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Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

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Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#121

Post by briankzimmer »

pjungwir wrote: post #70
huehehue wrote: post #62

Bit of a tangent and, for those not familiar, Yik Yak is an anonymous, upvote-downvote, location-based forum (kinda) where posts are automatically deleted if they net -5 votes. In college, I was really interested in how Yik Yak worked and found out that, given a list of N user ids (which were super easy to generate), one could send downvote requests to the server and instantly delete any post with a score There was n…

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…

This is something that I'm currently dealing with as well. However, I'm a little less concerned with trusting the location in particular and more in whether or not the client itself is trustworthy.

Do you have a user login system? Can you easily isolate fake data to a certain set of accounts? Or are you dealing with anonymous requests?

One possible solution you can look into is signature authentication of the headers to verify that the request is coming from a trusted source. You can either us a public/private key pair or a symmetric key with HMAC. That being said, this isn't foolproof - you have to keep the key secure, and that isn't totally possible in an app. If someone attaches a debugger they will be able to get your secret key if they're determined enough. The best you can do is obfuscate / encrypt the key so that it can't​ easily be read out from the strings in your app.

If you wanted to verify the location data itself, you could look into modeling the user's movements and look for abnormalities in the sequence of locations. Also, you can check the location against an API like Google or Foursquare on the back end.

Curious to hear what other people think as well.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#123

Post by nikanj »

cheriot wrote: post #24
pjc50 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting if there were a transfer market in programmers like there is in footballers, but I don't see it happening any time soon. (Partly this is because the rules of the game prevent replacing Lionel Messi with 1,000 cheap non-Western consultants hired through three layers of outsourcing)

What successful company has been built by "1,000 cheap non-Western consultants hired through three layers of outsourcing"? We don't need a rule against a losing strategy

Wipro?

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#124

Post by misingnoglic »

pjungwir wrote: post #78
s73ver wrote: post #76

Earlier 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.

Why don't you make a unique code for each user?

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#125

Post by lspears »

pjungwir wrote: post #70
huehehue wrote: post #62

Bit of a tangent and, for those not familiar, Yik Yak is an anonymous, upvote-downvote, location-based forum (kinda) where posts are automatically deleted if they net -5 votes. In college, I was really interested in how Yik Yak worked and found out that, given a list of N user ids (which were super easy to generate), one could send downvote requests to the server and instantly delete any post with a score There was n…

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…

https://www.locationsmart.com provides a service to locate devices at the cell tower level. You can use it to verify location updates from the device are in the ballpark of where they say they are. I haven't used it personally but a friend did.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#126

Post by fspacef »

dheera wrote: post #102

I loved the idea of Yik Yak, but every time I tried to start a semi-intelligent conversation I was downvoted to death. And this was smack in the middle of MIT. I guess the people I was hoping to interact with was exactly the opposite of the actual user base. It would be potentially interesting if the upvote/downvote thresholds and ranking took into account your Facebook or other social graph, and then extrapolated to…

> It would be potentially interesting if the upvote/downvote thresholds and ranking took into account your Facebook or other social graph

I think this would be a cool thing to have, but one of the key things for YY was the anonymity. Linking with FB would have killed that (as forcing users to create usernames did).

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#127

Post by halisaurus »

pjungwir wrote: post #70
huehehue wrote: post #62

Bit of a tangent and, for those not familiar, Yik Yak is an anonymous, upvote-downvote, location-based forum (kinda) where posts are automatically deleted if they net -5 votes. In college, I was really interested in how Yik Yak worked and found out that, given a list of N user ids (which were super easy to generate), one could send downvote requests to the server and instantly delete any post with a score There was n…

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…

Ping the clients and average out data from clients near the lat/long sent with the request and compare to the client in question.

Apply a max threshold to check if a client is reasonably close to potential "co-located" clients.

You can't shrink physical distance. Pinging a server in a nearby US city is 13ms. Hong Kong is 232ms.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#128

Post by posguy »

lspears wrote: post #125
pjungwir wrote: post #70

Earlier 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…

https://www.locationsmart.com provides a service to locate devices at the cell tower level. You can use it to verify location updates from the device are in the ballpark of where they say they are. I haven't used it personally but a friend did.

Looks like they just do a HLR lookup to get cellphone location, which at worst gives you the cell tower location and sector the phone is connected to.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#129

Post by ma2rten »

nostrademons wrote: post #52
blizkreeg wrote: post #41

I've found most acquihire situations unfair to existing employees. It seems that those coming in from the acquihire have a higher reward/payout that talented employees already at the company can never negotiate. Are the incoming acquihired engineers that much more worth than the ones you already have? There are certainly exceptions but by and large I can't imagine this being the case.

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.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#130

Post by hiddencost »

nostrademons wrote: post #52
blizkreeg wrote: post #41

I've found most acquihire situations unfair to existing employees. It seems that those coming in from the acquihire have a higher reward/payout that talented employees already at the company can never negotiate. Are the incoming acquihired engineers that much more worth than the ones you already have? There are certainly exceptions but by and large I can't imagine this being the case.

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…

if you mean $250k compensation per engineer, that sounds in-line with mid-level dev compensation at amagoobooksoft?
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