo transaction to be public.

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abhinuvpitale
Super interesting idea, I wonder if this can be used by insta celeb's to show
'flex' by spending on ridiculously priced goods.!

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anderjaska
I thought about this. I wonder if IG captures that need sufficiently.

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cameronperot
I had to turn off uBlock Origin to get it to work.

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anderjaska
That is very odd. I'm not making an CORS requests from the client

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Sohcahtoa82
Doesn't have to be cross-origin to get blocked by uBlock.

That said, the page isn't working for me. The call to
[https://watchmespendmoney.com/api/plaid/transactions](https://watchmespendmoney.com/api/plaid/transactions)
is returning a 500 Internal Server Error.

~~~
anderjaska
Got it yup, putting in a fix

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awillen
Isn't this what Clinkle did? Or some other failed startup I can't remember the
name of?

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Kiro
Clinkle sounds nothing like this.

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awillen
There was definitely some failed startup that just published people's credit
card purchases in a giant feed... maybe it was just an earlier iteration of
Venmo? I've been Googling but can't find it.

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justablippy
You're thinking of Blippy, by Pud!

[https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/11/blippy/](https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/11/blippy/)

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sharkweek
As the father of a toddler, even you saying the word Blippy (Blippi,
officially), is sending shivers down my spine.

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dang
This doesn't appear to be a valid Show HN. Please read the rules:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

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antcas
What rule does it break?

It's not immediately clear, but if you log in (at the top of the page) you can
log your own expenses to a public transaction feed.

And you can participate in the main experiment by commenting on OP's
transactions.

Seems like a cool and valid Show HN to me.

~~~
dang
I don't see how people can try this out. It looks like a closed beta with a
signup page?

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pvg
I think it had a beta notification form thingie when posted, then other
problems but now it looks like you can log in? It's getting spam and abuse
though so it's maybe not quite at the public trying stage yet either way.

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devadvance
Cool idea, though I couldn't get it to load yet. Will look after the deluge of
interest goes away!

I'm curious: do you see any risk of folks indirectly tracking you via your
transactions?

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anderjaska
Good question! I'm really not afraid of that. These are normal San Francisco
purchases IMO. Also there are filters on the backend so I don't share things
like medical expenses which reveal much more.

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istorical
you're gonna get so much traffic from the findom community, may as well start
charging a monthly subscription fee

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bracket
It fails for a number of times before it works.

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fullstckuxdev
not working

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bot1
Not working..

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classic_c0bra
spend less money on Safeway and more on servers...

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kome
"An unexpected error has occurred."

