2014-02-27 show with Chris McKinlay

Listening to today's show, and man, this guy is a terrible interviewee. I read a couple of articles on his OK Cupid hack, and he's clearly brilliant. But it just goes to show that a lot of really smart people have terrible verbal and communication skills. The number of "uh umm uhh"'s uttered was off the charts. Plus he had a real knack for rambling on while NOT answering the specific question that Bob or Munch posed to him.

Anyway, just wondering if anyone else felt the same way.

Ya, pretty bad, but don't think that I would do any better to be honest.

Quote: AcesAndEights

Listening to today's show, and man, this guy is a terrible interviewee. I read a couple of articles on his OK Cupid hack, and he's clearly brilliant.

Really? I was pretty unimpressed by the whole thing. I mean, he is obviously smarter than an average guy that you would find on the street, but "brilliant"? Come on. He created some spam accounts and did some basic statistical analysis. The only thing that this shows is that OKC needs some better spam detection and better defense against bots.

Quote: AxiomOfChoice

Really? I was pretty unimpressed by the whole thing. I mean, he is obviously smarter than an average guy that you would find on the street, but "brilliant"? Come on. He created some spam accounts and did some basic statistical analysis. The only thing that this shows is that OKC needs some better spam detection and better defense against bots.

As a software developer, I found certain parts of it impressive. Python scripts scraping web pages and interacting with them is not rocket science, but it's a pain in the ass, that's for sure.

You know more about math than I do, so maybe the math parts sounded more pedestrian to you. From the wired article:

Quote:

For McKinlay’s plan to work, he’d have to find a pattern in the survey data—a way to roughly group the women according to their similarities. The breakthrough came when he coded up a modified Bell Labs algorithm called K-Modes. First used in 1998 to analyze diseased soybean crops, it takes categorical data and clumps it like the colored wax swimming in a Lava Lamp. With some fine-tuning he could adjust the viscosity of the results, thinning it into a slick or coagulating it into a single, solid glob.

Quote:

The important part, though, would be the survey. He picked out the 500 questions that were most popular with both clusters. He’d already decided he would fill out his answers honestly—he didn’t want to build his future relationship on a foundation of computer-generated lies. But he’d let his computer figure out how much importance to assign each question, using a machine-learning algorithm called adaptive boosting to derive the best weightings.

I would hardly call that "basic statistical analysis."

Maybe I'm just biased against the guy. He created spam accounts and used them to harvest peoples' personal information and use it for his own purposes. He's an asshole.

Quote: AxiomOfChoice

Maybe I'm just biased against the guy. He created spam accounts and used them to harvest peoples' personal information and use it for his own purposes. He's an asshole.

I wholeheartedly disagree with your characterization of him as an asshole.

Any information that he "harvested" was already made publicly available by those who signed up for the site. He was just giving himself an advantage by using his knowledge and experience to collate all of the available information and speed up the process of finding good matches. Sure, you could say he manipulated the system, but I don't think he did anything ethically wrong.

But that's me :)

Also, he may have violated OK Cupid's terms of service. I'm actually kind of surprised that the Wired article didn't mention that, or include any statement or attempt to contact someone there.

The idea behind OKC is that you can see others responses to a question if (and only if) you answer the same question and make your result public, under the same terms. It's sort of an "I'll show you mine if you show me yours".

Creating fake accounts to give random answers to the questions, in order to harvest the answers of others is pretty sleazy in my book.

Laundromats are good, basically anywhere where the target female is going to be bored because you seem incredibly interesting by comparison. Grocery stores because it is unexpected, and plenty to talk about, easy icebreaker, you can ask her if she has tried something that is in her cart before.

Grocery stores are also pretty efficient for a determination of demographics, definitely single and lives alone if she just has a bunch of frozen "Serves one," dinners, and if you're not interested in someone with kids, can make sure she doesn't have any kid stuff in her cart.

The main thing to do is to try to entice her at any place where you are definitely more interesting than your immediate surroundings, or to try to make your approach in a time/place where she doesn't expect it, except funerals, that's not such a great idea...although she wouldn't expect it.

The point that I am making is that it isn't too terribly hard to go out there and find someone. Laundromats are also good, demographically, you don't want to talk to her if she has a man's clothes with her or any kids clothes if you are not interested in someone with kids. The downside is that she could be there because she is too poor to afford a washer/dryer, but I wouldn't make that assumption, maybe there just isn't enough room in her place for one.

Quote: Mission146

The downside is that she could be there because she is too poor to afford a washer/dryer, but I wouldn't make that assumption, maybe there just isn't enough room in her place for one.

Worse, she might assume that you are too poor to afford a washer and dryer ;-)

Quote: AxiomOfChoice

Worse, she might assume that you are too poor to afford a washer and dryer ;-)

I never went into a Laundromat with less than $750, cash, and I made it a point to drop those hundies all over the floor when trying to get a $10 out to break it in the quarter machine if there was an attractive young lady present!

Quote: Mission146

I never went into a Laundromat with less than $750, cash, and I made it a point to drop those hundies all over the floor when trying to get a $10 out to break it in the quarter machine if there was an attractive young lady present!

You're a brave man if the laundromats there are anything like the ones around here!

Quote: Mission146

I never went into a Laundromat with less than $750, cash, and I made it a point to drop those hundies all over the floor when trying to get a $10 out to break it in the quarter machine if there was an attractive young lady present!

I always walk around with a gangsta roll just to get street cred. $100 in the front with a bunch of $1's bundled on the inside. Gotta keep it hood for the homies.