7 ms·
High Frequency Dating
- wyclif 13y agoThis is hilarious and as a bonus it induces the warm, smug feeling I get when reminded I'm thankfully out of the dating game and happily married to a beautiful, smart woman. Good luck, kids.
- coolsunglasses 13y agoShould I get some salt for you to rub in?
- VexXtreme 13y ago> smug feeling I get when reminded I'm thankfully out of the dating game I on the other hand get a warm, smug feeling from knowing that if my girlfriend decides not to see me anymore (or I get bored, whichever comes first), new prospects are a walk to the nearest club/bar away. Good luck to you too.
- phpnode 13y agogood partners are not modular components that can be easily replaced, you'll discover this when you find one.
- Houshalter 13y agoNot yet. OP's technology may change this.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pm90 13y agoYou'd be surprised. Of course no 2 people are exactly the same, so you'll miss someone terribly. After a while, you realize that the so called scarcity of 'great people to date' is Hollywood inspired pseudo-romantic bullshit. (I speak as a man seeking women) One of the biggest advantages of living in a time of so many people is that the number of great people, in absolute terms, is also greater
- dmd 13y agoE.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gaid72fqzNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gaid72fqzNE
- mangotree 13y agoNor is their one soul mate in the world out there. Most people want the same things, it is not hard or unique to find someone compatable, no matter how much we tell our partner how special they are, and they say to us.
- beachstartup 13y agoah yes, the ol' condescending "you'll find someone someday" line. did you ever consider that some (many, actually) people are not optimizing for long term mating strategy, and are rather playing the game to maximize short-term sexual rewards? or does that simply not exist as a valid goal in your worldview, because you refuse to acknowledge its legitimacy?
- phpnode 13y agoPlease don't put words in my mouth. I just object to the other poster's utterly naive or sociopathic attitude. Unless you're 15 the idea of maintaining a relationship with someone you (smugly) consider replaceable seems pretty repellent to me to be honest, I wonder if she knows?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- girvo 13y agoGood luck, yourself
- dodyg 13y agoIndeed. Being happily married is one hell of a productivity booster. There's no need to waste time to get lucky or handle the frequent dramas in trying to figure out someone new.
- wavefunction 13y agoI'm more interested in your notion that you've "figured out" your spouse.
- HeyLaughingBoy 13y agoSeriously. Married for almost 10 years and figuring her out is at least a daily process.
- gadders 13y agoThe first comment is sort of a buzzkill: "I guess I see what’s supposed to be funny here, Rob, but I don’t think everyone will. As the man behind an awfully high-profile startup, I don’t think this is likely to attract any beneficial attention to you, and may very well attract some negative attention. Even if this is meant in good fun, I’m not sure it’s in your best interests."
- lhnz 13y agoHow would a work of sardonic fiction affect this man's reputation?
- dsr_ 13y agoHave you noticed that people who don't get the joke are unable to consider that other people might? Jokes are funny when they punch up [at people with more power/status]; they're asinine when you punch down. This is an excellent satire, which should have become obvious when the robot shows up...
- dvanduzer 13y agoHoly crap, and as a cousin post just pointed out, it's the Soylent guy. He's neither punching up nor down, but in: the optimal direction to punch.
- chattoraj 13y agoIt's like Rick Santorum satirizing conservatism.
- dvanduzer 13y agoHey, Rob comes off as slightly to moderately to extremely naive, depending on who you ask. But he never struck me as utterly un-self aware. This post, however, does seem almost too good, as if it's the greatest PR coup of all time.
- dwaltrip 13y ago
- benjaminwootton 13y agoI'm torn on this. On the one hand high frequency dating is a good thing because it adds liquidity to the market. On the other, it raises the risk of of increased volatility and flash crashes (when your partner finds out).
- JonnieCache 13y ago>high frequency dating is a good thing because it adds liquidity to the market. Ewwwww. The door to a whole world of truly unsavory double-entendre has been opened.
- martypitt 13y agoThose markets don't recover nearly as quickly as they used to.
- JonnieCache 13y agoThere's a pun somewhere connecting the phrase "the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" with premature ejaculation, but I can't seem to find it. You'll have to finish it off for yourself.
- rfnslyr 13y agoThese puns are an order of magnitude above what my brain can typically handle.
- 31reasons 13y agoClearly you can actually find dates.
