I'm pretty interested in this an OkC user of about 2.5 months (and as a programmer). On one hand, this feels like very blatant "cheating" of the system, and it almost feels like he's taking advantage of or misleading these women. On the other hand, perhaps he's just properly utilizing a tool at his disposal to find love. I find it hard to blame him considering the latter case. I'm tempted to think that if I had the proper skills (and time) there's a good chance I'd do the same, or at least try it to see the results firsthand. As is often the case, there's a lot of good discussion over on HN on this article.
Well, I don't entirely disagree with you but it sounds like you're being dismissive of the whole story because it makes you angry. So, he did answer questions honestly, he just let the computer decide which ones to answer and how high to mark their importance. One thing to note is that people on OkC decide which questions to answer all the time based on which questions the people they're interested in have answered. Is what he's doing really all that much different than this? To me, it seems like the same thing, he just took it to the next level. Another thing to note is that it worked for him - he's now engaged to someone he met by doing this. He told her about his "hacking" on their first date. (See the last ~12 or so paragraphs.) So clearly he didn't have to fake any compatibility upon meeting.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.