18 ms·

8^8 – Find another you

306 points by justhw 11y ago

facetube 11y ago
If someone cloned me, I'm pretty sure one of us would murder the other one. Similar != compatible when it comes to humans.
ColinWright 11y ago
To prevent abuse, we need to ensure that everyone taking the 8^8 test is a human and not a bot. Click on all of the icons below that represent animals. And then the site is so slow it only shows me 5 of 7 images, the other two failing to load. Good one. Don't get me wrong, it's a cute idea, although I have to say that I'm not sure I'd get along with someone who thinks exactly as I do. Edit: I've passed the spam test and started the "test" - most of the answers are "none of the above" or "any one of these 4". The usual frustrating experience. I mean: THE KEY TO BEING SUCCESSFUL IN LIFE IS ... How should I know?
- jflatow 11y ago
  Yeah, I can't seem to pass the spam test either.
  - parsnips 11y ago
    Looks like you found eachother.
    - marcosdumay 11y ago
      A friendship forged at a manufacturing plant?
      - duskwuff 11y ago
        A friendship forged out of 7075 aluminum alloy?
- matheist 11y ago
  And if there are always 3 animals (like on mine), then one out of every 35 (= 7 choose 3) bots will get through it anyway. Even if each picture is uniformly and independently an animal or non-animal, one out of every 128 bots will get through. If bots are a problem, maybe use a stronger captcha. It sounds like a neat idea but it's taking too long to load for me to check it out. I'll try again later.
  - david-given 11y ago
    I got two animals and a bird. Whether I click on just the animals or all three of them is part of the test, right?
    - wutbrodo 11y ago
      Birds are very much animals, both colloquially and scientifically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal
    - dsyko 11y ago
      I think you may have mis-read 'animal' as 'mamaml' A bird is an animal.
  - Someone 11y ago
    That either assumes a spammer makes the effort to program his bot to handle this problem or a bot so intelligent that it can interpret what this "proof you're human" task entails. The second, I think, can be ignored for now. The first is fairly unlikely, given the current popularity of the site and what a spammer stands to gain (hm, maybe there is quite somewhat to gain. One could register a few million different fake profiles, and use them to find gullible clients for a "I would like to come and visit you, but need money for the trip" scam. Edit: maybe, this whole site is part of such a scam) Also, if I were to make my bot aware of this "I'm human" test, I also would program in knowledge of the URLs or the pixels of the pictures used, and get a 100% success rate.
Nadya 11y ago
Took quite a while due to the site crashing several times, but I finished it. I think of it as an interesting experiment - even if nothing ends up coming from it. My largest concern is there are about 3 questions where I was torn between two answers. I'm thinking I should create email addresses to "cover every base" by alternating my answers on those 3 questions in every permutation. On the other hand, I would feel a bit bad for using up some of the "freebies" that legitimate people might miss out on and have to pay the small fee. @ColinWright >8^8 should be thought of less as a scientific black box, but as a friend who claims to know someone you'll hit it off with, and wants the two of you to get together. It might be wrong, but it could very well be right.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  > On the other hand, I would feel a bit bad for using up some of the "freebies" that legitimate people might miss out on I wonder what the legality of publishing their questions and answers are. If we can duplicate their questions and answers, people could find each other on twitter with a hashtag: #my8x8is{answer 1}{answer 2}...{answer 2}
  - iyn 11y ago
    I like your idea about the hashtag. I don't think that the definitive answers are the best approach (I'd prefer multiple answers), but it'd interesting if we were able to design a "format" that could be used to describe one's answers.
    - userbinator 11y ago
      but it'd interesting if we were able to design a "format" that could be used to describe one's answers It's 24 bits, so how about six hex digits, like HTML colour codes?
      - pavel_lishin 11y ago
        Haha, I really like that idea - it would be great if you could somehow make similar colors match similar people, but I guess that's not really feasible.
karmakaze 11y ago
On too many of the questions there were multiple choices which seemed equally true thus my results would be largely arbitrary.
- jordigh 11y ago
  I had the same feeling. I went through the 8 questions. If someone else answered as I did, I feel like it would be completely random chance. There wasn't anything personally identifying about the questions at all. This reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect If you're vague enough, everyone is self-centred enough to believe that you're talking about them. I would expect the distribution of the answers to be close to uniform too.
flurpitude 11y ago
9,945 people have taken the test according to the stats at the bottom, and the site's painfully slow. Definitely needs some performance tweaking.
- ricardonunez 11y ago
  It didn't work for me. It can't handle the spike in traffic right now that it reached the front page, that's probably what's going on.
  - thrillgore 11y ago
    Or its just badly developed. I hit question 4 and it failed.
- oh_sigh 11y ago
  Presumably many more people are taking the test. They should have just hosted this on whatever google sheets does with questionnaires. It seems a bit silly to want millions of people to take your quiz, but not have the resources available to serve it.
braaap 11y ago
Ummm, I like other people precisely because they aren't me. My soulmate is not a duplicate of me. They are a compliment. At best, 8^8 might expose someone who ends up making a lot of the same decisions as me. Boring!
- amelius 11y ago
  You could of course also search for someone who is, in all aspects, the complete opposite of you :)
  - _archon_ 11y ago
    Or have your partner take the test, and line up a spare.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- ordinary 11y ago
  Nitpick: you mean complement. I'm going to go ahead and assume your soulmate isn't "your hair looks nice today!" :)
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    What if the parent commenter is narcissistic?
- amag 11y ago
  My thoughts exactly! Most of my most interesting experiences has happened just because some one I was with at the time choose to do something that I would never have done. As an introverted thinker, I need someone to challenge my ideas, not to reinforce them.
gattis 11y ago
"Take the 8^8 test and the likelihood of someone else answering in the exact same pattern as yourself is 1 in 16,777,216" That requires A) the distribution of answers is even across all 8 options, and B) there are zero correlations between any two answers in the quiz. Not to mention that the 8 questions have to pretty accurately split the space of human personalities down into eigen-answers that explain the most variance in personality. And there's just no way to do pick these questions without having the data to analyze in the first place.
- aidenn0 11y ago
  Simple stupid example. A lot more than 1/5 of the people would choose A for the following question: How many people have you killed? a) 0 b) 1-9 c) 10-99 d) 100-999 e) 1000 or more
  - temuze 11y ago
    Or, for the second problem or correlations: Do you have a Y chromosome? a) Yes b) No Do you have two X chromosomes: a) Yes b) No Each are 50-50 questions, but the answer to A is correlated to the answer to B. It's hard to find questions whose answers are independent variables.
    - chrisamiller 11y ago
      Well, not quite 50/50... :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome
    - robocat 11y ago
      Perhaps not correlated in the way you are think, due to confounding factors: A) how many people don't understand the questions B) how many people understand the questions but don't choose to answer "correctly" e.g. transgender. E.g. smart arse Yes, Yes answers. C) correlation with a third variable e.g. sampling bias (HN readers that answer internet surveys).
- Nadya 11y ago
tjradcliffe 11y ago