- rfnslyr 13y agoI've had so many dates and they all fall through or fade after the third. Found out most women expect guys to drive them everywhere and pay for their dates, about 50% were offended I didn't pay for all their shit. I've had bad dating experiences.
- timje1 13y agoThis is simply brilliant. The escalation from a typical nerd's "I've optimised my social life" post to absurdity had me in stitches.
- baby 13y agotoo bad he talked about the "robot" too soon. He should have kept going the same way and I would have been pointless about it.
- Houshalter 13y agoThe robot isn't too implausible, if you could convince your date to accept a telepresence which is just weird and wacky enough it might work some percent of the time. The hard part would be getting the AI good enough, but it's not impossible.
- dkokelley 13y agoWeird and wacky? Sure. But if I were a lady I wouldn't want to be seen out on a date with a telepresence bot. (In fact, it's not even telepresence - it's surrogacy!) Perhaps if distance were an issue I would accept a Skype date at a restaurant (with a live date on the other end). Bringing my relatively inconspicuous iPad and conversing with another human is within the realm of socially normal behaviour.
- kaitai 13y agoI don't know. As a "female" I started getting that squicky dehumanized feeling... until I realized the possibilities. Put that boy on mute and you've got the makings of a lovely subsidized evening!
- angersock 13y ago"Put that boy on mute and you've got the makings of a lovely subsidized evening!" Aaaaand that's one more tally under the "women can be rather objectifying and crass themselves" column. Keep it classy.
- napolux 13y agoLOL! I just got at the robot part that this was a fiction :P
- arsemouflon 13y agoLet's just agree the robot part is the nerd threshold.
- napolux 13y agoYEP :P
- lotsofcows 13y agoUp to the fourth paragraph I was going to post something patronising about it being a great way to get a fuck buddy but a bad way to form a relationship. However, having finished the post, I now think that a long term relationship leading to marriage and children would be possible. Some tweaking might be required. Ideally, a long and meaningful relationship could develop with 0 physical contact.
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoAutomated bot actually makes sense for a first or maybe even second message. Things would become even more interesting if girls would write their own bots too. Someone should build an API for that.
- kfk 13y agoAre we there yet with AI? Maybe some kind of adaptative strategy would help online dating. Each robot (M/F) should 1. read, 2. evaluate, 3. stop/continue. Question: how many messages iteratactions we need to have a 90% confidence of a good face to face date for both?
- mcv 13y agoOnly the first. You have got to read their response yourself. If you don't, it can't possibly work. Or it shouldn't work. You're basically accepting a relationship where people ignore each other. The people who drop out after that second message are probably the real keepers. The ones that stay apparently didn't say anything worthy of a response anyway.
- ar7hur 13y agoThere is such an API! https://wit.ai https://wit.ai
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- loser777 13y agoThis is a great read. The OpenCV part hit a bit too close to home though: I was stuck for a minute trying to think how he managed to segment faces well enough to compute ratios (not just as a rectangle or a blob) given all of the possible conditions/perspectives of the photos.
- mailshanx 13y agoyou bet! i was automatically thinking about how did he manage to get sufficiently good resolution, how did he cope with lighting/background changes, and so on....
- timbre 13y agoIt's really the wrong approach. Supervised learning is the way to go. For example a paper by Kumar et al.[1] shows how to build an "attractive woman" classifier that is 83% accurate. [1] http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~neeraj/publications/base/papers/nk_pami2011_faceattrs.pdf http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~neeraj/publications/base/pap...
- anaphor 13y agoPresumably if they used 310 million faces instead of only 3.1 million it would be even more accurate, which is pretty impressive.
- VladRussian2 13y agoi'm confused - an .edu paper has been already mentioned while "Weird Science" hasn't been yet.
- MasterScrat 13y agoClearly the right approach here would be crowdsourcing: submit all the pics using the hot-or-not API, keep only those with 7.5+ ratings.
- patrickmclaren 13y agoI would be left feeling quite sorry and embarrassed for the partner in the case that they were actually a warm body. They would essentially be interviewing to play the submissive within a hegemony.
- Houshalter 13y agoReminds me of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797
- Nursie 13y agoI like it! But I think we can take this further, surely she's into automation too? So he-bot and she-bot are the ones that actually get together. But then why bother with the physical world if it's all software? The entire exchange can be virtualised and simulated at high speed, then you only need to actually bother the meatspace human if the whole thing has been electronically predetermined to be acceptable to all parties. That way you can find the perfect match in seconds. Unless, of course, they were a little creative or devious in their parameter settings, but nobody would ever do that, right?
