Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | more NestedLoopGoBrr's commentslogin

We put our faith into systems built by PhDs every day. People don’t have to understand why airplanes stay in the air in order for them to be the only practical means of rapid international transport.


Doesn't that mean we should trust PhDs who are yelling at the top of their lungs that Internet voting is a bad idea right now?

https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2018/09/securing-the-...


I can watch an airplane fly and be confident that it's actually flying. I can watch election workers count and be confident that they're actually counting. I don't need to know why something works when I can personally observe it working.

But I can't observe the operation of an electronic voting system. All I can see is the result, and a fraudulent result looks very much like a legitimate result. I'm forced to understand it (which is likely impossible considering the complexity of modern hardware) or to trust people who have incentives to cheat me.


It's also inconsequential when people say that planes are a lie from the fake news media. Science works whether or not you believe in it. Elections, not so much.

If people just decide not to believe the results of an election, then democracy falls apart.


Because the fact that the maths add up to allowing for planes to fly doesn't need to be understood to be accepted. On the other hand, the process of electing a representative from a group must be understood to not be contested or misrepresented.


But people do have to understand at least at a high level why the announced result matches what the voters put in. The whole point of a voting system is not to pick a winner, but convincingly show that the loser(s) lost.

Undermining trust in the voting system is an old trick. Unless the voting system can show such allegations to be wrong, its results will remain disputed.


OTOH you have people who don't know how vaccines work, don't trust doctors, and have opted not to get them, jeopardizing public health. If such people can exist, just imagine what would happen if there was a misinformation campaign targeting the losing side, with the aim of convincing that the e-voting election was rigged/flawed/broken, and that they should stage an insurrection to remove the current "illegitimate" government.


They’re actually adding interests now as part of their matching algorithm, but the top picks are unique to each person, based on a number of different data points.


As a woman that uses Tinder, I can say first hand that the experience for women on the app is completely different. Paying for Tinder Gold lets you see the likes, infinite swipes, etc. like it does for men, but the value of that data is less useful. I buy Gold because I liked the features nonetheless, but the list of likes is useless - I’m constantly pegged at 9,999+ likes, the list freezes every five seconds, and there’s no meaningful way to sift through it.


Tinder removed the IG handles more likely because men were stalking women’s instagrams and it wasn’t immediately obvious connecting to instagram was going to display your username for all to see.


Bumble did it for that, probably not tinder. Most people who put their insta expect others to be able to add them on insta. This is the whole point of insta, it is to have the most people as possible watching at you. Tinder has always struggled to keep users in their app, which is the most important goal when you are a social network


Tinder is still there for the "discovery" of the people to add on Instagram, that is not going to change. Tinder doesn't make any extra money after people match, whether they continue to chat in or out of the app. Once connections are made and the users move out of the app, they still come back to Tinder for more discovery.


Sometimes “I told you so” is the last form of catharsis available to an engineer ground down by politics or bias making them unheard or ignored. Speaking from experience on that one.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: