High Frequency Dating

[timje1]

This is simply brilliant. The escalation from a typical nerd's "I've optimised my social life" post to absurdity had me in stitches.

[thisishugo]

It's perfectly written, and I don't know if that's a testament to Rob's ability as a creative writer, or to how much time he's spent engulfed in a startup culture where this sort of behaviour is far closer to the realm of possibility than one might imagine or (arguably) hope.

[rayiner]

I found it awfully dehumanizing of the "females" in the narrative. Maybe I just don't get the joke.

Pro-tip: It's rarely idiomatic English to call someone "a female," unless you're purposefully trying to compare her to an animal.[1] Female is a species-neutral term (like "breeding"). When talking about humans, it's proper to use the anthropic term "woman."

[1] My observation is that women refer to men as "male" much less often than the reverse, but when they do they often intend the comparison to animals.

[baby]

too bad he talked about the "robot" too soon. He should have kept going the same way and I would have been pointless about it.

[S4M]

I actually thought it was true - and was thinking "oh shit, this guy must be a good programmer" - until the moment he explains how the actual date involves a robot.

[benjaminwootton]

I'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]

>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.

[asgard1024]

While I agree additional liquidity is good in this market, sometimes you want to intervene with some protection of trading partners. Other people argue that these problems are all solved with an "invisible hand".

[theorique]

Flash crashes or "flesh crashes?"

[fantnn]

Hft decreases volatility

[jcarpio]

This 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]

Out of curiosity, what did you think of the Circle

[wyclif]

This 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.

[VexXtreme]

> 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.

[coolsunglasses]

Should I get some salt for you to rub in?

[dodyg]

Indeed. 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.

[girvo]

Good luck, yourself

[Nursie]

I 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?

[girvo]

Whoa. The possibilities... It's pre-arranged marriages but WebScale(tm)(r).

[polarix]

Give this idea 35 years, and check back then. Of course, there will be no need to escalate to meatspace by that time.

[grogenaut]

This 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]

> over 5 years

[chollida1]

EDIT 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

[fudged71]

If I'm not mistaken, this wasn't a parody and Dustin was quite frustrated with the reaction to the post.

[Leszek]

I'm going to call Poe's law on this one, because I'm genuinely not sure if this is a parody post or not.

[rza]

If it was satire, someone better tell Moxie about it: http://thoughtcrime.org/blog/the-worst/

[lotsofcows]

Up 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.

[girvo]

A cynic would say that most marriages consist of zero physical contact... ;)

[loser777]

This 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.

[MasterScrat]

Clearly the right approach here would be crowdsourcing: submit all the pics using the hot-or-not API, keep only those with 7.5+ ratings.

[mailshanx]

you 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....

[awjr]

Beautiful 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 :)

[gadders]

The 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."

[dsr_]

Have 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...

[dwaltrip]

Is it a bad idea for me to ask what startup he created?

[lhnz]

How would a work of sardonic fiction affect this man's reputation?

[Houshalter]

This 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/

[anon4]

I 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.

[tambourine_man]

Not too far from the truth:

Amy Webb: How I hacked online dating

http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating...

[alcari]

It 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!

[pdog]

It took me until the Double Robot to realize this was a joke.

[napolux]

LOL! I just got at the robot part that this was a fiction :P

[arsemouflon]

Let's just agree the robot part is the nerd threshold.

[batiste]

This doesn't use MongoDB therefore this is not web scale.

[digitalzombie]

... 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...

[king_jester]

> pick up artists

You misspelled misogynist.

[joeblau]

It's only a joke until it's real.

[talkingquickly]

I feel like they may have lost any semblance of the "artist" part using that approach..

[drpancake]

I'm reminded of a story told by Tim Ferris about outsourcing his dating for a bet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eim8J0NIpQ