- alcari 13y agoIt seems to me that FABIO could be massively improved upon by offloading the computation to a remote (cloud?) server, allowing the date to continue until screams of pleasure are recorded. Additionally, the robot self destruct seems like overkill. It would be better to simply wipe them and start over. After all it, it wasn't a hardware failure that resulted in a bad date, but a software problem!
- batiste 13y agoThis doesn't use MongoDB therefore this is not web scale.
- Houshalter 13y agoThis isn't too implausible. I remember a story about a guy who was fooled into dating a chatbot for 2 months. http://www.radiolab.org/story/137466-clever-bots/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/137466-clever-bots/
- Nursie 13y agoHeh. You ever hear of Vixenlove? She was a yahoo or aim chatbot (can't remember which) that pretended to be a slightly flirty teenage girl but logged all her interactions to the author's website. There was some great material in there.
- anon4 13y agoI think this can work well as a startup. You sign up and create a profile. Then the system matches you up with as many other people as it can and runs several simulated dates based on your profiles. After 3 successful simulated dates, you are both booked a room and given a transcript of your conversation this far, plus a list of fetishes.
- cousin_it 13y agoThat's a great idea. I see a couple of problems though: - Once the simulation gets sufficiently advanced, it will want to pass the buck to another simulation, because that's what you did. - In a world where many people do that, if you find yourself on a date with someone, that raises the chance that you're a simulation. What you do with that knowledge is up to you :-)
- kirk21 13y agoI would totally pay for that. A lot of datingsites are just a waste of time...
- awjr 13y agoBeautiful article. Well played sir. I went from "this could work" to "huh" to "W T F" loving every single sweet paragraph. So much win. Thank you :)
- danmaz74 13y agoThen, at some point, the female starts sending her robot too...
- topbanana 13y agoA friend of mine set up a micro to repeatedly click on the thumbs up - and I thought that was bad!
- tambourine_man 13y agoNot too far from the truth: Amy Webb: How I hacked online dating http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating.html http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating...
- ninasaysso 13y agoThis made me sad, mostly because the base variable is facial attractiveness. Gotta love living in a culture so saturated in image worship that dating sites have nearly boiled off text bios entirely. Have fun chatting with people you have next to nothing in common with!
- outworlder 13y agoThat assumes the objective is to 'chat'.
- mcv 13y agoIf all you need is a warm body with the correct orifices, facial looks aren't terribly relevant either. If you intend to spend any amount of time together, what you hear is just as relevant as what you see.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- alexfarran 13y agoTim "4 hour workweek" Ferris actually did something similar using virtual assistants. http://blog.timferriss.com/1/post/2009/07/how-to-tim-ferriss-your-love-life.html http://blog.timferriss.com/1/post/2009/07/how-to-tim-ferriss...
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoPossibly related: http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating.html http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating...
- digitalzombie 13y ago... Oh it's a joke. I actually know a few programmers, who are also pick up artists, that do something similar but less complex.. they write scripts that spam msg to girls on dating site and just shot gun approach. I think I've found my next project...
- joeblau 13y agoIt's only a joke until it's real.
- talkingquickly 13y agoI feel like they may have lost any semblance of the "artist" part using that approach..
- voetex76 13y agoIt's shameful. The true master PUA has a 80% success rate from cold approach. Spamming messages requires no deft use of seduction skills.
- king_jester 13y ago> pick up artists You misspelled misogynist.
- onedev 13y agocan you explain?
- beachstartup 13y agodon't bother. anyone who equates competence at picking up women with misogyny is incapable of being helped. their views are too old-fashioned.
- rfnslyr 13y agoYou misspelled over sensitive.
- vdaniuk 13y agoFirst they laugh at the high frequency dating, then they fight it, then it wins.
- yohann305 13y agoAfter reading the first 2 paragraphs, I started looking for a "download" button to get the source code! You got me!
