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Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

It may not matter what happened.

But it does matter that you decided to publicly out him. This is very petty and as a user i would feel betrayed of my privacy.

You could have actually taken advantage of this and wrote a completely different blog post and people would have appreciated it, but this feels too petty. Even when you say it doesn't matter and all the diplomatic cliche saying competition is good, it just doesn't feel right because I can sense the bitterness in every word.

It's not like this guy was freelancing for you telling you he's going to build your idea and one day suddenly he launched it as his own. You already have a service out there. It's public domain. You can't "steal" an idea that's already out there.

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Also quite certain that I won't be signing up for Nugget, given his lack of respect for his users.

He gave this guy a product idea, which is literally the goal of his own product, and now he's mad about it. Mad enough to breach his own privacy policy[1] and publicly out the guy, and to do it 1) to improve his own position, and 2) to hurt the other guy's.

It's a whole compact lesson on how not to treat your users.

[1]: Nugget Personnel: Nugget personnel and authorized consultants and/or contractors may have access to user information if necessary in the normal course of Nugget business.

Protection of Nugget and Others: We may release personal information when we believe in good faith that release is necessary to comply with a law; to enforce or apply our Terms of Use and other policies; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Nugget, our employees, our users, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organizations for fraud protection and credit risk reduction.

I agree and I was surprised how Justin Vincent (the OP) stalked and outed Cory. If he thought he could damage Cory's reputation he just damaged his own.

If I were the OP I would just delete the post. This is a free market and it shows that having and executing a nice idea is just half the battle, you need to think also about how to make your business model defensible, something the OP haven't done.

I came here to type out almost this exact thing. I'm not sure what the op hoped to gain from this, but frankly, he seems very petty. There is literally no way that I'd give him any personal information after reading this....

He may have gotten some pageviews out of this, but I think that it will take a very long time to repair his brand.

So you stole their idea

Actually no, I didn't. Good ideas tend to occur to multiple people at the same time.

Obviously my sarcasm was not obvious

You captured my feelings after reading this blog post pretty well.

Having never been subscribed to any lists like this the post comparing the two didn't even convince me that Nugget was superior. Quite the opposite, I signed up for Opps Daily.

It is fucked up. Again, why smaller companies are a bigger liability. No accountability when joe schmoe small businessman CEO decides to poke around their own companies' user data.

I kind of felt the same when I read this, going through analytics etc.

I for one don't think it is trivial to steal someones idea, but also response was a little bit too much.

do we 'own' ideas?

Before I started a company, I probably would have said yes. After a few years in the startup world, I'm not so sure anymore.

There is, after all, a reason why inventions are patentable and ideas aren't.

Execution is king.

I mean, even if you don't did a startup, you will notice that you have ideas you told nobody and they get still executed by someone.

In a way we do. Investors are pushing story that ideas are not worth anything. Of course they are, otherwise those studios they set-up would just crank out hit after hit, because they can design that business perfectly.

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