
High Frequency Dating - Seldaek
http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005
======
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.

~~~
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.

~~~
mcv
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.

~~~
mynewwork
Or, less cynically, because no one uses 'gals'. There is no female analog to
'guys'. Males under age 18 -> boys. Males 18-35 -> guys. Males over 35 -> men.

For female, it's less clear. Calling a 20-something a 'girl' might be viewed
offensively as diminutive. Calling college students 'women' can also seem
awkward casual contexts (it's perfectly fine in most).

~~~
JonnieCache
"Ladies" is probably the word you're looking for.

~~~
scott_karana
For the plural, you're right, but I've never heard anyone called a "lady"
without some level of pre-existing intimacy

~~~
hmsimha
I've gotten to a point where I'm more frequently associating with people
(including 'females') in the 25-35 age range and have had this debate
internally. I've started using 'lady' for this very purpose, though I realize
it's not as socially common. I might recount an interaction by referring to 'A
guy' or 'A lady' I met (rather than 'girl'). Personally, I'd love for it to be
socially acceptable to refer to people with words that don't presuppose age
(or gender, for that matter) but that time isn't coming anytime soon.

------
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.

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

~~~
JonnieCache
There'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.

~~~
btown
If the utility function is especially curvy, the optimal position for a
rational actor might not be underneath it.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Yeahbut. Fun is frequently irrational.

------
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.

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

~~~
pm90
You'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
E.g.,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gaid72fqzNE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gaid72fqzNE)

------
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).

------
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](http://dcurt.is/the-best)

~~~
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.

~~~
rfnslyr
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._

------
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... ;)

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

------
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.

~~~
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....

~~~
timbre
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...](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~neeraj/publications/base/papers/nk_pami2011_faceattrs.pdf)

~~~
anaphor
Presumably if they used 310 million faces instead of only 3.1 million it would
be even more accurate, which is pretty impressive.

------
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."

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

~~~
tempestn
[http://lmgtfy.com/?q=rob+rhinehart+startup](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=rob+rhinehart+startup)

~~~
dwaltrip
Haha thanks, that made it easy. I am on my phone and didn't notice that the
URL gave away his last name. The blog post only says "by rob".

~~~
precisioncoder
The url clued me in robrhinehart.com all you need is a space and wikipedia ;)

------
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/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/137466-clever-bots/)

~~~
Nursie
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
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
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 :-)

------
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...](http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating.html)

------
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.

~~~
napolux
YEP :P

------
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.

~~~
onedev
can you explain?

~~~
beachstartup
don't bother. anyone who equates competence at picking up women with misogyny
is incapable of being helped. their views are too old-fashioned.

------
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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eim8J0NIpQ)

------
ninasaysso
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
That assumes the objective is to 'chat'.

~~~
mcv
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.

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

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

------
cLeEOGPw
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.

~~~
mcv
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.

------
RyanMcGreal
Possibly related:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating...](http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating.html)

------
Houshalter
Reminds me of this comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797)

------
yohann305
After reading the first 2 paragraphs, I started looking for a "download"
button to get the source code! You got me!

------
alexfarran
Tim "4 hour workweek" Ferris actually did something similar using virtual
assistants. [http://blog.timferriss.com/1/post/2009/07/how-to-tim-
ferriss...](http://blog.timferriss.com/1/post/2009/07/how-to-tim-ferriss-your-
love-life.html)

------
patrickmclaren
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.

------
danmaz74
Then, at some point, the female starts sending her robot too...

------
ph0rque
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.

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

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

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

------
queryly
Who will be regulating it? Government?

------
AsymetricCom
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.

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

