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If helping aging adults is something you are passionate about, we are helping older people age in place with grace and dignity. I'm an engineer here and am happy to answer any questions and/or give a referral if you are interested in applying!

https://www.joinhonor.com/meet/engineering


I’m genuinely interested in advocating for the elderly in tech. Do you have any insights on the challenges Honor faces or has overcome? Especially in regards to respecting the real-world/digital privacy (let alone HIPAA!) while engineering a solution with technology.


Honor faces the same issues as everyone in the home care industry: senior home health care is taxing work and there is very high turnover. It's also a very intimate and emotional industry. Some of our technology challenges are around Care Professional satisfaction and improving back-of-house operations.


I saw Dr. Karr present the Whole-Cell Computational Models a few months ago and I believe it's truly transformative work. Once you wrap your head around what they do, you'll understand the limitless potential this software could have. If you're interested, I think these two articles can give you a good idea of what Whole-Cell Modeling is: http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(12)00776-3 https://covert.stanford.edu/publicationpdfs/DMacklin2014.pdf.

I applied to work with them at the time but they were low on funding. I would apply today if I weren't already happily employed. Good luck Karr Lab!


Do most banks not have an API? If you use software (e.g. something from Intuit) that accesses your banking info, is it likely screen-scraping?


Correct. Most banks are running back end infrastructure from the 80s with lots of manual or semi-manual processes (e.g. overnight interbank batch reconciliation, at least in Australia). From an outsider's perspective, it appears that retail bank management is completely technically illiterate.

Which unfortunately also makes them the perfect marks for being sold inappropriate tech solutions (see: blockchain mania).


From an insider's perspective, yes. They are completely technically illiterate. Banks. Exchanges. Brokers. The whole financial services industry.


Oh yeah, don't get me started on exchanges. I'm astounded at how bad their technical processes are. The ASX (Australian Stock Exchange) has something like a 3 day time to settlement. And I'm told it's one of the more 'modern' exchanges (I guess the other ones are still using stock tickers and abacuses).


Unfortunately 2 days now. I appreciate the time to settlement because I could buy my shares and pay 2 days later. Sometimes it takes time to get funds from other accounts, and I wanted to buy (or sell) today, for example, when the quarterly just came out.


Part of me wants to sneer in disgust, but part of me considers that we live and work in a tech industry that truly, honestly believes that "move fast and break things" is a great design principle, and maybe we don't want those people in charge of the foundation of the global economy.

I dunno.


Perhaps open source projects such as Apache Fineract (incubating) can leapfrog the slow-moving giants.

http://fineract.incubator.apache.org/

    Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source
    system for core banking as a platform. Fineract 
    provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution 
    for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service 
    providers to offer financial services to the world’s 
    2 billion underbanked and unbanked.


Sorry I'm a bit late to reply. Just wanted to say thanks very much for telling me about this. I now know what I'm doing this weekend :)


Mint used to use Yodlee which did web scraping when no API was available, but has since transitioned to using bank APIs it seems:

http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/2212/how-does-mint-...


Not entirely. Mint only used Yodlee at the beginning, before Intuit acquired them, and that was a while ago. Even before the acquisition, they had a secret project to create a backup scraping platform because they worried that Yodlee would cut them off when the acquisition was announced.

Mint now uses an internal service (called FICDS, IIRC, but I'm no longer at Intuit) that still scrapes. That service also handles bank interactions for Quickbooks, TurboTax and Quicken, though the latter was sold off, so may be moving to something else. Additionally, that service allows the use of tokenization, which greatly reduces the chances that account credentials would leak based on a vulnerability in Mint or a rogue employee, since that team is pretty locked down and Mint, TurboTax and Quickbooks never store banking credentials.

As an aside, I wonder why Wells picked Xero to trial their API. It could have been a lot more impactful by doing a trial with Intuit, especially if they could have had it ready by tax season.

Also, here's a fun fact: For a number of years, Mint employees at Intuit could not see their own employee stock plans in Mint. Morgan Stanley's site was a Flash monstrosity that couldn't be scraped correctly. Asking them about it earned you a well-practiced eye roll.


It could have been a lot more impactful by doing a trial with Intuit

Given Intuit's checkered past with QFX, If I were writing a nascent API for FX, I wouldn't want them anywhere near it.



Wells Fargo charges $3/month just for read access.


Have suspected this for a while. Its amazingly brittle if so (coming from someone that has done ALOT of scraping). I suppose Bank UIs change slower than the likes of amazon or retail but still. Pretty pathetic


Some banks intentionally break screen scraping.

Having your customer's data is a competitive advantage when it comes to cross-selling other services.


To do my own personal and business accounting I used the iOS APIs that I discovered by using Charles. I don't remember if I had to disable certificate pinning. But that's one way of getting your bank account information fed to a data source.


Yep


I suggest you take it as far as you can by yourself, and then seek partners online. To take it off the ground, do you need someone to build a prototype? If that's the case, write out some deliverables and shop it around to developers.


cool, thank you. is this common practice for freelancers?


Anecdotally, it seems common to me, but I don't have any real data from which to make serious inferences.


I think this is a good resource to start: http://betterexplained.com/articles/linear-algebra-guide/


I think they make a percentage of the salary of the person they helped hire.


It's clear that the same principle applies for every digit. But is the converse true? ie: Almost all numbers DON'T contain the digit "3"


Not unless we equivocate and redefine "almost all" to be something other than what he used in this video, right?

He showed that the ratio of "whole numbers containing 3" to "whole numbers" is close to 1. So the ratio of "whole numbers not containing three" to "whole numbers" is close to 0.


Almost all numbers contain all ten digits.



I would love to see some stats from mypermissions.org on people's permissions


Seeing as mypermissions.org is just a site with links, i think its just not possible. The most stat that they can get you is the number of people which click on a particular application link (say fb vs twitter)

EDIT: I wrote the above when I didn't know about their chrome extension. That could perhaps be used for more stats.


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