High Frequency Dating

by Seldaek • 13 years ago

678 182 13 years ago

wyclif• 13 years ago

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.

coolsunglasses• 13 years ago

Should I get some salt for you to rub in?

dwaltrip3• 13 years ago

I also have some lemon juice, in the fridge.

VexXtreme• 13 years 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.

phpnode2• 13 years ago

good partners are not modular components that can be easily replaced, you'll discover this when you find one.

girvo3• 13 years ago

Good luck, yourself

dodyg• 13 years ago

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.

wavefunction• 13 years ago

I'm more interested in your notion that you've "figured out" your spouse.

gadders• 13 years ago

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."

lhnz• 13 years ago

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

dsr_• 13 years ago

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...

dvanduzer2• 13 years ago

Holy 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.

dwaltrip3• 13 years ago

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

randallsquared2• 13 years ago

It's the one that's people. Except he only read the book.

tempestn• 13 years ago

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=rob+rhinehart+startup

unwind• 13 years ago

I wondered the same, but was shocked to realize he actually said it himself, on his personal web site where the blog was hosted. Amazing, really. :)

mcv5• 13 years ago

Let's just say he's big on "optimize your life" solutions.

He's pretty much parodying himself here, which is what makes this so effective.

benjaminwootton• 13 years ago

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).

JonnieCache3• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Those markets don't recover nearly as quickly as they used to.

theorique• 13 years ago

Flash crashes or "flesh crashes?"

anonymouz• 13 years ago

flesh rashes

fantnn3• 13 years ago

Hft decreases volatility

amalag2• 13 years ago

Says the industry groups profiting from it.

asgard1024• 13 years ago

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".

timje12• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

timje12• 13 years ago

That's the thing, the initial steps sound like exactly what a hacker would look at. And we're so busy furrowing our brows to follow the technology that we don't realise the ridiculousness of what he's doing until there's a robot attending the date. He's basically played a trick on our left brain.

Kurtz79• 13 years ago

I think it's a perfect benchmark to see how much someone is engulfed in said startup culture.

Just measure how far you had to read before thinking "ok, I get it, he is joking".

I had to get to the part about the Odesk virtual assistant.

consultant23522• 13 years ago

It's sad that I thought it was serious/plausible right up until the robot doubles.

akinity• 13 years ago

You're on to something when discussing Rob's ability as a writer. Smart money says communication is his real strength. By speaking in startup/engineer vernacular to starry eyed bored dreamers(you: hn, vice, digg, reddit consumers) he's generated millions in pre-sales and investment without delivering anything.

baby• 13 years ago

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.

Houshalter5• 13 years ago

The 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.

rayiner2• 13 years ago

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.

taybin• 13 years ago

I'm sure that was deliberate. You're not supposed to think this is a good idea after reading it.

mcv5• 13 years ago

It was very dehumanizing, and I think (hope) that was the entire point.

I'm also surprised about how often I see English-speakers talk about "females" rather than "women". I vaguely suspect that might say something profound about an aspect of American culture that's deeply wrong about how it views women.

JoeAltmaier• 13 years ago

Yeah; the implication is there that women are mundane. E.g. No mention of what happens when his robot is met by her robot for instance. How would the neural link be made then? Would they even need to book an airbnb? Couldn't they exchange neural feeds right there in the restaurant?

dagw• 13 years ago

I found it awfully dehumanizing of the "females" in the narrative.

I'm pretty sure that was the whole point.

smoyer• 13 years ago

Actually, I was picturing the female sending her robot to meet the robot he sent ... the restaurant bill should be pretty cheap and hopefully the wine doesn't short it out.

kordless• 13 years ago

It's not a joke. It's satire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire

finnw• 13 years ago

You can call me a "male" if you like. I do not find it offensive at all, even if intentionally used in that way. I am an animal after all. It's only double standards that I would have a problem with.

joyeuse6701• 13 years ago

Right but the use of men by women is almost always negative and dehumanizing. "ugh..men" "men are always..." the only positive connotation I can think of is "now that's a man" but that's slightly different in the singular use and by implication it infers most men don't qualify as a "man"... in any case let's not read too much into the sarcastic tone of the post. if you're looking for something to upset you, I guarantee you'll find it.

philwelch• 13 years ago

I always liked that little linguistic distinction, but it was taken far more seriously decades ago than it is today, when the phrase "a female lawyer" would seem gauche and "a woman lawyer" would be more appropriate. But the adjective sense of the word "woman" is essentially extinct today.

