I find this creepy and weird. How could you possibly tell the love of your life (if and when you found that person) that they were nothing more than a toy in your little data harvesting exercise.
"PS: I will not open-source the code since it could be used to hurt people, but I might share it if you ask nicely."
If you write code for fun (not commercially owned IP), and you are not willing to share it because 'it could hurt people', you might want to re-evaluate if you should write it in the first place.
Personally I think his approach here was really awful, but for this particular thing you could argue that the code is OK if used by one person, or a very tiny number of people, but if it were used by many people it'd be a big problem. There's a lot of things like that.
I think anyone who has been single long enough to experience the soul-draining tedious world of modern dating could understand and appreciate a way to optimize any part of matchmaking.
Also, I think "speed dating" is just a less geeky version of this.
Glad I'm not the only one... I mean I get the 'hacker' appeal of this, and why it's on HN, but at the same time it's so impersonal and weird to message that many people.
I can't see how almost all of the HUMAN BEINGS on the other end wouldn't find their treatment in this exercise at least a little bit disturbing.
"PS: I will not open-source the code since it could be used to hurt people, but I might share it if you ask nicely."
If you write code for fun (not commercially owned IP), and you are not willing to share it because 'it could hurt people', you might want to re-evaluate if you should write it in the first place.