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

Post by michaelmior » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 9:10 PM UTC

waterside81 wrote: post #100

Since the reply is buried down below, here's how they did it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6369859

Post by michaelmior » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 9:11 PM UTC

hkdobrev wrote: post #85

Here is how I think it was done: I assume the author is not a Facebook friend with the girl. Otherwise it would have been too easy. But friends of friends is not the only privacy leak on Facebook. There is a very old feature (which is about to get deprecated) called Networks. Networks are created for schools, universities and other big organizations. They had the name of the high school so they have to list it as the…

Post by wahnfrieden » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 9:13 PM UTC

hkdobrev wrote: post #92

philfreo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by frogpelt » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 9:20 PM UTC

philfreo wrote: post #91

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 :)

Post by fr0sty » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 9:20 PM UTC

philfreo wrote: post #112

danso wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in the other post, you said you inadverdently realized you had a second photo of the target (which presumably contained key identifying info)...so, are you saying here that that second photo didn't come from investigating the event that she was at (i.e., if it had a meetup/lanyrd page, looking at all the attendee photos and seeing what looked like her?)

The second photo that we later realized we had was one a teammate had taken himself and didn't have anyone else in it. I think it was doable with just 1 photo, and I'm not ready to share with Justin how the 2nd photo helped. :)