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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 she just met at bar X, blah blah

* We know she was going to some kind of event - you guys figured out what that was, and found a guest list or something.

* You guys did a some wi-fi sniffing and read a few emails. He did say he emailed you the photo, so you know which account to listen for.

Are any of those close?

If it were me, the first thing I would do knowing her high school is create a Facebook account and upload her photo (with her face) and see who Facebook suggests I tag in it.

I'm not sure what the rules are concerning tagging suggestions, but I have noticed that it suggests that I tag people I know in other people's photos so you KNOW they recognize everybody in every photo - the trick is meeting the right conditions for it to allow it to share that recognition match with you based on her privacy settings I think...

Some good ones, but nope.

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. :)

So you had a second photo of the girl, taken by a team mate, but it has only her in it?

OK then, there is something identifying about this girl, which the second photo gave you

* Tattoo

* Glasses

* Hair

* Amputee

* Scar/burn, etc.

* particular purse/hat/watch/accessory

* etc.

Or maybe she was wearing a t-shirt brandishing the company she works for.

An article of clothing or accessory of some kind from a conference she attended that helped you look up attendees and identify her, or some other identifying club/service that contains profile pictures?

Name tag

But it had _something else_ in it...

A credit card slip with her name on it perhaps?

In a single picture where she was a random bystander? Unlikely that you'd be able to read anything that had her name on it, unless it was an actual name tag. Even then, people don't generally stand very still for photos that are taken of other people.

Sorority/college sweater?

You looked on Instagram and other for pictures taken at the bar, and you found one either taken by the woman in question or one of her friends with the mystery woman tagged.

Or maybe you knew that she wanted him to meet her at an event and you found a roster for that event- or ie if it was a real estate convention you would have a pretty good idea that she was a realtor and could look at websites for realtors in Austin.

Or maybe you checked his recent facebook friends, looked at his recent twitter followers, and everyone who liked/commented on his recent photos/posts on Instagram and whatever other social networks he's on- as well as the photos/posts he liked/commented on.

I think you took a (relatively) low-tech approach to this.

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...

Your facebook link contains a list of 73 persons going to the event, so maybe one of them had a picture that matched the one the team had of the girl...

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.

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

They didn't actually try it, so there's no proof.

Actually, they tried it... but stopped it before it ran its course.

You had another picture that showed where she worked? Used LinkedIn and company's webpage (Some company list their employee) to narrow it down to a few people. Or send a message to a coworker on linkedin whatever looking for information about that girl and they gave it to you? I'm curious :P

Veronica Mars style social engineering does tend to work.

So the actual method that worked was "another photo" mentioned by grecy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6369669 an hour ago?

This method likely would have worked by itself. The method that worked sooner wasn't just "another photo" found online of her friends as grecy mentioned. It was a photo we had taken ourselves, and it didn't have anyone else in it. But I'm not ready to tell Justin more details about it.

This strikes me as odd, albeit a clue. You had a photo of a girl you'd presumably never met. A photo you'd taken, that you didn't know was her at first.

They went to the same event, took some photos. And in checking their photos, see that the same girl was in their photos too. Then they saw who she was with, and were able to locate a friend of hers. From locating a friend of hers from this second photo, they located her.

"didn't have anyone else in it" - seems no one else was in the photo with her.

Perhaps she was doing a presentation, so was alone at the front of the room. The photographer, being in the audience, would obviously know which presentation it was and from there its a quick look-up on the list of presenters.

Maybe her phone's contact list, call history, Facebook, Instagram, etc. or her business/credit card were visible in that picture?

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.

It entirely depends on what was contained in the photo..... Photos can contain information.

yah I was actually thinking of facebook ad just after I replied, with that criteria..only thing that turned me off from it what that you made it sound as highschool was a post-processor (validation) vs pre-processor (targeting)

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

No, there was no hint about what company she worked for. And she didn't apply to work at Elastic / Close.io either

she applied for work with your company, and you had her photo and info from the cv?

In the US CVs don't include a photo.