The basic claim is false on many levels: Very few of us are lucky enough to come across our soulmate within our lifetimes. We tend to choose our friends and spouses from the limited pool of people available in our immediate vicinity: students at our schools, people who live in our neighborhoods, colleagues at our workplaces. Statistically, it is extremely unlikely that we will come across our soulmate. First off, the notion of "soulmate" is bogus romantic nonsense, and the notion that the person most compatible with us is just like us is demonstrably false. My father and I were very similar to each other and fought and argued all the time, because we were both cantankerous, ornery and contrary. My life-partner and I--who are as close to "soulmates" as anyone can be to that basically ridiculous idea--are very similar in some respects, very different in others. The areas where we complement each other are as important as the ones where we reinforce each other. More importantly, the claim that there is some great unexplored mass of humanity where our "soulmate" lurks is bogus. There are only 5000 people in the world. Maybe fewer. If there were more we wouldn't keep running into each other all the time. That is, the number of people in our tribe is surprisingly small, and anyone who is sufficiently similar to us to answer the questions the same way is already almost certainly a member of it, so dipping into the pool of random strangers across the world is unlikely to improve the odds much in most cases, and citing an anecdote or three--which some people will be tempted to do--does not change this fact. The human social graph is full of islands. Finally, to work as advertised the test requires that answers to the questions are uncorrelated, which is almost certainly not the case. So most people will find themselves with hundreds of "soulmates", a very few will have none. Unique matches will be extremely rare. It's a superficially fun idea that turns out to be more of a monument to the failure to understand probability than anything else.
- rl3 11y ago
  I've always been puzzled by the fixation on similarity as a metric for determining compatibility. As you point out, too much similarity can adversely impact compatibility. Conversely, lack of similarity is often times a positive thing.
- edem 11y ago
  > There are only 5000 people in the world? Did I miss something?
hvm 11y ago
Yeah, the site is painfully slow. A site with a multiple choice test should handle thousands of users at a time with a tiny server. How is this thing made?
- mayli 11y ago
  Same here, got ERR_CONNECTION_RESET when trying to click next.
  - rl3 11y ago
    Likewise. Oh well, soulmates are overrated anyways.
- azinman2 11y ago
  Seriously. I mean maybe not 1000 request/sec but at least 50/sec, which will get you pretty far (3k/ppl/min). And they at the bottom say 11k matches so far... too bad I like the premise!
  - awhe 11y ago
    I think the number you saw was the number of tests taken so far; there are 0 matches, currently.
    - azinman2 11y ago
      Err, that's actually what I meant ;)
- noobie 11y ago
  Restarted the router 3 times thinking it was a problem on my end. sigh
- oaktowner 11y ago
  I know this sounds mean-spirited, but it's not. I'd be interested to know how this was developed as an example of what not to do. I wonder what the architecture is (and how it could/should be improved).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nutate 11y ago
wait... soulmates?
XYEaQMZJvS 11y ago
I really like the concept, but I find the implementation disappointing. I know it sounds dumb, but I think of myself as being a rather odd person, and not just like, collecting human skulls odd. It's hard to explain, but I don't feel that most people would get me, or like me once they got to know me. I'd love to find someone who's just like me (sometimes), so when I first clicked, I was a little excited, perhaps naively so. I was disappointed to find that it was just eight multiple-choice questions, many of which I had a hard time answering. There was no nuance.
- robocat 11y ago
  Fortunately there are many people who have a generic like towards oddity. There are also plenty of people that only care about a few things important to them, and don't care much about extra oddities. If you care about the feelings of someone, and you like them, that goes a long way towards them liking you. If you are non-judgemental about the oddities of others, that helps a lot too.
  - abruzzi 11y ago
    I've never tried the questionnaires on dating sites, but it seems you'd get better results with paired questions. Ask person A what they're looking for in attribute X. Ask person B to describe themselves in attribute X. So someone that is emotionally submissive that likes a partner that is emotionally dominant gets matched with someone that is emotionally dominant that prefers a partner that is emotionally submissive. Of course that assumes that the person even consciously knows what they want. I don't know how true that is.
ExpiredLink 11y ago
Slightly off topic, why so many links to 'juvenile' questions on HN?
6502nerdface 11y ago
The site operator may like to know that the site is probably blocked by many corporate proxies; certainly by mine, which categorizes it as URL Category: "Malicious Outbound Data/Botnets" I assume because the domain name looks suspicious to a classifier that's been trained on evil domain names.
- organsnyder 11y ago
  The domain name has also only been registered for 11 days (Creation Date: 2015-05-04T16:22:00.00Z). That could have something to do with it as well.
iyn 11y ago
I love the idea! The "non-optimal" (location & time based) way of finding the people you spend your time with can be quite frustrating, if you think about it. I'm happy to have a great people around me, but why not meet more interesting people? But, as others already pointed out, there are some problems with the current version: * one could prefer multiple answers on some questions. I think that the test should allow for multiple answers and use ML/statistics to find close/closest matches. Using True/False (exact match) may not be the best. The "workaroud" would be to take several tests with all the permutations, but IMO that is a design flaw. * the questions may not be the best. This is an interesting problem - how can we pick questions/attributes that would be a good "model" of human personality/mind/psychology? * such test need to reach a lot of people and it may take a long time. Therefore, it needs to be done _right_ from the beginning, so that all the people take the same test. Again - I love the concept and I'm glad that somebody it taking the time and effort to build this. IMO this has the potential to influence who you spend your time/life with - so it's very important to do this well.
yramagicman 11y ago
Obligatory XKCD, though it's not a comic. https://what-if.xkcd.com/9/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/9/
cmstoken 11y ago
Completely underwhelming. It's just a bunch of random personality questions that give no real insight about the person.
logfromblammo 11y ago
I can't speak on behalf of anyone else, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want someone just like me as a best friend. To assemble an effective RPG party, you need multiple roles, like warrior, wizard, cleric, and rogue. Effective RL social circles work the same way. I'm more of an interjecting quipsniper or a technical sidebarbarian, and I really rely on other people to carry the majority of a conversation. If I were to hang out with a copy of myself, there would be no conversation to add zingers, counterpoints, and trivia to. There's only so much of that crap that other people can take before it gets annoying, so there's not much use in adding two to the same party, unless they're scripted, like Crow and Tom Servo. Also, I have a theory of conversation that keys on conversational coefficients. If a group of people are having a conversation, you add together their coefficients. If the sum is one, you have a very natural, comfortable conversation. If it is less than one, you experience some uncomfortable lulls. If it is greater than one, some people get interrupted, can't finish sharing their thoughts, or are excluded. If the coefficient approaches two, separate simultaneous threads of conversation will form, and participants will spontaneously rearrange or split themselves between conversations so as to make each one have a coefficient sum as close to one as is possible. People don't have a fixed coefficient. They can adjust it within a certain range, that is somewhat dependent on atmosphere and subject matter. For instance, a lecturer who can teach an entire class without losing the attention of the audience can stretch up to 1.0 for conversations, but probably only for that one topic. Someone who has trouble yielding conversational priority may have a lower limit somewhere above 0.5. I suspect that most people can easily handle a range from 0.2 to 0.5. But I max out at probably a 0.4, on very few topics, so my "soul mate" would need to be much more talkative than I am, not at the same level, because it would take at least three of me to have a good conversation.
TheMakeA 11y ago
There seems to be an awful lot of gratuitous negativity going on here. The site was on Reddit yesterday, now it's on the front page of HN. Maybe the author can't throw a lot of resources at it, or they used the project as an excuse to learn a new stack. Who knows. Maybe it was slow for you. Maybe it's not a mathematically sound idea. Maybe the questions aren't ideal. The CAPTCHA isn't ideal. Who cares? There's no need to be mean about it.
- tajen 11y ago
  > There seems to be an awful lot of gratuitous negativity going on here. There isn't much negativity above your comment, no-one above you has criticized the speed or the CAPTCHA. Were you referring to a specific comment without using the reply-to feature? Are you saying the HN community is "mean" about it? Most people on HN are very positive even if the project is slow, because everyone knows what it means to be on the top page of HN.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Did you see this post and thread, asking HN to avoid gratuitous negativity? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916
    - tajen 11y ago
      I'm not sure why my comment seems negative to you, while the comment above doesn't. The person above was generalizing negatively about "the people here", and it seemed gratuitous because no-one had criticized the speed or the CAPTCHA before. In other words, please hellban me now, because I didn't get what was negative in my first comment.
      - DanBC 11y ago
        I'm not sure why you think I am critcising you. Parent post is talking about gratuitous negativity, and I wanted to make sure you understood what they meant by gratuitous negativity which, in the context of HN, has a specific meaning. I don't have any power to hellban you!
insickness 11y ago
This whole thing has been done before and in a way that allowed the questions to be crowdsourced, not just one person coming up with what he/she thinks are meaningful. On OKCupid, There are thousands of questions, many of them penned by users. You choose which questions to answer, then mark how important this question is to you. You also choose the answer you want your partner to have. For example: Are you looking for a partner to have children with? [] yes [] no Answer(s) you’ll accept [] yes [] no Importance [] a little [] somewhat [] very If this question were not at all important to you, you would just not answer it.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  IIRC, OkCupid also has a "not at all important" option; that way, you could answer "yes" to the hypothetical question without caring about someone else's answer (while at the same time providing an answer for somebody else who does care about the answer).
- bcoates 11y ago
  OKCupid is weird; in actual human interaction the questions are more important than the answers so having the computer do that part is backwards.
stuaxo 11y ago
Don't you have to kill your clone ? I liked this until they said "soulmate" it works much better as a weird sort of atsy project.
- omgitstom 11y ago
  That is the premise of that shitty jet li movie, the one
beloch 11y ago
"If you take the 8^8 test right now all our services will be 100% free for you. This offer is good only for those taking the 8^8 test before we reach the milestone of 1,000,000 tests taken. Thereafter, to cover server costs, there will be a modest fee for connecting with matches. " -------- I'm usually pretty pessimistic about the motives of websites like these. For example, this site seems like a great way to get a huge database of marketing info associated with email addresses. Nowhere on the main page or in their faq does it say they won't be selling this data, so they probably will. Use your spam-address if you're going to do this! That being said, someone just like me also wouldn't pay for a service that's likely going to sign them up for spam. Given that payment will be required long before the odds favour a match for me showing up, I think I'll just skip it.
SCHiM 11y ago
I love the idea! Since I personally believe that every person has a 'perfect match'. To those who don't, consider the following: 1) You either do or don't get along with certain people. 2) This is determined by how they act, look and your dispositions to those actions and looks. 3) Given these terms for quantifying the amount of 'like' you feel towards a person, it follows that there are combinations of act/look that you absolutely loathe or love. 4) There exists a combination of act/look that is your perfect match, the combination that you love the most, ie. Your soulmate. What does not follow is that you would like someone who, as the site puts it, is very much like you. I'm quite sure I couldn't stand myself in certain situations. Maybe your soulmate is actually someone who is entirely unlike you in certain aspects? EDIT: Also it's likely, at least in my case, that some of the questions don't have the options you'd pick. I guess it kinda proves that 8 options over 8 questions can't be used to arbitrarily identity a person.
- autarch 11y ago
  Except that I'm fairly sure a lot of studies have shown that the more time you spend with someone, the more you like them (at least if you liked them to start with). I suspect you're much more likely to find a good romantic partner by spending more quality time with people you initially like and find attractive, rather than spending all your effort trying to meet as many different people as possible.
  - SCHiM 11y ago
    Uhh, I agree with you. But what I don't get is where you see the contradiction in what we both said. Where do we disagree?
- mb_72 11y ago
  Well, the 'matching' might be correct at a certain point in time, but people do change. These kind of questions might nail how people feel and think and act now, however what about the future? Relationships start and finish all the time because of the dynamic nature of people's personalities (even if the changes are small ones).
sergiotapia 11y ago
How can a website this simple be so slow? I don't get it.
cbaker 11y ago
Why would you want to meet someone exactly like yourself? You already know you. I'd rather meet people different from me.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Truth be told, opposites don't usually attract. People prefer others who are similar to themselves.
  - Arnor 11y ago
    There's a wide spectrum between "exactly like you" and "opposite"
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
jader201 11y ago
It's fascinating (not being snarky) that this post has received about 50+ votes since I first saw it, and I've not once been able to pull the site up completely (never made it past the bot detection, and most of the time, won't even come up). So I'm trying to understand the phenomenon: - HN folks are bookmarking it for later based on comments (even though it may/may not be worthy of a +1) - HN folks are +1'ing it based on the idea derived from the comments - Those +1'ing it are actually able to make it through (though it doesn't seem so based on most of the comments) The fascinating part to me is that, assuming it's one of the first two, how much +1's an (arguably) broken link can get based on comments. The idea sounds interesting, and the site may very well be +1 worthy.
- frandroid 11y ago
  HN traffic can crash a site. Do you know how many thousands of PVs HN can send to a site? That out of those thousands, 50 would +1, that isn't a stretch. Also, you also have to account for people who clicked +1 in the early life of the link, where it wasn't being crushed, and lead more people to it.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  It worked for me when I first clicked on it, and then I upvoted it. However I am unable to take the test or refresh the site.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  Apparently no one on HN has used a dating web site before either. They have you do the same types of quizzes.
Dansvidania 11y ago
I wander if this could be from the guy asking how to spend 100k on AWS.
LordHumungous 11y ago
It's cool, but it kind of reminds me of Ok Cupid back in the day when they would ask you 200 questions about your personality, and then it would match you with people who gave similar answers. I went on dates with a couple people who were 99% matches, expecting love at first sight, only to find that in real life we didn't click at all. It seems that there are many dimensions to human interaction that are not easily captured by these kinds of quizzes.
JasonFruit 11y ago
Sadly, my counterpart can't take the test either, because neither of us is running javascript.
robocat 11y ago
Sampling bias: I actually don't want to find me (I already know where to find men similar enough to me). Complements: for many traits, I prefer someone who has a strength where I have a weakness. I like opposing opinions as they help me work out my wrongnesses.
- laumars 11y ago
  I was thinking this after the 1st question, which asked what sort of person are you at a party. One of the answers was "being the centre of the attention" and often you find people who are that way inclined will fight others who are similar.
dheera 11y ago
"Click on all of the icons below that represent animals." Anyone else notice that only the animals are simply-connected 2-manifolds? A bot could easily solve this.
- praptak 11y ago
  You win the nitpick of the year award :-) Actually there is a plane and a snowflake which share this property with the animals. But the set of images seems to be small - I got quite a few repetitions with just a few retries, so you could probably just hardcode it. Which doesn't matter much - my feeling is that this test is rather intended to put humans into the right mood than to really deter bots.