I would infer it more as a sign of pseudoscientific language than as a comparison to animals, and the pseudoscientific tone is appropriate in the context of TFA.

shit_parade• 13 years ago

The suspect was a white male.

The male gaze.

Protip: the male in the story became the robot. And critiques of language usage is the first step to oppression.

jff2• 13 years ago

I've heard that people who have served in the armed forces tend to say "male" and "female", presumably because those are the terms in official use.

S4M• 13 years ago

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.

napolux2• 13 years ago

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

arsemouflon• 13 years ago

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

napolux2• 13 years ago

YEP :P

lotsofcows• 13 years ago

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.

girvo3• 13 years ago

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

awjr2• 13 years ago

I've been told I'm not allowed to upvote you...

cLeEOGPw• 13 years ago

Automated 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• 13 years ago

Are 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?

mcv5• 13 years ago

Only 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• 13 years ago

There is such an API! https://wit.ai

loser777• 13 years ago

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.

mailshanx• 13 years ago

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....

timbre• 13 years ago

It'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/pap...

MasterScrat• 13 years ago

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.

patrickmclaren• 13 years ago

I 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.

Houshalter5• 13 years ago

Reminds me of this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797

Nursie2• 13 years ago

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?

girvo3• 13 years ago

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

polarix• 13 years ago

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

alcari• 13 years ago

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!

batiste• 13 years ago

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

Houshalter5• 13 years ago

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/

Nursie2• 13 years ago

Heh. 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• 13 years ago

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.

cousin_it• 13 years ago

That'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• 13 years ago

I would totally pay for that. A lot of datingsites are just a waste of time...

awjr2• 13 years ago

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 :)

danmaz74• 13 years ago

Then, at some point, the female starts sending her robot too...

topbanana• 13 years ago

A friend of mine set up a micro to repeatedly click on the thumbs up - and I thought that was bad!

tambourine_man• 13 years ago

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...

ninasaysso• 13 years ago

This 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• 13 years ago

That assumes the objective is to 'chat'.

mcv5• 13 years ago

If 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.

alexfarran• 13 years ago

Tim "4 hour workweek" Ferris actually did something similar using virtual assistants. http://blog.timferriss.com/1/post/2009/07/how-to-tim-ferriss...

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

Possibly related:

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

digitalzombie• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

talkingquickly• 13 years ago

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

voetex76• 13 years ago

It'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• 13 years ago

pick up artists

You misspelled misogynist.

onedev• 13 years ago

can you explain?

rfnslyr10• 13 years ago

You misspelled over sensitive.

vdaniuk2• 13 years ago

First they laugh at the high frequency dating, then they fight it, then it wins.

yohann305• 13 years ago

After reading the first 2 paragraphs, I started looking for a "download" button to get the source code! You got me!

chollida1• 13 years ago

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

Leszek• 13 years ago

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.

rfnslyr10• 13 years ago

This 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• 13 years ago

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

rza• 13 years ago

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

drpancake• 13 years ago

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

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

coldtea• 13 years ago

I've tried high frequency dating once, but had to stop when all of my glassware broke.

jcarpio• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, what did you think of the Circle

pdog• 13 years ago

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

ph0rque• 13 years ago

Now, 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• 13 years ago

Who will be regulating it? Government?

grogenaut• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

over 5 years

AsymetricCom• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

Ironically, the tinder app is already completely overrun with chatbots.

jff2• 13 years ago

It may not have been intended, but it came off as a damn fine parody of the idiot "pick up artists".

kimonos• 13 years ago

This is an awesome idea!... But I guess this type of dating has its advantages and disadvantages, just saying... (",)

High Frequency Dating

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