You were stalking her. Amusing story though

"stalk [verb] to follow, watch, and bother (someone) constantly in a way that is frightening, dangerous, etc."

No, we weren't. And she knew about it, was amused by it herself. No bad intentions.

Taking the third definition of off merriam-webster online doesn't really prove your point here. There is a reason why the title of the op was "Why Engineers Scare Me". I know this was all in good fun but please do understand why this is stalking and how the same technique can be used in very harmful ways.

stalk. verb: to follow (an animal or person that you are hunting or trying to capture) by moving slowly and quietly

stalk. slang defination: hound, spy, solicitation for a certain kind of information

> she knew about it, was amused by it herself. No bad intentions.

her opinion and agreement apparently doesn't matter, the internet knows better.

sophistry [ˈsɒfɪstrɪ] n pl -ries 1. (Philosophy) a. a method of argument that is seemingly plausible though actually invalid and misleading b. the art of using such arguments 2. subtle but unsound or fallacious reasoning 3. an instance of this; sophism

Your reply appears to accuse the parent of sophistry, but you provide an even worse argument for your claim than the parent does. It is not obvious to me how posting the definition of “stalk”, according to which the bet was not stalking, is an invalid or misleading argument.

I am directly accusing the parent of sophistry by selecting to post a definition of "stalking" that required malicious intent if not violence when that is not the totality of the definition, is not consistent with Merriam-Webster or Oxford dictionary and seeks to excuse their behavior by the omission. .

But you knew that.

Did you make a post on Reddit/4chan/Facebook/whatever asking, "Does anyone know this girl?"

Here is my guess:

The second photo you realized you had showed the subject holding the device used to take the picture sent to your colleague. You investigated that particular device and found a way to uniquely identify it's pictures based off some characteristic of it's photos, not necessarily EXIF, then scoured the Internet for photos with the same unique characteristic until you found one that revealed more information about the subject?

The team(including Justin: using first name here for convinience's sake) had a trip to Austin. Where they were should be a public knowledge. Perhaps they(you) started the search from there. A facebook search or so could tell some plans of people who would have fun at that particular place.

It is also possible that during the few days' correspondence one of the engineer guys had some other piece of info that we are not familiar with. Seeing how the engineers already knew her high school, I'm sure Justin talked about her with co-workers.

I think the key information that's missing here is what the engineers knew but Justin didn't know that they knew.(Sounds like a quote out of a Friends episode, mmm)

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.

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.

Nah I like this approach...let us bumble around for awhile in the discussion...I'd be very surprised if no one on HN could surmise the solution, but I'll admit I'm stumped (though I've only thought about it for a few minutes before getting back to work)

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.

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

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!

Wait, whats the solution?

This teasing is too much. Now I'm hooked like it's a spy novel.

Wherever you were that night had a Facebook page with an event created for the evening you were there. You uploaded your second picture to the Facebook event, or tagged the Facebook page of the bar you were at. Then someone tagged the girl in the photo, revealing her identity.

Did you go back to the bar where they originally met and talk to the bartender? She probably frequents the bar if she lives in the area.

At that point, if the bartender knows some of her backstory or friends or anything - maybe only has a first name - things get much simpler.

nah we were too lazy for that - it all happened while chilling on a laptop :)

Justin's own phone leaked his location (through some google-lattitude, or Yelp like service or perhaps gps directly) while Justin drove (or rode with her in a taxi) to her home.

How would they have gotten my GPS location? And how would they have figured out which one was her house. I was in her neighborhood and stopped multiple places that were 'significant' to her as a kid. Any of them could have been her house. And I wasn't at anyone for more than 60 seconds

so... another reason to be scared of engineers?

good idea, but not the case here.

She bought that dress from some Austin boutique and modeled it for them, or left a review? Y'all found the review?

C'mon Phil, spill the beans now!

If the other picture was found in some social network ,maybe it was labeled .

Her CV somewhere on a job hunting site?

Dating sites?

tineye.com or similar?

no luck

Did she "check in" at the bar with FourSquare?