dash2 11y ago
There is a widespread idea that the way to find true love is to spend all your effort searching for one optimal partner. Here is an alternative algorithm: spend some effort finding a good enough partner, and at least as much effort building a good relationship with him or her. I like this site: it shows the widespread idea in its purest form. Kind of a reductio ad absurdum.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  How much effort does it take to answer 8 questions?
  - dash2 11y ago
    Not much, I did it myself! But the idea behind the site is "find that single unique person who is right for you" (one in 8^8 people). So it exemplifies the idea I was talking about.
btilly 11y ago
Interesting idea. Bad execution. There is NO way that performance should be so bad given current load. Some of the questions are frustrating. For instance question #4 is "YOU SAVE AN OLD LADY'S LIFE. IN GRATITUDE SHE GIVES YOU $100,000. WHAT DO YOU DO WITH MOST OF IT?" The obvious answer for me is, "Save it." But all possible answers are ways to spend it or give it away. I chose "Move to a nicer neighborhood", but that really is NOT who I am...
- personjerry 11y ago
  I suspect at each POST request the website is attempting to match (and filter) against all existing results.
  - praptak 11y ago
    They state otherwise - "verification takes place a few days from now". And filtering against 20k results should be instant anyway.
  - asadlionpk 11y ago
    Maybe the server is a single nodejs instance (or something single-threaded). So requests are queued and take longer.
- meric 11y ago
  If you save into a bank account, your business is "Lend banks money".
- hobarrera 11y ago
  Yeah, or options like "Pay my debts".
ams6110 11y ago
Nice way to build a profile of a bunch of email addresses which will then be quite valuable for targeted marketing campaigns.
- masterminding 11y ago
  Damn... lol
edem 11y ago
At the time of writing there are 15099 filled tests so producing a match (assuming that all 8 answers must be the same) is highly unlikely (0,08%) if I assume even distribution.
- abustamam 11y ago
  Assuming even distribution, there would need to be 8^8 quizzes taken before there's a match. Will we get that many people to take the quiz? I guess time will tell.
  - thesteamboat 11y ago
    You may want to read about the "Birthday paradox"[1]. Short version the expected time for there to be a match with you is much much larger than the expected time to find a match at all. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_Paradox
radikalus 11y ago
After 5 attempts, I made it. Out of 17.5k test takers, no matches yet? Birthday paradox be damned.
- pixl97 11y ago
  I don't believe their no matches counter. We're on the Internet. The first thing some Redditor or 4chan'er did was take the test from two different places and answer the questions the same way.
tempestn 11y ago
FYI, email address validation doesn't support new gTLDs.
robert-wallis 11y ago
I was thinking about how fast it would be to find matches, so I wrote a little C program that runs in about 1/7th a second: https://gist.github.com/robert-wallis/b7faf94976b153923fde https://gist.github.com/robert-wallis/b7faf94976b153923fde It generates a random number, then tries 8^8 times to generate a new random number and find a match.
lips 11y ago
At a party you... ...listen in fear at the sounds of people who enjoy other people, observe small material details as though you were an anthropologist encountering alien beings, depend on searching for beer to consume time, and occasionally find someone who is amused by your off-kilter humor, but who ultimately is not really anyone you're likely to form a meaningful sober bond with? Oh, apparently I have to actually be remotely ok in social settings. Seriously, what the fuck.
- abruzzi 11y ago
  yeah. About six of the eight questions offered no selection that was in any way a meaningful answer for me. So apparently this matching algorithm it going to find that one in sixteen million person that randomly selected six out of eight answers the same, and completely agrees with me on two points. The point is that, like many polls, the questions are very leading, and take a distinctly biased approach. For example, the question about what to take away that would change who you are. The options are all very idealized, and sound like they come off a dating website (ok..., maybe that what this intends to be.) Almost none of the possible answers seem likely to be an answer in keeping with the "being honest" directive. If the question was more of "what is your idealized opinion of yourself" it might have a real answer.
- naturalethic 11y ago
  That was the only one I had trouble with
Glyptodon 11y ago
Some of the questions need more choices. Didn't feel happy with any of the answers for some of the questions.
abustamam 11y ago
I wish there were a way to see what your results were. I took the test this evening; it'd be neat to retake it in a week and see if my answers match the ones I provided tonight.
frevd 11y ago
Lol, fail - I don't understand the question: #2 "REMOVING WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING WOULD MAKE YOU A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON?" I'm not a native speaker -- what am I supposed to do here?
- vibhavsinha 11y ago
  It might be rephrased into something like: "Which of these best define your personality?"
Dewie3 11y ago
If there was a twin of me out there... we wouldn't get along anyway.
EGreg 11y ago
OkCupid does this
brohee 11y ago
The FAQ has some funny nuggets... "Psychology is a science" - Anyone following Retractation Watch may beg to differ... "8^8 is blocked outside of countries where English is both the official language and the most common vernacular." - Could take it from France, no VPN involved...
colinbartlett 11y ago
I hope they fix their email regex. This kind of thing infuriates me because this really is the email I use daily: http://imgur.com/F9a2XeG http://imgur.com/F9a2XeG
chrisra 11y ago
I don't like the idea of finding a soulmate, like there's only one person who you can be truly happy with. You find someone, and then work your guts out to be lovable and to love, and you become soulmates.
Codhisattva 11y ago
These questions are so heavily stilted towards white male start up culture it's laughable.
- kefka 11y ago
  I noticed that. The question "if you got 100K for saving lil old woman", my choice wasn't there. Pay my debts.
  - tsmith 11y ago
    Also missing: put it in the bank (i.e. do nothing). The answers to the "greatest satisfaction" question are also telling. They are all job/business related. There's not even a single "spend time with my friends and family" catch-all.
    - Codhisattva 11y ago
      Yeah. Where's the "travel the world and live in a tent" option. My soul mate is definitely out there in a tent with mad cash in the bank watching a sunset from a mountain top. Sigh We'll never find each other unless s/he wanders into an internet cafe tomorrow before this rolls off of front page of HN... Hurry soul mate! HURRY down the mountain!
      - kefka 11y ago
        You cam make up whatever hair-brained scenarios you want, but 1 in 3 people in the US have debts in collections. Or 77 million people. Source: http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/29/pf/debt-collections/ http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/29/pf/debt-collections/ So yes, "Pay off debts" is plenty sane, and yet not on there. And given the existing potential answers, gives credence that this is for rich white boys financed by rich mommy and daddy.
hobarrera 11y ago
I find that the options to the answers are ridiculous limited: Question 1: "AT A PARTY YOU..." Missing answer: "I don't go to parties". The same applies to most of them. It seems like the author got some friends to write down possible answer, but didn't assume that there are people way more different than themselves. I can't answer honestly to most of them, so I can see how it'll fail horrible to find someone else like myself.
vannevar 11y ago
What if my soulmate is a roomful of monkeys on typewriters? It seems a fallacy to attribute coincident answers with any sort of real compatibility.
rpwverheij 11y ago
nice idea. I stopped at the first question though. The answer that would correctly describe my average situation at a party involves a combination of 3 of the mentioned answers and probably 3 others that were not mentioned, so I doubt a test with 8 questions with each 8 answers can match me properly to someone that is very much like me.
Diti 11y ago
"8^8 is not yet available in your country at this time. Hopefully a translated version will be available soon." Wait, what? I don't need a translation, I just want to give that website a go.
timkofu 11y ago
We can read and write English just fine in Kenya. No translation needed.

