Man living off Groupons for one year breaks a New York start-up’s website | Hacker News Reader

Man living off Groupons for one year breaks a New York start-up’s website

betabeat.com

12 pointsticky12 comments

This was really hard for me to understand, so I'll post my summary in hopes that it helps someone else:

CityPockets is a website that helps you organize your coupons and vouchers. You import your coupons and CityPockets will plot the deals on a map and display their expiration date. This should make you more efficient with your coupons.

Josh Stevens is "The Groupawn", a Groupon customer trying to live off of Groupons for an entire year. What this means is that he has no cash, but a year's supply of vouchers from Groupon, provided to him for free as a sort of publicity stunt.

Josh Stevens broke the CityPockets website by trying to import thousands of Groupon vouchers onto CityPockets, a site whose average load is nine vouchers per user.

> “At first, we suspected that it was a scam, until we Googled the guy’s name.”

What does this even mean? "This guy sure is trying to import a lot of data. Clearly he's trying to scam us."

What's strange about it ? Any unusual behavior can be suspect. Also "suspected" implies possibility, pretty much the opposite of "clearly".

Agreed. We were just surprised, since our highest user at that point only had 85 vouchers (It's 149 now), then this guy comes around with thousands. We thought it was a fake account, but it turned out to be a real user.

While I understand that it's suspicious - as in, out of the norm - but what kind of a scam would it have been?

LOL - "scam" is probably the wrong word to use. More like a "prank" or some sort of DOS.

I wouldn't brag about a simple import breaking your site.

We just found it intriguing because our system wasn't optimized or configured to show thousands of vouchers for a single person (imagine thousands of pins on a map or how long it'd take to load a page). Never thought anyone would have so many vouchers! But we've managed to fix that.

Josh is awesome! He has almost 3000 vouchers from across the US and loves that our map function maps it all out for him, categorizes it and sorts by expiration. ~Cheryl Yeoh (Founder of CityPockets)

What about the import caused the site to crash?

Is it a repeatable problem?

It's probably related to Google Maps and their geo-code limitations. You can only query about 2500 in a 24hr period, and even then you can't do bursts without being blocked for a 24hr period. What you should do is query in intervals, store the resulting geo-code information in your database, then use that information rather constantly query Google's geo-coding services.

I'm not privy to any information, but this is likely what happens as we had to advise some of our users that were having a similar issue with Google Maps.

Good info, thanks for the thorough response.

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