How's the 20th century working out for you?
It's reasonable to assume that the subset of people who use OKCupid is not representative of society as a whole. Now im not sure exactly what biases this might introduce, but one should always be aware, especially considering that the OKCupid users are a self selected sample (not a random sample) of society.
Absolutely, but that's not what DirtyAndy was getting at - he's assigning his own stereotype of an OKCupid user, which he has little data to back up.
It's perfectly valid to be suspicious of population bias in a website - any website for that matter - but to extrapolate and pretend to know just how that bias is tilted (without data) is doing yourself a disservice.
As for no data, I did write my comment with no data to back it up. I would imagine less than 10% of comments I see on HN are made with solid information to backup someones thoughts. Most people on here are smart people that can make up their own minds and provide information from the world they see around them.
Did you have any data to back your comment up? Here's a start, OKCupid claim the median number of partners for both men and women, gays and straights is 6. I've just gone out and googled for such numbers, and whilst I didn't find anything definitive, I didn't find one median or average as low as 6, in fact looking at 18-35 as another commentator points out as OKCupid being representative of, 9 would appear more likely (my guess would have been 8). So that probably supports my assumption that there is a bias to some degree - OKCupid users appear to be getting less than the average. I have no idea where OKCupid falls in the spectrum of dating sites, I have no idea how many active users there are in the world of dating websites, but I would be staggered to see statistics that extrapolate to the user base of a singles website being indicative of overall society. In 10 years time, maybe, but at this point in time I doubt it. This article is trying to claim it has real facts, all I am saying is take those facts with a grain of salt.
What does one have to do with the other? They will meet in the flesh at some point, you know.
I've known my wife for 10 years since meeting on Yahoo! I still remember vividly the first time we saw each other. If it wasn't love at first sight, it was certainly love that first night.