<story><title>An almost perfect real-world hack</title><url>http://lbrandy.com/blog/2009/08/an-almost-perfect-hack/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kalvin</author><text>Wow, one commenter built a business from the same idea (sorry to repost a comment, but it&apos;s pretty great.):&lt;p&gt;&quot;I have been doing the same thing since 2001. Only I live in Cook County Illinois, the second most populated county behind Orange County, California.&lt;p&gt;So my database has upwards of 1,000,000+ properties in it (residential, commercial, and industrial).&lt;p&gt;Funny thing…I took the experiment one step further. I fed every single house in the county through the algorithm, to see who else had a similar appeal case.&lt;p&gt;Lo and behold, 65% of the county was being overassessed.&lt;p&gt;So I had two choices:
1) Class action lawsuit on behalf of the county
2) Mass mailing. Gimme $25, I give you the appeal info.&lt;p&gt;I chose two, and have been mopping up ever since. If you don’t win the appeal (all public record) you get a refund.&quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>An almost perfect real-world hack</title><url>http://lbrandy.com/blog/2009/08/an-almost-perfect-hack/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>conorgil145</author><text>Just goes to show that if you make the extra effort a lot of the time things will tend to work out. This guy was extremely prepared and didn&apos;t even need the information that he gathered with an awesome day&apos;s worth of coding because the lawyers thought he wouldn&apos;t even show up!&lt;p&gt;Nice work though. Hopefully all of the work he did will help someone else save some $$ too because he said that he posted the DB online.</text></comment>