306 points by justhw 11y ago

If someone cloned me, I'm pretty sure one of us would murder the other one. Similar != compatible when it comes to humans.

ColinWright 11y ago

To prevent abuse, we need to ensure that everyone taking the 8^8 test is a human and not a bot. Click on all of the icons below that represent animals. And then the site is so slow it only shows me 5 of 7 images, the other two failing to load. Good one. Don't get me wrong, it's a cute idea, although I have to say that I'm not sure I'd get along with someone who thinks exactly as I do. Edit: I've passed the spam test and started the "test" - most of the answers are "none of the above" or "any one of these 4". The usual frustrating experience. I mean: THE KEY TO BEING SUCCESSFUL IN LIFE IS ... How should I know?

jflatow 11y ago
Yeah, I can't seem to pass the spam test either.
- parsnips 11y ago
  Looks like you found eachother.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    A friendship forged at a manufacturing plant?
    - duskwuff 11y ago
      A friendship forged out of 7075 aluminum alloy?
matheist 11y ago
And if there are always 3 animals (like on mine), then one out of every 35 (= 7 choose 3) bots will get through it anyway. Even if each picture is uniformly and independently an animal or non-animal, one out of every 128 bots will get through. If bots are a problem, maybe use a stronger captcha. It sounds like a neat idea but it's taking too long to load for me to check it out. I'll try again later.
- david-given 11y ago
  I got two animals and a bird. Whether I click on just the animals or all three of them is part of the test, right?
  - wutbrodo 11y ago
    Birds are very much animals, both colloquially and scientifically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal
  - dsyko 11y ago
    I think you may have mis-read 'animal' as 'mamaml' A bird is an animal.
- Someone 11y ago
  That either assumes a spammer makes the effort to program his bot to handle this problem or a bot so intelligent that it can interpret what this "proof you're human" task entails. The second, I think, can be ignored for now. The first is fairly unlikely, given the current popularity of the site and what a spammer stands to gain (hm, maybe there is quite somewhat to gain. One could register a few million different fake profiles, and use them to find gullible clients for a "I would like to come and visit you, but need money for the trip" scam. Edit: maybe, this whole site is part of such a scam) Also, if I were to make my bot aware of this "I'm human" test, I also would program in knowledge of the URLs or the pixels of the pictures used, and get a 100% success rate.

Nadya 11y ago

Took quite a while due to the site crashing several times, but I finished it. I think of it as an interesting experiment - even if nothing ends up coming from it. My largest concern is there are about 3 questions where I was torn between two answers. I'm thinking I should create email addresses to "cover every base" by alternating my answers on those 3 questions in every permutation. On the other hand, I would feel a bit bad for using up some of the "freebies" that legitimate people might miss out on and have to pay the small fee. @ColinWright >8^8 should be thought of less as a scientific black box, but as a friend who claims to know someone you'll hit it off with, and wants the two of you to get together. It might be wrong, but it could very well be right.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
> On the other hand, I would feel a bit bad for using up some of the "freebies" that legitimate people might miss out on I wonder what the legality of publishing their questions and answers are. If we can duplicate their questions and answers, people could find each other on twitter with a hashtag: #my8x8is{answer 1}{answer 2}...{answer 2}
- iyn 11y ago
  I like your idea about the hashtag. I don't think that the definitive answers are the best approach (I'd prefer multiple answers), but it'd interesting if we were able to design a "format" that could be used to describe one's answers.
  - userbinator 11y ago
    but it'd interesting if we were able to design a "format" that could be used to describe one's answers It's 24 bits, so how about six hex digits, like HTML colour codes?
    - pavel_lishin 11y ago
      Haha, I really like that idea - it would be great if you could somehow make similar colors match similar people, but I guess that's not really feasible.

karmakaze 11y ago

On too many of the questions there were multiple choices which seemed equally true thus my results would be largely arbitrary.

jordigh 11y ago
I had the same feeling. I went through the 8 questions. If someone else answered as I did, I feel like it would be completely random chance. There wasn't anything personally identifying about the questions at all. This reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect If you're vague enough, everyone is self-centred enough to believe that you're talking about them. I would expect the distribution of the answers to be close to uniform too.

flurpitude 11y ago

9,945 people have taken the test according to the stats at the bottom, and the site's painfully slow. Definitely needs some performance tweaking.

ricardonunez 11y ago
It didn't work for me. It can't handle the spike in traffic right now that it reached the front page, that's probably what's going on.
- thrillgore 11y ago
  Or its just badly developed. I hit question 4 and it failed.
oh_sigh 11y ago
Presumably many more people are taking the test. They should have just hosted this on whatever google sheets does with questionnaires. It seems a bit silly to want millions of people to take your quiz, but not have the resources available to serve it.

braaap 11y ago

Ummm, I like other people precisely because they aren't me. My soulmate is not a duplicate of me. They are a compliment. At best, 8^8 might expose someone who ends up making a lot of the same decisions as me. Boring!

amelius 11y ago
You could of course also search for someone who is, in all aspects, the complete opposite of you :)
- _archon_ 11y ago
  Or have your partner take the test, and line up a spare.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
ordinary 11y ago
Nitpick: you mean complement. I'm going to go ahead and assume your soulmate isn't "your hair looks nice today!" :)
- yellowapple 11y ago
  What if the parent commenter is narcissistic?
amag 11y ago
My thoughts exactly! Most of my most interesting experiences has happened just because some one I was with at the time choose to do something that I would never have done. As an introverted thinker, I need someone to challenge my ideas, not to reinforce them.

gattis 11y ago

"Take the 8^8 test and the likelihood of someone else answering in the exact same pattern as yourself is 1 in 16,777,216" That requires A) the distribution of answers is even across all 8 options, and B) there are zero correlations between any two answers in the quiz. Not to mention that the 8 questions have to pretty accurately split the space of human personalities down into eigen-answers that explain the most variance in personality. And there's just no way to do pick these questions without having the data to analyze in the first place.

aidenn0 11y ago
Simple stupid example. A lot more than 1/5 of the people would choose A for the following question: How many people have you killed? a) 0 b) 1-9 c) 10-99 d) 100-999 e) 1000 or more
- temuze 11y ago
  Or, for the second problem or correlations: Do you have a Y chromosome? a) Yes b) No Do you have two X chromosomes: a) Yes b) No Each are 50-50 questions, but the answer to A is correlated to the answer to B. It's hard to find questions whose answers are independent variables.
  - chrisamiller 11y ago
    Well, not quite 50/50... :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome
  - robocat 11y ago
    Perhaps not correlated in the way you are think, due to confounding factors: A) how many people don't understand the questions B) how many people understand the questions but don't choose to answer "correctly" e.g. transgender. E.g. smart arse Yes, Yes answers. C) correlation with a third variable e.g. sampling bias (HN readers that answer internet surveys).
Nadya 11y ago

