>The site became a point of contention on campuses across the >country, with many universities debating banning it.
Yes universities could "ban" an app
Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak
131–140 of 144 posts
Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen $1M+/engineer compensation (over a 4-year vesting period) given to ordinary employees at big companies. It's actually not that out of the ordinary. One of the things that surprised me about working for a big company is that the compensation structure is not quite as lopsided (in favor of acquisitions) as I thought. There do need to be two conditions met to bring in the big bucks though: 1) you need to perfo…
Do you mean $1M per year or over 4 years? 250k per year in total compensation does not seem like that much. EDIT: Since I am being downvoted, I thought I'd provide some data to back up my claim. The average total compensation for a Senior Software Engineer in the US at Google according to Glassdoor is $267,413.
Google is widely acknowledged to be near the top of the heap w/r/t compensation.
Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
A problem I've mused on for a few years is related to this: when a phone submits a lonlat to an API server, how can you make the server more confident it can trust the location? I mean with curl I could POST any lonlat I want---I don't even need a phone! I don't think this is truly solvable, but how can you make spoofing the location harder? The scale I'm thinking about is "Are you really in the store you say you're…
There is no better case study for this than Pokemon Go, where the interest in spoofing location reached unheard of levels (outside of state actors). This is a good writeup: http://engineering.shapesecurity.com/2016/08/pokemon-go-api.... Basically sign your API requests with the most obscure function of phone context variables imaginable, and recognize that if you get so popular that it's cracked, you can just hire a…
Before Pokemon Go there was Ingress and hoo boy was/is this a problem.
Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak
#134Sad to see things end this way - Yik Yak was pretty dope at Berkeley. However, I felt like the content got stale and predictable, and met the classic homogenous fate of every upvote/downvote community ever.
Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
A problem I've mused on for a few years is related to this: when a phone submits a lonlat to an API server, how can you make the server more confident it can trust the location? I mean with curl I could POST any lonlat I want---I don't even need a phone! I don't think this is truly solvable, but how can you make spoofing the location harder? The scale I'm thinking about is "Are you really in the store you say you're…
Send temperature and barometric pressure. Temp will vary (inside/outside) but pressure should be reasonably consistent.
Phone temperature is completely useless if the device is kept in a pocket next to human body temperature. Phones are also self-heating, especially when running Pokemon Go.
Barometers aren't very widely spread and I'd be wary of their calibration.
Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak
#136Pity, mainly because there seems to be a market for local anonymous communications, but a relatively small, and very vocal subset of users can ruin it for everyone. I wonder if some sort of anonymous reputation system could have saved them from making product decisions that were counter to the reasons for using the app in the first place.
comment karma like here on hackernews is sort of an "anonymous reputation system" is it not?
Pseudonymous, not anonymous. People can recognise your username and treat you accordingly. Conversely if you start a new username it doesn't retain any karma from your "main".
Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that any more trustworthy? You can probably use the same source the server would use to verify that information. Not to mention, most phones may not have those sensors.
Some very popular phones have a barometer[1]. If you are getting data from a bunch of phones, and most of them are legit, then you'll have a good idea of where the air pressure 'should' be, and if you get a barometer reading that is outside that data set by a standard deviation you can probably 'guess' that it is not coming from a phone at the same lat/lon as the other ones. [1] https://www.phonegg.com/list/303-Cell-…
That only adds one extra step to spoofing - now I have to check weather.com for the barometer reading in the location I plan to poof before sending. NBD...
Also, pressure in vs outside can vary more than you'd think...
Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak
#138I think the key problem was the hype train and the lack of product-oriented/technical leadership. remembered them doing very well on campus last two years of college. They had on campus reps to hand out "schwag"; probably not very fun to scale. The obvious bullying was the problem. If they had found some way to solve that and snuck their way back into high schools... then again, kids can be so cruel.
They did eliminate bullying... by making the app non-anonymous (forced usernames) and it's what killed the app.
Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the reason that API is private is because people do not want that level of tracking. And there are very few applications which absolutely, positively need this level of accuracy. And, I'm sorry, but marketing/advertising doesn't count.
In my case it is: the store gives you a secret code, and you enter it on your phone to earn discounts and raffle entries. We would like to prevent people taking the code home and sharing it with all their friends. So it's not about tracking. Still I get why the restriction needs to be there.
If you have a mobile application, you can use that + beacon based location, so the code can be used only inside a store.
Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my case it is: the store gives you a secret code, and you enter it on your phone to earn discounts and raffle entries. We would like to prevent people taking the code home and sharing it with all their friends. So it's not about tracking. Still I get why the restriction needs to be there.
Make them have to submit it via a WIFI network in the store?
Or arrange some kind of (perhaps NFC based) token signing system.