Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashdav | Hacker News Reader

Waiting for their answer now. Haven't posted any stripe code publicly. Could be a very good coincidence.

> Could be a very good coincidence

Literally the last two times I have text my wife suggesting pizza for dinner I have had an advertisement SMS from Dominos moments later. If it wasn't for the shocking state of Dominos tech (website and mobile app) I would think they had some crazy surveillance going on!

Some kind of pavlov's dog response? IE Dominos sends SMS marketing on a roughly predictable timetable, and on a couple of days those messages arrived late, causing you to subconsciously anticipate pizza news and suggest getting pizza?

Probably not, I'm talking out of my ass.

I hope so, that would be awesome.

Seems possible actually. Wasn't there just something yesterday on Dominos using pizza-smelling ink on DVDs? The DVD would heat up in the player and produce a pizza smell, inspiring hunger and hopefully a trip to Dominos. That's pretty dastardly. Timing advertisements seems to be much more in the realm of possibility.

With the current state of mobile app permissioning, I wouldn't be surprised if analytics companies are mining text message history for signals. This should be easy for you to test though.

Your cell phone provider could be selling them that stuff, seems like a really good revenue stream and easy to implement

Somehow this seems much more creepy than Google doing the same with emails.

Just random musings: say that you signed up at a random point in time within a two year period, and that they also e-mail people at a random point in time within a two year period. The odds of their e-mail arriving within 40 minutes of you signing up are then about 1 in 26,000. Low, but you'd expect it to happen to a few people.

They're presumably only open eight hours a day, so you can probably cut two thirds of that number. Also, did you consider the birthday paradox?

I'm not sure how the birthday paradox would apply here, since we're matching up two events per person, not matching up nearby events where you're looking for pairs among multiple people.

Do you browse the web logged into Linkedin?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com