tjradcliffe 11y ago

The basic claim is false on many levels: Very few of us are lucky enough to come across our soulmate within our lifetimes. We tend to choose our friends and spouses from the limited pool of people available in our immediate vicinity: students at our schools, people who live in our neighborhoods, colleagues at our workplaces. Statistically, it is extremely unlikely that we will come across our soulmate. First off, the notion of "soulmate" is bogus romantic nonsense, and the notion that the person most compatible with us is just like us is demonstrably false. My father and I were very similar to each other and fought and argued all the time, because we were both cantankerous, ornery and contrary. My life-partner and I--who are as close to "soulmates" as anyone can be to that basically ridiculous idea--are very similar in some respects, very different in others. The areas where we complement each other are as important as the ones where we reinforce each other. More importantly, the claim that there is some great unexplored mass of humanity where our "soulmate" lurks is bogus. There are only 5000 people in the world. Maybe fewer. If there were more we wouldn't keep running into each other all the time. That is, the number of people in our tribe is surprisingly small, and anyone who is sufficiently similar to us to answer the questions the same way is already almost certainly a member of it, so dipping into the pool of random strangers across the world is unlikely to improve the odds much in most cases, and citing an anecdote or three--which some people will be tempted to do--does not change this fact. The human social graph is full of islands. Finally, to work as advertised the test requires that answers to the questions are uncorrelated, which is almost certainly not the case. So most people will find themselves with hundreds of "soulmates", a very few will have none. Unique matches will be extremely rare. It's a superficially fun idea that turns out to be more of a monument to the failure to understand probability than anything else.

rl3 11y ago
I've always been puzzled by the fixation on similarity as a metric for determining compatibility. As you point out, too much similarity can adversely impact compatibility. Conversely, lack of similarity is often times a positive thing.
edem 11y ago
> There are only 5000 people in the world? Did I miss something?

hvm 11y ago

Yeah, the site is painfully slow. A site with a multiple choice test should handle thousands of users at a time with a tiny server. How is this thing made?

mayli 11y ago
Same here, got ERR_CONNECTION_RESET when trying to click next.
- rl3 11y ago
  Likewise. Oh well, soulmates are overrated anyways.
azinman2 11y ago
Seriously. I mean maybe not 1000 request/sec but at least 50/sec, which will get you pretty far (3k/ppl/min). And they at the bottom say 11k matches so far... too bad I like the premise!
- awhe 11y ago
  I think the number you saw was the number of tests taken so far; there are 0 matches, currently.
  - azinman2 11y ago
    Err, that's actually what I meant ;)
noobie 11y ago
Restarted the router 3 times thinking it was a problem on my end. sigh
oaktowner 11y ago
I know this sounds mean-spirited, but it's not. I'd be interested to know how this was developed as an example of what not to do. I wonder what the architecture is (and how it could/should be improved).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

nutate 11y ago

wait... soulmates?

XYEaQMZJvS 11y ago

I really like the concept, but I find the implementation disappointing. I know it sounds dumb, but I think of myself as being a rather odd person, and not just like, collecting human skulls odd. It's hard to explain, but I don't feel that most people would get me, or like me once they got to know me. I'd love to find someone who's just like me (sometimes), so when I first clicked, I was a little excited, perhaps naively so. I was disappointed to find that it was just eight multiple-choice questions, many of which I had a hard time answering. There was no nuance.

robocat 11y ago
Fortunately there are many people who have a generic like towards oddity. There are also plenty of people that only care about a few things important to them, and don't care much about extra oddities. If you care about the feelings of someone, and you like them, that goes a long way towards them liking you. If you are non-judgemental about the oddities of others, that helps a lot too.
- abruzzi 11y ago
  I've never tried the questionnaires on dating sites, but it seems you'd get better results with paired questions. Ask person A what they're looking for in attribute X. Ask person B to describe themselves in attribute X. So someone that is emotionally submissive that likes a partner that is emotionally dominant gets matched with someone that is emotionally dominant that prefers a partner that is emotionally submissive. Of course that assumes that the person even consciously knows what they want. I don't know how true that is.

ExpiredLink 11y ago

Slightly off topic, why so many links to 'juvenile' questions on HN?

6502nerdface 11y ago

The site operator may like to know that the site is probably blocked by many corporate proxies; certainly by mine, which categorizes it as URL Category: "Malicious Outbound Data/Botnets" I assume because the domain name looks suspicious to a classifier that's been trained on evil domain names.

organsnyder 11y ago
The domain name has also only been registered for 11 days (Creation Date: 2015-05-04T16:22:00.00Z). That could have something to do with it as well.

iyn 11y ago

I love the idea! The "non-optimal" (location & time based) way of finding the people you spend your time with can be quite frustrating, if you think about it. I'm happy to have a great people around me, but why not meet more interesting people? But, as others already pointed out, there are some problems with the current version: * one could prefer multiple answers on some questions. I think that the test should allow for multiple answers and use ML/statistics to find close/closest matches. Using True/False (exact match) may not be the best. The "workaroud" would be to take several tests with all the permutations, but IMO that is a design flaw. * the questions may not be the best. This is an interesting problem - how can we pick questions/attributes that would be a good "model" of human personality/mind/psychology? * such test need to reach a lot of people and it may take a long time. Therefore, it needs to be done _right_ from the beginning, so that all the people take the same test. Again - I love the concept and I'm glad that somebody it taking the time and effort to build this. IMO this has the potential to influence who you spend your time/life with - so it's very important to do this well.

yramagicman 11y ago

Obligatory XKCD, though it's not a comic. https://what-if.xkcd.com/9/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/9/

cmstoken 11y ago

Completely underwhelming. It's just a bunch of random personality questions that give no real insight about the person.

logfromblammo 11y ago

I can't speak on behalf of anyone else, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want someone just like me as a best friend. To assemble an effective RPG party, you need multiple roles, like warrior, wizard, cleric, and rogue. Effective RL social circles work the same way. I'm more of an interjecting quipsniper or a technical sidebarbarian, and I really rely on other people to carry the majority of a conversation. If I were to hang out with a copy of myself, there would be no conversation to add zingers, counterpoints, and trivia to. There's only so much of that crap that other people can take before it gets annoying, so there's not much use in adding two to the same party, unless they're scripted, like Crow and Tom Servo. Also, I have a theory of conversation that keys on conversational coefficients. If a group of people are having a conversation, you add together their coefficients. If the sum is one, you have a very natural, comfortable conversation. If it is less than one, you experience some uncomfortable lulls. If it is greater than one, some people get interrupted, can't finish sharing their thoughts, or are excluded. If the coefficient approaches two, separate simultaneous threads of conversation will form, and participants will spontaneously rearrange or split themselves between conversations so as to make each one have a coefficient sum as close to one as is possible. People don't have a fixed coefficient. They can adjust it within a certain range, that is somewhat dependent on atmosphere and subject matter. For instance, a lecturer who can teach an entire class without losing the attention of the audience can stretch up to 1.0 for conversations, but probably only for that one topic. Someone who has trouble yielding conversational priority may have a lower limit somewhere above 0.5. I suspect that most people can easily handle a range from 0.2 to 0.5. But I max out at probably a 0.4, on very few topics, so my "soul mate" would need to be much more talkative than I am, not at the same level, because it would take at least three of me to have a good conversation.

