I thought about all the possibilities listed and simply cannot find any of the potentials. It just seems bizarre! I cannot think of any common way FB could've connected us, other than pics.
I get random connection suggestions on FB that make me scratch my head as well sometimes, but most, if not all, are people that are 3-4 degrees removed from me. So they are friends of a friend's friend somewhere in the chain. FB makes some guesses based on how much you interact with certain people on the platform. Judging by that it makes weighted judgments of who you may know. So the more you use FB and like/share/comment with your friends, the greater your chances of seeing random friend recommendations that you may not realize there is connection to.
Plus, you never know how many people get their entire address book stolen by Facebook without consent (or a drive-by "can facebook app access your contacts?" button that immediately uploads your entire address book back to the mothership; or a linkedin connection/scraping or call record logging on android or half a dozen other aggregate info dump methods people aren't privy to).
I'm surprised facebook hasn't tried to create their own spyware-infused browser and computer platform yet. Millions of facebook users think "facebook" is the entire Internet anyway. Not far removed from just giving over your entire life to them.
The more I think the more bizzare it was. The reason being, we know each other by synthetic names in a forum (and let me just say anonymity was expected from both of us). So the only way I can think of is somehow the synthetic string/name matched on both of our data somehow like you are describing.
My experience w/ SO has been mixed. Some of the moderators act like quality police and shut down genuine, but potentially basic questions. Yes, amazingly some of the answers are so deep! So mixed opinion for me.
@nl noob here. I'd like to try building a toy QA systems (but in limited domain. For example, wild life). Can you please provide some open source pointers ? Is OpenEphyra the one I should look into ? Thanks!
The GitHub version of OpenEphyra[1] is a good place to start. From memory you need to much around some to get the Bing-based knowledge-miner to work, but it is pretty good once you do.
[2] is a good architectural overview.
For limited domain knowledge base building, DeepDive[3] is state-of-the-art. They don't have a QA interface though.
I have a feeling, you have not seen death from close quarters. Once you have seen it up close, you kinda of get used to it. Also it is little unusual to think so much about death at such an young age and these may be signs of spiritual inclinations. And you could consider surfing few books (Buddhism, Zen Koans etc).
