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Comment by shadykiller | Hacker News Reader

From the article here - https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/02/04/companies-behind-iow...

Shadow Inc. — the tech company behind the app — launched in 2019 with backing from political nonprofit ACRONYM, according to a statement from the nonprofit.

ACRONYM founder and CEO Tara McGowan, a Newport, R.I., native, said on Twitter that Shadow is “an independent company ACRONYM invested in.

McGowan, who lists herself as a former journalist, married then-Hillary Clinton campaign staffer and current Buttigeig strategist Michael Halle in 2015, according to a Providence Journal marriage announcement and Halle’s Twitter account.

Not at all suspicious !

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It's not really. That's how most software projects happen. "We need XYZ app/site/solution? Hm...I worked with these guys back in 2016 and they did good work. I'll make an introduction...."

But that first step, "we need xyz"... they didn't.

Also "they did good work" can't possibly be true, since Clinton 2016 was a bad campaign, with bad data, that lost.

Your logic is there can be no individual person who did good work on the campaign, if the overall campaign was bad?

We're talking about the person who _led_ the software and data efforts for Clinton in 2016. Clinton's data was bad and misleading and stale, which contributed to the candidate taking victory tours a week before losing four states the campaign thought they would easily win. Yes, I think every high-ranking official of that campaign should be unemployable in the same field.

Gotcha, fair enough

This greatly oversimplifies a complex system that relies heavily on the honesty and behavior of thousands and thousands of humans. The fact that Hillary Clinton "lost" or even that the data was bad has very little to do with the quality of the application that was developed. Even if the wrong thing was built, it can still be built well.

I'm not a developer at all, but even I recognize that the world is full of crappy products that no one needs or that dont actually solve a problem but nonetheless were engineered and built exactly as the original scope dictated. Doing good work doesnt always mean that the work is any good.

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