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Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

blog.close.io

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Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#91

Post by philfreo »

socialist_coder wrote: post #74

This 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.

So you're saying that http://close.io not only has good engineers but also is good at marketing? Maybe you should check it out if you're looking for sales software then :)

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#92

Post by hkdobrev »

philfreo wrote: post #79
mmmooo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So you had two pictures? But what does this give you? Unless the second picture was available on the internet it is just the same as the first one.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#93

Post by TrainedMonkey »

philfreo wrote: post #79
mmmooo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did that picture by include any kind of hint of a company she is working for?

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#94

Post by rayiner »

philfreo wrote: post #79
mmmooo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Proof that your friends are your biggest privacy leak. People will tell just anything to anyone.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#95

Post by lifeformed »

I'm guessing it has to be something to do with facial recognition, since he asked for the picture without knowing its contents (other than that it has her face in it).

From there, if he had an idea of where they went that night, a club or bar, perhaps he could do some Facebook/Twitter searching magic to search for pictures of that night, taken by other people. Then they could look for her face in the background.

Not sure where to go from there... perhaps they got lucky with one of the pictures being tagged with name. Or perhaps they identified everyone she was shown to be associating with, and found intersections in their Facebook friends list? Does it have to do with Facebook?

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#96

Post by AsymetricCom »

jasdeepsingh wrote: post #84
AsymetricCom wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you required two engineers to do something that you could have confirmed yourself with 2 seconds of Googling shows that your ego is a bit inflated.

I like the grey color of your comments. Where did you get that? :)

testicular elephantitis

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#97

Post by olalonde »

philfreo wrote: post #37
wahsd wrote: post #29

Earlier 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.

My guess: someone on the team met another girl at the bar which happened to know her / attend the same event.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#98

Post by elorant »

philfreo wrote: post #17

I'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…

So you know the school and you have her picture. By her picture you can make a guess about her age. Then you search the web for graduates for particular dates from this particular school. It doesn’t have to be a yearbook or a class roster, people on LinkedIn mention the schools they’ve attended. Sooner or later you’ll find someone and then you can narrow the search. Even simpler, once you find someone you simply contact him with a fictional story as to why you’re searching this woman. From there on it just takes some old good fashioned social engineering.
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