>My Ask
Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
71–80 of 220 posts
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#72I'm the engineer he's referring to. I still get a laugh seeing Justin's amazement when we told him her name. To answer a few questions... - This isn't the actual photo but looks similar, except that she was alone. Justin was afraid of reposting the same photo after the results of handing over a photo last time :) - There was no useful exif data in the image. - We knew her high school and approximate age in Austin, bu…
A few ideas come to my head. * Everyone was at the original bar at the same time - someone else had photos from the night that had her and other people in them, and those people (her friends) could be found online. * The bar had some kind of "sign-up for x" list, or some kind of contest, or some kind of photos of the night, which were helpful. * You searched twitter/facebook/whatever for a girl posting about a boy sh…
Some good ones, but nope.
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
You obviously knew something about her that made it possible, which you even admit Justin doesn't know you had. People are getting bored with your shenanigans, spill it!
I don't feel bad about letting the discussion continue as-is because of the fact that we completely expected to get the answer with only the information mentioned here. I still haven't heard this method mentioned yet directly. The "extra" information we got came later after we already started working on it, and came as surprise. It just happened to bring the result back sooner than the other approach.
Can you or did you mention what it was that Justin didn't know you knew about her. Seems rather unfair, to him and us.
So we could all plow through every event that happened in Austin that she may have attended, but without knowing what part of town it starts looking rather boring. I have a real job. :)
So it seems you weren't even confident when you got your confirmation, a.k.a., it was an informed guess but could have just as easily been a girl that looked alike at an event at the time she was supposedly at an event?
Tricky ol' Phil.
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#74This is obviously a shill post setup to advertise close.io and HN fell right for it.
Why would this post be hosted on the close.io blog and not on a personal blog? It has nothing to do with close.io.
Why would he mention close.io so many times?
Why would he ask about the quality of the "close.io engineers" instead of just his coworker or friend?
Smells fishy to me.
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#75I'm the engineer he's referring to. I still get a laugh seeing Justin's amazement when we told him her name. To answer a few questions... - This isn't the actual photo but looks similar, except that she was alone. Justin was afraid of reposting the same photo after the results of handing over a photo last time :) - There was no useful exif data in the image. - We knew her high school and approximate age in Austin, bu…
It was this line - "On Thursday night, after exchanging texts all day, around 8:00pm local time the girl sent me a picture of her in order to convince me to meet her at an event she was going to." Find the event Thursday night at 8:00pm in Austin and start tracking down from there.
Without spending too much time on this, I thought of the same as well and knowing that:
Her dress, which was very unique had never been worn by her, because she bought it the day before
...should narrow down the events that this person wanted to attend. Here are the events that happened that day:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/calendar/2013-09-05/
...which, to me, only had one really unique event that evening:
http://www.facebook.com/events/1405498132998020
...which, possibly, would include a picture of that person either in the same outfit or include a profile picture of that person commenting or liking the event.
But this is just a guess...
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#76I'm the engineer he's referring to. I still get a laugh seeing Justin's amazement when we told him her name. To answer a few questions... - This isn't the actual photo but looks similar, except that she was alone. Justin was afraid of reposting the same photo after the results of handing over a photo last time :) - There was no useful exif data in the image. - We knew her high school and approximate age in Austin, bu…
Did you make a post on Reddit/4chan/Facebook/whatever asking, "Does anyone know this girl?"
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#77One of the things that looks like a clue to me is that this the lead engineer of close.io. Browsing through their site, it looks like they do "telecom in an API"; it reminds me of Twilio and OneBox. So, here's a thought. Let's say the Engineer has access to the SMS logs (NSA-style) for Justin's phone. (Maybe his phone goes through their system. But even if not, maybe it's company-provided, so there's an admin interfa…
Since the point of this article is probably to promote their company, having the answer be "our engineers looked at your private information for a prank" seems like a no go.
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
that the extra information brought the result back "sooner" is intriguing. If you don't mind me asking, would other approaches discussed here have brought the result nonetheless? or did they?
I'm pretty confident it would have, but we ultimately "stopped" it after getting the answer confirmed, so I can't say with 100%.
So you stumbled on a piece of information which proved useful, notwithstanding that you didn't intend to look for.
If Justin observed correctly, you guys were very impressed with yourselves. Had you retrieved the answer by methods of which you were confident, you would've still been impressed, but not greatly.(I'm making a lapse conjecture here, of course)
Since you were confident that you would be able to find her, prior to looking at the picture, according to the article, I don't think you were looking for any information in the picture other than for confirmation.
However, some extra information in the picture(since it was taken very recently) enabled you to look further, which returned a result. Perhaps a building, an address, or some sort of landmark-ish location which narrowed whereabouts of the picture vastly? If this were the case, then I can understand that you guys were very impressed, because well, it is.
EDIT: Just saw the 'solution'; very nice touch!
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#79I'm the engineer he's referring to. I still get a laugh seeing Justin's amazement when we told him her name. To answer a few questions... - This isn't the actual photo but looks similar, except that she was alone. Justin was afraid of reposting the same photo after the results of handing over a photo last time :) - There was no useful exif data in the image. - We knew her high school and approximate age in Austin, bu…
post pic on craiglist/similar in Austin area. Say you found wallet/purse/camera/etc with her picture. Anyone that knows her please call/email w/ Name/Address for you to send back. Use highschool for validation when contacted. Might have some error.
This is the closest I've heard to one of the ideas that we expected to work, so I'll share.
- Create an ad on Facebook with her picture.
- Target people that went to her high school within 4 years of the range of years we thought she graduated within. Was only a few hundred people so the cost of running the ad would likely only be a few bucks.
- The ad copy / landing page just needed to be convincing that we weren't stalking her. We went with the "help us win a bet" approach but the "lost camera" approach would have been good also.
Ultimately we got the answer sooner from another approach after we found out that we had another picture of the girl that Justin didn't know we had. So we canceled the ad, but I think this would have worked if given enough time.
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#80I'm the engineer he's referring to. I still get a laugh seeing Justin's amazement when we told him her name. To answer a few questions... - This isn't the actual photo but looks similar, except that she was alone. Justin was afraid of reposting the same photo after the results of handing over a photo last time :) - There was no useful exif data in the image. - We knew her high school and approximate age in Austin, bu…
Philfreo > I think that the girl did share something with you that Justin doesn't know, such as something that she did accomplish in that school, like winning some kind of award, winning a competition or something similar. Then, you used that information along with the name of the school in Google.