Show HN: Watchmespendmoney | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Watchmespendmoney

watchmespendmoney.com

54 pointsanderjaska46 comments

Do we get to see the sudden enormous AWS bills as HN overloads your site?

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

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...

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

> Thank you for the hug of death :)

Reminds me of the Barney mod for Doom.

He'd hug you to death, after singing "I love you".

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

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.

Or just push a fake message?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...

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.

I'd argue that it would have a detrimental effect, where you must be spending money on whatever is considered hype at that point in time or else you are consider not cool and get cancelled.

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

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.

While it sounds very interesting in the beginning with a ton of things, i would argue that at the end of the day, people stoped carring.

You can, for example, see whatever people are earning in Sweden.

As soon as it is allowed and possible, things like this just become a novelty.

There was one guy having data on how often he pleasured himself. First thought 'oh interesting' second thought 'mh okay so what'.

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

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

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

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

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 is returning a 500 Internal Server Error.

Got it yup, putting in a fix

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

Clinkle sounds nothing like this.

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.

Facebook had a feature that showed your friends purchases you made on your timeline. People were pissed that their surprise gifts were ruined.

Man unintended side effect, wow, I wonder how many other ones there were with things like this? Finding out someones sexual orientation when they order a sex toy?

You're thinking of Blippy, by Pud!

https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/11/blippy/

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

Thank you!

Wasn’t it Mint that did this? I remember this feature from a failed startup as well.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

It fails for a number of times before it works.

not working

Not working..

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

"An unexpected error has occurred."

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