Top all-time · #5227
Keith Casey
Personal blog · caseysoftware.com/blogcareerbusinessprogramming
Keith Casey writes Caseysoftware, a personal blog at caseysoftware.com about career, business and programming. Since 2009, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 90 times, most often “Working for a Dating Website (2015)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Keith Casey's post "Working for a dating website", which argues that a dating site's business model can conflict with its users' success. Comments cite it when discussing dating-site incentives.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Caseysoftware -
Most-linked posts?
- Working for a Dating Website (2015)2 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-09-26
- Even when you are paying for the product, you may still be the product2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-04-29
- Don't Attend a Hackathon2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-06-08
- Thoughts about a carless future2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-10-26
- Developer Evangelism: The Whole Story2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-01-22
What Hacker News says?
I worked on a dating site briefly and saw exactly this. iirc, something like 20% of their customer base fell into this state. It was one of many things that convinced me that space was ugly. I described another pattern here: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
Comment linking /blog/working-for-a-dating-website
on “Netflix stops charging customers who never watch”Submitted Why the US federal employee record breach is worse than others as a story · 161 points
HN discussionNo, it's not just you. Our circle of friends, colleagues, etc have shrunk this past year and there's been little new to refill and recharge them. Most of the chance encounters (serendipity) that make life better are gone right now and it's impacting work, family, dating, and everything else. I wrote on it here this past October: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/the-uncounted-casualty-of-202... My advice: Introduce som…
Comment linking /blog/the-uncounted-casualty-of-2020
on “Ask HN: Anyone else burnt out due to extended lockdown and work-from-home?”Submitted My startup is broken as a story · 111 points
HN discussionThat's one of many "it doesn't apply to me, so it doesn't matter" scenarios. As the OPM "hack" has demonstrated, the government has no interest and little culpability in protecting the vital and dangerous information it has collected. If it shows this much disregard for the important information, how much less protection will they apply to the unimportant things? * I hate calling it a "hack" since it's been determin…
Comment linking /blog/opm-background-check-hack-a-different-angle
on “If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear”Submitted Coffee: Never Surprise Your Customers as a story · 85 points
HN discussionSome in the security community demonstrated this with Robin Sage, circa 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage It introduces the idea of "transitive trust" where person A might not know person B but if the two have a bunch of contacts in common, the odds of A trusting B goes up. When there's a profile with tens or hundreds of shared connections, it looks real by all accounts. I wrote about this is an intel g…
Comment linking /blog/open-source-intelligence-linkedin
on “A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity”Submitted Don't Attend a Hackathon as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI ran into this one back in June: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/dont-attend-a-hackathon Avoid the "idea guy" at all costs.
Comment linking /blog/dont-attend-a-hackathon
on “Our Team Won Startup Weekend and All We Got Was a Shitty New Boss”Submitted You are what you leak (2018) as a story · 25 points
HN discussionYears ago, I briefly consulted for a dating website and fundamentally their business model is broken and their incentives are completely misaligned with the users': https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
Comment linking /blog/working-for-a-dating-website
on “Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says”Submitted Technical Debt Doesn't Disappear as a story · 18 points
HN discussionI've written up a number of these issues. Here's one where you can use Likes to determine quite a bit with minimal effort: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/social-apis-for-social-evil
Comment linking /blog/social-apis-for-social-evil
on “Facebook was warned about app permissions in 2011”Submitted Developer Relations: A Painful Reckoning as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThree things strike me here: audience, proximity, and predicting behavior. - The audience coming out of the waterpark at the end of the day are different than the people entering the overall park at the beginning of the day. If nothing else, the larger group will include people who have no interest in going to the waterpark and therefore find no value in it at all. The smaller audience is more highly qualified. - Th…
Comment linking /blog/the-problem-with-would
on “The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret”Submitted IP Agreements at Hackathons as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThey don't need that data anyway. I theorized about Airbnb inferring demographic information from Facebook likes in 2015 because it was trivially easy: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/social-apis-for-social-evil It was confirmed they were doing it in 2018. If you used social login with them at all, they have all that info and they're supposed to delete it (according to Facebook's AUP) but effectively impossible to ve…
Comment linking /blog/social-apis-for-social-evil
on “Tell HN: Airbnb now opts in your name and photo to data sharing”Submitted Defending Against the 2nd Worst Developer as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe problem is that we already have a nationalized version of this - the OPM database for security clearances - and it too has been hacked. It was known vulnerable in 2009 and nothing was done about it until it was known to be hacked 6 years later. Even worse, while the author criticizes how Equifax got started - private investigators looking for affairs, etc - that is exactly what the OPM database is. They're looki…
Comment linking /blog/why-this-security-breach-is-worse-than-all-the-others-combined
on “Get Rid of Equifax”Submitted Working for a Dating Website (2015) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI think you would find these interesting. - https://web.archive.org/web/20190429100515/https://static.iz... - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/us/match-com-lawsuit-ftc.... - https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
Comment linking /blog/working-for-a-dating-website
on “Greensboro Man Creates Dating App Where He's the Only Guy Allowed”Submitted The “hackers” had root – all US security clearances should be considered suspect as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYes. I've been blogging in some form for ~18 years - https://caseysoftware.com/ - and use it to put out ideas that are fueled by my day job or just generally document things that I've thought through and made sense of. At least 3-4 times/month, when someone asks me something, I have a blog post written in that area and I send it to them. The credibility shift between "here's my email answer" and "here's a blog post"…
Comment linking /blog/developer-evangelism-the-whole-story
on “Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?”Submitted Developer Evangelism: The Whole Story as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe only way to grow the business is to grow the market and move into niches where the customers don't go away, such as Tinder. Otherwise, the customer base of a dating site is doomed to collapse as it becomes successful: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
Comment linking /blog/working-for-a-dating-website
on “Match Group Buys PlentyOfFish for $575M”Submitted Sexism in the PHP Community as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI did a writeup and launched a simple SDK around this back in 2014 when it launched: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/marvel-api-helper-library
Comment linking /blog/marvel-api-helper-library
on “The Marvel API”Submitted Selling to Developers: Developers Have Two Goals in Life as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI wrote about this last month.. with dating sites, losing is losing while winning is losing bigger: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
Comment linking /blog/working-for-a-dating-website
on “Why investors don’t fund dating”Submitted The Painful Truth: Your Version One Sucks as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
