I wonder how it's possible they didn't think about this problem. Considering everyone involved in building this feature, not a single person thought about the possibility of twins or simply people who are very alike? Also, can't people open multiple accounts?

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another-dave 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I imagine that it probably went like this "what about identical twins?" / "Don't worry about that for now, we'll solve for it before we go live, but it's not in this milestone". Then someone pulls rank and decides the product is "good enough, we can't wait for all bugs to be fixed" and gets it deployed.

	▲	mr_toad 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Issues get closed to make the metrics look good, not because they’re actually fixed.

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II2II 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just look at the "falsehoods programmers believe about ..." articles that pop up from time to time. There are plenty of complexities in the real world that people either don't know about, aren't front of mind when they are tackling a larger problem, or simply don't want to deal with in the here and now. Lost knowledge and new problems are part of the reason why programmers are discouraged from rewriting software from scratch and why businesses in general are hesitant to replace legacy systems that still work.

	▲	globular-toast 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's true, but those lists are interesting because they aren't full of things you should be learning in primary school.

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dgellow 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Based on my experience I assume someone mentioned the risk, others said it’s unlikely and only a small percentage, that we should care about the 99% for now. Then the issues isn’t revisited until someone impacted complains enough.

p99 is ok for web stuff, not for systems that impacts people in their life, but I’ve seen too often things being dismissed because they are edge cases (which becomes an actual real issue at the scale of a country of course)

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nkrisc 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Which is pretty absurd because twins aren’t even that uncommon. I would bet most people on the planet know or are related to twins.

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hamper653 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Every person on the planet is related to twins.

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nkrisc 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What a pointless point to make. I’ll spell it out for you: related within a generation or two. There are no twins in my family that I know of for several generations, for example. Thus I would say I’m not related to any twins because I’m not in any meaningful way, even if there might be twins somewhere in my ancestral history.

If you mean that all humans are related, that is true but a completely useless fact in this context.

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hamper653 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not every word in a conversation needs to be useful.

	▲	anon48293 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Apparently not even entire replies, so I’ll join in with one.

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_joel 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because it probably does the dystopian tracking well enough, they don't care if it's not 100% accurate. Edge cases in the new world have no recourse, citizen.

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crooked-v 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's one of those items way down on the list of "Falsehoods programmers believe...", way below everything on the names list (https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...).

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wat10000 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe they didn’t care. Identical twins are a fraction of a percent of the population. Excluding them (really, only half of them) from the customer base wouldn’t hurt noticeably.