Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 144 posts

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

#61

Post by frogstomp19 »

billyhoffman wrote: post #55
frogstomp19 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but I'm a software engineer working for a startup in ATL. I'm not sure how we have a reputation for being "dominated by business types", but we do have a relatively high contingent of fintech and b2b companies here (our only unicorn, Kabbage, plus several others like Square, Salesloft, Salesforce). I think though that our pool of engineering talent is relatively high - I'd guess it's the most likely landing sp…

> only unicorn Kabbage Uhhh Let me introduce you to a little company called Internet Security Systems. $1.3B+ acquisition by IBM.

I could be wrong here but my understanding is if a company is acquired they WERE a unicorn (if the acquisition was for $1B+) but they aren't a unicorn after the acquisition.

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

#62

Post by huehehue »

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 no location checking to see if a user id was being used in both Florida and Montana at the same time, and there was no real throttling. I hit up their support, and tried to reach out to their devs, but I kept getting brushed off.

Of course this is just one small thing, but I'm not exactly surprised at how things are turning out if this was the level of interest that the Yik Yak team showed in their own product.

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

#63

Post by problems »

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…

Honestly, I'm continually amazed by the level of absolute garbage people can ship with any level of popularity. And worse, get funding to ship it.

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

#64

Post by ng12 »

problems wrote: post #63
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…

Honestly, I'm continually amazed by the level of absolute garbage people can ship with any level of popularity. And worse, get funding to ship it.

But it doesn't really matter does it? It's a social application, not a banking system. If your garbage gets users it's not garbage.

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

#65

Post by austenallred »

problems wrote: post #63
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…

Honestly, I'm continually amazed by the level of absolute garbage people can ship with any level of popularity. And worse, get funding to ship it.

The quality of code and level of popularity are not directly correlated.

In fact, I've found often times they're inversely correlated. Maybe something to do with where time is spent?

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

#66

Post by pcwalton »

ng12 wrote: post #64
problems wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm continually amazed by the level of absolute garbage people can ship with any level of popularity. And worse, get funding to ship it.

But it doesn't really matter does it? It's a social application, not a banking system. If your garbage gets users it's not garbage.

If a company gets users but fails to retain them, causing the product to fail and the investors to lose their funds, then it certainly isn't a success.

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

#67

Post by ryanwaggoner »

posguy wrote: post #60
ynniv wrote: post #14

Square has an Atlanta office in Atlantic Station, which is ~ 15 minutes from where Yik Yak is located in Buckhead. This same Square office previously picked up the Google Web Toolkit team after Google closed their local office.

Huh, well Square seems to be in the right place at the right time to make this acquisition of talent. I still don't get how Square intends to retain/gain customers at the price point their at, Mercury, Heartland, etc are eating their lunch.

Heartland is such an utter piece of garbage. I'd use almost anything before I'd touch it (or any typical shitty enterprise processor) again.

Source: spent a year helping a client migrate from Stripe to Heartland to save a few basis points. Things like faxing docs to terrible APIs to constant lies from sales, who is a bunch of ignorant, rude good ol' boys, just like most of their competitors. Pure incompetence at virtually every point of interaction. Literally have not a single good thing to say.

I'd invest a significant part of my net worth in Stripe if I could. They and companies like them are going to destroy Heartland in the long run, and it can't come soon enough.

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

#68

Post by ng12 »

brightball wrote: post #54
ng12 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true, could you provide a source?

I don't know about legal challenges, but they basically created an anonymous area broadcast. There's a lot of complications that come along with that.

I really don't think there are. As long as they complied with authorities when somebody used Yik-Yak to do something illegal they're in the clear.

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

#69

Post by lazerwalker »

harryh wrote: post #19
gonzo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Golden handcuffs.

That's not really the case here. Golden handcuffs refers to stock that was previously granted but either has not yet vested or has vested but the employee can't keep if they walk away from the job. While the employees in question surely own Yik-yak stock that stock is now worthless. They're starting at Square just like they would start at any other job. Thus they will stay at Square if it is a better job for them (fo…

Yes, but presumably as part of the acquisition they're getting $X00,000 of stock/cash on a 4-year vest. That's far more than one would get for a standard new hire options package at a company of Square's size/maturity.

I'd say that's accurate to describe as "golden handcuffs", since they (probably) can't just walk down the street to another company and get that offer matched.

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

#70

Post by pjungwir »

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 in?" where all users are from the same fairly dense city. So geolocating the IP isn't good enough. Accuracy to a city block or two seems good enough though.

My best idea so far is to submit a list of available wifi access points, and use that as a "password" to prove that you're where you say you are. If your list is 80% like the list of other users at that location, we trust you.

Unfortunately in iOS you can't get that list! It requires a private API, so calling that method will get your app rejected from the store.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

Post reply on HN