- chollida1 13y agoEDIT I'll leave my post as two people were kind enough to point out that I was just flat out wrong. I had originally thought that the below post was a parody. I'm told it wasn't, though in my defense it definitely reads like a parody... I mean the perfect cutlery... the most meaningless item in anyone's house?? This reminds me of another parody post here a while ago about someone who said they'd bought the perfect cutlery. They went a bit further and beat the joke to death talking about the difference between several cutlery sets. It was bit better because it started out with some good points bout optimizing your life and buying the best and then it jumped into how to buy what is probably the least important thing in anyone life...cutlery I think this hacking your life is starting to jump the shark:) Here is the other parody post: http://dcurt.is/the-best http://dcurt.is/the-best
- Leszek 13y agoI'm going to call Poe's law on this one, because I'm genuinely not sure if this is a parody post or not.
- rfnslyr 13y agoThis is the part that got me: Yanagi designed his flatware to stand the test of time. He died in 2011, but his design lives on.
- fudged71 13y agoIf I'm not mistaken, this wasn't a parody and Dustin was quite frustrated with the reaction to the post.
- rza 13y agoIf it was satire, someone better tell Moxie about it: http://thoughtcrime.org/blog/the-worst/ http://thoughtcrime.org/blog/the-worst/
- drpancake 13y agoI'm reminded of a story told by Tim Ferris about outsourcing his dating for a bet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eim8J0NIpQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eim8J0NIpQ
- coldtea 13y agoI've tried high frequency dating once, but had to stop when all of my glassware broke.
- jcarpio 13y agoThis is fantastic satire. Especially, since I've just read The Circle. Judging by the other comments here, a lot of us were going along believing it was true. Until robot. And, why not? The pieces were believable: OpenCV, NLTK, some scripting and API twiddling. The virtual assistant wasn't much of a stretch either. Especially if you're familiar with modern online dating sites now. Still thinking that online dating is like browsing an organized list of potential dates where an online host helps you with searching is naive. Craigslist personals are still like that, stripped down, no profile, anonymous and no algorithms. OKCupid, like other dating sites, makes money via ad revenue, not by connecting you with a partner, so what's their priority? Who knows if your experience is affected by: - how often you visit the site - if you use an adblocker (they know, and they let you know they know) - if you're on a free account - message response rate - if you use their features (quickmatch, etc.) - how many questions you've answered (at a tech talk recently, Sam Yagan co-founder said answering more than 10 questions was pointless) - your quantcast/cookie/tracker profile - sentiment analysis of your profile/messages Here's a fun anecdote: As a new user of their iPhone app, I was interested in using the Locals feature (to see who was available on short notice for a date). The first day it worked, let me see those in my vicinity. The next day it was completely removed from the app. No warning. Something (I was a new user) must've decided that that feature wasn't for me. This goes beyond dark design patterns which attempt to influence your behavior (i.e. on another dating site, you have to pay to send messages, and attractive people send you collect messages, that you have to pay to read.). With dark design, if you're aware, you know what the site wants you to do. If your online dating success is controlled by black box methods without feedback, they silently judge. So, how soon before hackers decide they're tired of being gamed and start using tools they're familiar with defensively? Could this be the start of a new arms race?
- shanac 13y agoOut of curiosity, what did you think of the Circle
- pdog 13y agoIt took me until the Double Robot to realize this was a joke.
- ph0rque 13y agoNow, the only improvement left is to set up the same system from the perspective of the "female", and have two robots go on a date, etc.
- queryly 13y agoWho will be regulating it? Government?
- grogenaut 13y agoThis article is a joke but I have a mildly sociopathic friend who does the first section of this. Has an app that just replies to everyone on craigslist / dating site with a standard greeting that he has statically determined over 5 years as being the most successful. It does filter for undesirable terms to him. It also does one round of banter using a trained data set of responses. He says he gets around 30 actual profiles to look at and personally contacts the ones he's interested in. Must work, guy goes on 2-3 dates a week.
- jeffbr13 13y ago> over 5 years
- AsymetricCom 13y agoI love the thinly veiled threats from other startup hustlers in the comments. Yeah Rob, you might suffer from some difficulty for deflating our bubble a bit... these people are pathetic excuses for humans, maybe we can replace startup founders with a simple Perl script that uses a simple genetic algorithm to find the best combination of cloud technologies that get investors to part with their money at the highest ratio.
- cookingrobot 13y agoIronically, the tinder app is already completely overrun with chatbots.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jff 13y agoIt may not have been intended, but it came off as a damn fine parody of the idiot "pick up artists".
- kimonos 13y agoThis is an awesome idea!... But I guess this type of dating has its advantages and disadvantages, just saying... (",)