Live data from Hacker News

Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

medium.com

331–340 of 361 posts

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#331
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must have been heavily flagged. It's been lower than it should have been from the start. Admittedly the title of the submission isn't great so - if I'm being charitable - it's because users flagged based on title only.

It's been on the front page for hours now.

Yes. Right now this submission is 15 hours old, in position 25 with 1065 points and 313 comments. In position 24 is a submission from 15 hours ago with 131 points and 22 comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10466678). In position 19 is a submission from 14 hours ago with 153 points and 70 comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10467190). So it's not just because of exponential submission decay nor because of flamewar filtering.

Last evening GMT this submission was in fourth place when by points/comments/age it should have been first.

User flagging is the most charitable interpretation.

edit: now at position 54, 1078 points, 315 comments, 16 hours ago. At position 53 is a story from 17 hours ago, 69 points, 13 comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10466419)

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#332
post #90
post #48

as someone mentioned in the blog comment, Fly Maids site is a complete copy (with redesigned homepage) of another cleaning service http://www.homeaglow.com/ @johnsalzarulo out of curiosity, try if your login works on homeaglow.com f.e.: both logos are served from the same S3 bucket: https://s3q1w2e3.s3.amazonaws.com/brands/logos/fly_maids.png https://s3q1w2e3.s3.amazonaws.com/brands/logos/homeaglow.png

Also interesting, the homeaglow.com zendesk account (now shut down) has all its entries created by "AJ Hung" https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:https:%2F%2Fhomeag... (look at the cached pages). One of the first employees of Homejoy was Daniel Hung https://twitter.com/danhung Anyone want to tweet him and ask? :-)

This is a total nitpick, but I was actually Homejoy's first engineer. I was fired after 4 days, and then they hired Dan to replace me. This has no relevance whatsoever, I just thought I'd clarify that one bit :)

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I ran a startup into the ground I would never ever betray my customers by selling their data! When you run a business into the ground, some decisions about what you sell get taken over by courts, at the direction of your creditors. When you trust your data with a company, you're not just trusting its ethics, you're trusting its long term viability too.

> When you run a business into the ground, some decisions about what you sell get taken over by courts, at the direction of your creditors. This is true, but a lot of this "story" still seems strange, especially in light of the fact that all of the sites that appear to be associated with Cheung's new venture have been taken offline. There are a number of well-funded players in this space, some of which might have an…

Not to mention the people that the site content was stolen from.

To me, this sounds like "As founder, I had access to all of Homejoy's data, so I just took it with me."

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#334
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you're using their JS solutions so credit card data never ever goes through your servers (even temporarily), PCI-DSS compliance on Stripe just means serving the payment page over SSL. https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-i-need-to-be-pci-com...

Except this article says it is not served over SSL. There's even a huge graphic with an arrow pointing it out. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*dLlQGvWTeMTB7PT_n...

Yes. That's a problem, certainly. I'm just pointing out that Stripe's "are you PCI compliant" process is pretty low-key.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#335
I wish people wouldn't jump to conclusions with out all the facts. We don't know who bought what. Google has some of the team. Handy was in talks to by homejoy. who knows who else is involved. if handy bought the data they would have a right to their own copy.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think this is a stupid move on the founder's end and there's no debate about that, I disagree with your understanding of what "passion" is. People seem to think most passionate people are born with some sort of pre-assigned passion, but it's something that arises out of your experience and action. Just like Thomas Edison was "passionate" about what he built (but he was super greedy and an asshole too), this g…

I do not think anyone is born with a pre-assigned passion. I just still doubt you can be "passionate" about a "space". That the word "space" is used in this entrepeneurial jargon is not a coincidence. The word "space" is a lack of things, not a thing itself, a vacuum, an absence, an opportunity. An opportunity to make money, specifically. I don't think the firm belief that there's a lot of money to be made in a certa…

I agree that greed isn't passion, but "space" here is industry jargon for things like "business domain" or "market" or "customer segment". He could by lying (that is¸ saying he's passionate about something he's not) or wrong (confusing greed or familiarity or obsession for passion).

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#337
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I ran a startup into the ground I would never ever betray my customers by selling their data! When you run a business into the ground, some decisions about what you sell get taken over by courts, at the direction of your creditors. When you trust your data with a company, you're not just trusting its ethics, you're trusting its long term viability too.

You're trusting that they or their acquirers will honor the contracts that they have with you. In the case of Homejoy, my assumption is that the claims/promises they made constitute a contract with their users that limits their ability to make use of your data outside the described scope. IANAL, but I think there's a reason we don't regularly hear about things like this - it's actually hard to do without getting sued…

Truth be told, they've probably got more experience than anybody else to make Homejoy 2.0 a much better product.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#338
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to follow up and address some concerns mentioned in this thread, and acknowledge that I definitely made mistakes. How did you get my information? We acquired Homejoy’s domain and customer information through an ABC process. Our intention is to improve and then relaunch Homejoy’s cleaning service. We were testing a new model using Fly Maids, one of our testing brands. As evidenced today, we made some mistakes…

Why is a Google form required to ensure that my information is never used in any way? Aaron Cheung, I would appreciate it if you didn't taint YC's brand with your questionable business practices.

>Aaron Cheung, I would appreciate it if you didn't taint YC's brand with your questionable business practices.

You could say the same about bigger "success" stories (let's say Airbnb). They're actively ignoring laws that make their business look better. Regardless of how you feel about whether the laws are just or not, how does that reflect on YC to have one of their biggest success stories blatantly ignoring laws?

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#339
post #298

I think it goes without saying that there is nothing remotely legitimate happening here. The fact that Aaron posted this comment and expected anybody to believe it is remarkable. That being said, I spent 5 minutes researching Aaron Cheung and I was astonished by what I found. He has a Twitter account, but has posted exactly 0 times [1]. He has an HN account, but has posted exactly 0 times [2], and only commented twic…

What does it matter whether he twittered or hacker newsered? What a weird thing to bring up. More importantly, this is gratuitously personal. Stalking expeditions are not welcome on Hacker News, whatever one's opinion of the story at hand. Please don't do this on this site. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10467925 and marked it off-topic.

>More importantly, this is gratuitously personal. Stalking expeditions are not welcome on Hacker News, whatever one's opinion of the story at hand. Please don't do this on this site.

I agree with your point that they are weird things to bring up, but how is that "stalking"? It's looking at 3 very public profile pages, which requires almost no effort to look at. Unless you've edited the post to remove information, that seems entirely benign. There's absolutely 0 expectation of privacy with those pages, and almost by definition were created to allow access for the general public to that information.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#340
Looks like some big mistakes might have been made by the people over at FlyMaids. Despite all this I hope there are people close who are looking out for their wellbeing, and helping them fix the situation.
Post reply on HN