TheMakeA 11y ago

There seems to be an awful lot of gratuitous negativity going on here. The site was on Reddit yesterday, now it's on the front page of HN. Maybe the author can't throw a lot of resources at it, or they used the project as an excuse to learn a new stack. Who knows. Maybe it was slow for you. Maybe it's not a mathematically sound idea. Maybe the questions aren't ideal. The CAPTCHA isn't ideal. Who cares? There's no need to be mean about it.

tajen 11y ago
> There seems to be an awful lot of gratuitous negativity going on here. There isn't much negativity above your comment, no-one above you has criticized the speed or the CAPTCHA. Were you referring to a specific comment without using the reply-to feature? Are you saying the HN community is "mean" about it? Most people on HN are very positive even if the project is slow, because everyone knows what it means to be on the top page of HN.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Did you see this post and thread, asking HN to avoid gratuitous negativity? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916
  - tajen 11y ago
    I'm not sure why my comment seems negative to you, while the comment above doesn't. The person above was generalizing negatively about "the people here", and it seemed gratuitous because no-one had criticized the speed or the CAPTCHA before. In other words, please hellban me now, because I didn't get what was negative in my first comment.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      I'm not sure why you think I am critcising you. Parent post is talking about gratuitous negativity, and I wanted to make sure you understood what they meant by gratuitous negativity which, in the context of HN, has a specific meaning. I don't have any power to hellban you!

insickness 11y ago

This whole thing has been done before and in a way that allowed the questions to be crowdsourced, not just one person coming up with what he/she thinks are meaningful. On OKCupid, There are thousands of questions, many of them penned by users. You choose which questions to answer, then mark how important this question is to you. You also choose the answer you want your partner to have. For example: Are you looking for a partner to have children with? [] yes [] no Answer(s) you’ll accept [] yes [] no Importance [] a little [] somewhat [] very If this question were not at all important to you, you would just not answer it.

yellowapple 11y ago
IIRC, OkCupid also has a "not at all important" option; that way, you could answer "yes" to the hypothetical question without caring about someone else's answer (while at the same time providing an answer for somebody else who does care about the answer).
bcoates 11y ago
OKCupid is weird; in actual human interaction the questions are more important than the answers so having the computer do that part is backwards.

stuaxo 11y ago

Don't you have to kill your clone ? I liked this until they said "soulmate" it works much better as a weird sort of atsy project.

omgitstom 11y ago
That is the premise of that shitty jet li movie, the one

beloch 11y ago

"If you take the 8^8 test right now all our services will be 100% free for you. This offer is good only for those taking the 8^8 test before we reach the milestone of 1,000,000 tests taken. Thereafter, to cover server costs, there will be a modest fee for connecting with matches. " -------- I'm usually pretty pessimistic about the motives of websites like these. For example, this site seems like a great way to get a huge database of marketing info associated with email addresses. Nowhere on the main page or in their faq does it say they won't be selling this data, so they probably will. Use your spam-address if you're going to do this! That being said, someone just like me also wouldn't pay for a service that's likely going to sign them up for spam. Given that payment will be required long before the odds favour a match for me showing up, I think I'll just skip it.

SCHiM 11y ago

I love the idea! Since I personally believe that every person has a 'perfect match'. To those who don't, consider the following: 1) You either do or don't get along with certain people. 2) This is determined by how they act, look and your dispositions to those actions and looks. 3) Given these terms for quantifying the amount of 'like' you feel towards a person, it follows that there are combinations of act/look that you absolutely loathe or love. 4) There exists a combination of act/look that is your perfect match, the combination that you love the most, ie. Your soulmate. What does not follow is that you would like someone who, as the site puts it, is very much like you. I'm quite sure I couldn't stand myself in certain situations. Maybe your soulmate is actually someone who is entirely unlike you in certain aspects? EDIT: Also it's likely, at least in my case, that some of the questions don't have the options you'd pick. I guess it kinda proves that 8 options over 8 questions can't be used to arbitrarily identity a person.

autarch 11y ago
Except that I'm fairly sure a lot of studies have shown that the more time you spend with someone, the more you like them (at least if you liked them to start with). I suspect you're much more likely to find a good romantic partner by spending more quality time with people you initially like and find attractive, rather than spending all your effort trying to meet as many different people as possible.
- SCHiM 11y ago
  Uhh, I agree with you. But what I don't get is where you see the contradiction in what we both said. Where do we disagree?
mb_72 11y ago
Well, the 'matching' might be correct at a certain point in time, but people do change. These kind of questions might nail how people feel and think and act now, however what about the future? Relationships start and finish all the time because of the dynamic nature of people's personalities (even if the changes are small ones).

sergiotapia 11y ago

How can a website this simple be so slow? I don't get it.

cbaker 11y ago

Why would you want to meet someone exactly like yourself? You already know you. I'd rather meet people different from me.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Truth be told, opposites don't usually attract. People prefer others who are similar to themselves.
- Arnor 11y ago
  There's a wide spectrum between "exactly like you" and "opposite"
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

jader201 11y ago

It's fascinating (not being snarky) that this post has received about 50+ votes since I first saw it, and I've not once been able to pull the site up completely (never made it past the bot detection, and most of the time, won't even come up). So I'm trying to understand the phenomenon: - HN folks are bookmarking it for later based on comments (even though it may/may not be worthy of a +1) - HN folks are +1'ing it based on the idea derived from the comments - Those +1'ing it are actually able to make it through (though it doesn't seem so based on most of the comments) The fascinating part to me is that, assuming it's one of the first two, how much +1's an (arguably) broken link can get based on comments. The idea sounds interesting, and the site may very well be +1 worthy.

frandroid 11y ago
HN traffic can crash a site. Do you know how many thousands of PVs HN can send to a site? That out of those thousands, 50 would +1, that isn't a stretch. Also, you also have to account for people who clicked +1 in the early life of the link, where it wasn't being crushed, and lead more people to it.
Houshalter 11y ago
It worked for me when I first clicked on it, and then I upvoted it. However I am unable to take the test or refresh the site.
zxcvcxz 11y ago
Apparently no one on HN has used a dating web site before either. They have you do the same types of quizzes.

Dansvidania 11y ago

I wander if this could be from the guy asking how to spend 100k on AWS.

LordHumungous 11y ago

It's cool, but it kind of reminds me of Ok Cupid back in the day when they would ask you 200 questions about your personality, and then it would match you with people who gave similar answers. I went on dates with a couple people who were 99% matches, expecting love at first sight, only to find that in real life we didn't click at all. It seems that there are many dimensions to human interaction that are not easily captured by these kinds of quizzes.

JasonFruit 11y ago

Sadly, my counterpart can't take the test either, because neither of us is running javascript.

robocat 11y ago

Sampling bias: I actually don't want to find me (I already know where to find men similar enough to me). Complements: for many traits, I prefer someone who has a strength where I have a weakness. I like opposing opinions as they help me work out my wrongnesses.

laumars 11y ago
I was thinking this after the 1st question, which asked what sort of person are you at a party. One of the answers was "being the centre of the attention" and often you find people who are that way inclined will fight others who are similar.

dheera 11y ago

"Click on all of the icons below that represent animals." Anyone else notice that only the animals are simply-connected 2-manifolds? A bot could easily solve this.

praptak 11y ago
You win the nitpick of the year award :-) Actually there is a plane and a snowflake which share this property with the animals. But the set of images seems to be small - I got quite a few repetitions with just a few retries, so you could probably just hardcode it. Which doesn't matter much - my feeling is that this test is rather intended to put humans into the right mood than to really deter bots.

dash2 11y ago

There is a widespread idea that the way to find true love is to spend all your effort searching for one optimal partner. Here is an alternative algorithm: spend some effort finding a good enough partner, and at least as much effort building a good relationship with him or her. I like this site: it shows the widespread idea in its purest form. Kind of a reductio ad absurdum.

Houshalter 11y ago
How much effort does it take to answer 8 questions?
- dash2 11y ago
  Not much, I did it myself! But the idea behind the site is "find that single unique person who is right for you" (one in 8^8 people). So it exemplifies the idea I was talking about.

btilly 11y ago

Interesting idea. Bad execution. There is NO way that performance should be so bad given current load. Some of the questions are frustrating. For instance question #4 is "YOU SAVE AN OLD LADY'S LIFE. IN GRATITUDE SHE GIVES YOU $100,000. WHAT DO YOU DO WITH MOST OF IT?" The obvious answer for me is, "Save it." But all possible answers are ways to spend it or give it away. I chose "Move to a nicer neighborhood", but that really is NOT who I am...

personjerry 11y ago
I suspect at each POST request the website is attempting to match (and filter) against all existing results.
- praptak 11y ago
  They state otherwise - "verification takes place a few days from now". And filtering against 20k results should be instant anyway.
- asadlionpk 11y ago
  Maybe the server is a single nodejs instance (or something single-threaded). So requests are queued and take longer.
meric 11y ago
If you save into a bank account, your business is "Lend banks money".
hobarrera 11y ago
Yeah, or options like "Pay my debts".

ams6110 11y ago

Nice way to build a profile of a bunch of email addresses which will then be quite valuable for targeted marketing campaigns.

masterminding 11y ago
Damn... lol

edem 11y ago

At the time of writing there are 15099 filled tests so producing a match (assuming that all 8 answers must be the same) is highly unlikely (0,08%) if I assume even distribution.

abustamam 11y ago
Assuming even distribution, there would need to be 8^8 quizzes taken before there's a match. Will we get that many people to take the quiz? I guess time will tell.
- thesteamboat 11y ago
  You may want to read about the "Birthday paradox"[1]. Short version the expected time for there to be a match with you is much much larger than the expected time to find a match at all. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_Paradox

radikalus 11y ago

After 5 attempts, I made it. Out of 17.5k test takers, no matches yet? Birthday paradox be damned.

pixl97 11y ago
I don't believe their no matches counter. We're on the Internet. The first thing some Redditor or 4chan'er did was take the test from two different places and answer the questions the same way.

tempestn 11y ago

FYI, email address validation doesn't support new gTLDs.

robert-wallis 11y ago

I was thinking about how fast it would be to find matches, so I wrote a little C program that runs in about 1/7th a second: https://gist.github.com/robert-wallis/b7faf94976b153923fde https://gist.github.com/robert-wallis/b7faf94976b153923fde It generates a random number, then tries 8^8 times to generate a new random number and find a match.

lips 11y ago

At a party you... ...listen in fear at the sounds of people who enjoy other people, observe small material details as though you were an anthropologist encountering alien beings, depend on searching for beer to consume time, and occasionally find someone who is amused by your off-kilter humor, but who ultimately is not really anyone you're likely to form a meaningful sober bond with? Oh, apparently I have to actually be remotely ok in social settings. Seriously, what the fuck.

abruzzi 11y ago
yeah. About six of the eight questions offered no selection that was in any way a meaningful answer for me. So apparently this matching algorithm it going to find that one in sixteen million person that randomly selected six out of eight answers the same, and completely agrees with me on two points. The point is that, like many polls, the questions are very leading, and take a distinctly biased approach. For example, the question about what to take away that would change who you are. The options are all very idealized, and sound like they come off a dating website (ok..., maybe that what this intends to be.) Almost none of the possible answers seem likely to be an answer in keeping with the "being honest" directive. If the question was more of "what is your idealized opinion of yourself" it might have a real answer.
naturalethic 11y ago
That was the only one I had trouble with

Glyptodon 11y ago

Some of the questions need more choices. Didn't feel happy with any of the answers for some of the questions.

abustamam 11y ago

I wish there were a way to see what your results were. I took the test this evening; it'd be neat to retake it in a week and see if my answers match the ones I provided tonight.

frevd 11y ago

Lol, fail - I don't understand the question: #2 "REMOVING WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING WOULD MAKE YOU A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON?" I'm not a native speaker -- what am I supposed to do here?

vibhavsinha 11y ago
It might be rephrased into something like: "Which of these best define your personality?"

Dewie3 11y ago

If there was a twin of me out there... we wouldn't get along anyway.

EGreg 11y ago

OkCupid does this

brohee 11y ago

The FAQ has some funny nuggets... "Psychology is a science" - Anyone following Retractation Watch may beg to differ... "8^8 is blocked outside of countries where English is both the official language and the most common vernacular." - Could take it from France, no VPN involved...

colinbartlett 11y ago

I hope they fix their email regex. This kind of thing infuriates me because this really is the email I use daily: http://imgur.com/F9a2XeG http://imgur.com/F9a2XeG

chrisra 11y ago

I don't like the idea of finding a soulmate, like there's only one person who you can be truly happy with. You find someone, and then work your guts out to be lovable and to love, and you become soulmates.

Codhisattva 11y ago

These questions are so heavily stilted towards white male start up culture it's laughable.

kefka 11y ago
I noticed that. The question "if you got 100K for saving lil old woman", my choice wasn't there. Pay my debts.
- tsmith 11y ago
  Also missing: put it in the bank (i.e. do nothing). The answers to the "greatest satisfaction" question are also telling. They are all job/business related. There's not even a single "spend time with my friends and family" catch-all.
  - Codhisattva 11y ago
    Yeah. Where's the "travel the world and live in a tent" option. My soul mate is definitely out there in a tent with mad cash in the bank watching a sunset from a mountain top. Sigh We'll never find each other unless s/he wanders into an internet cafe tomorrow before this rolls off of front page of HN... Hurry soul mate! HURRY down the mountain!
    - kefka 11y ago
      You cam make up whatever hair-brained scenarios you want, but 1 in 3 people in the US have debts in collections. Or 77 million people. Source: http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/29/pf/debt-collections/ http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/29/pf/debt-collections/ So yes, "Pay off debts" is plenty sane, and yet not on there. And given the existing potential answers, gives credence that this is for rich white boys financed by rich mommy and daddy.

hobarrera 11y ago

I find that the options to the answers are ridiculous limited: Question 1: "AT A PARTY YOU..." Missing answer: "I don't go to parties". The same applies to most of them. It seems like the author got some friends to write down possible answer, but didn't assume that there are people way more different than themselves. I can't answer honestly to most of them, so I can see how it'll fail horrible to find someone else like myself.

vannevar 11y ago

What if my soulmate is a roomful of monkeys on typewriters? It seems a fallacy to attribute coincident answers with any sort of real compatibility.

rpwverheij 11y ago

nice idea. I stopped at the first question though. The answer that would correctly describe my average situation at a party involves a combination of 3 of the mentioned answers and probably 3 others that were not mentioned, so I doubt a test with 8 questions with each 8 answers can match me properly to someone that is very much like me.

Diti 11y ago

"8^8 is not yet available in your country at this time. Hopefully a translated version will be available soon." Wait, what? I don't need a translation, I just want to give that website a go.

timkofu 11y ago

We can read and write English just fine in Kenya. No translation needed.