Brainiac Dating: Solve puzzles and meet your fellow nerds online | Hacker News Reader

Brainiac Dating: Solve puzzles and meet your fellow nerds online

thenextweb.com

34 pointsbond16 comments

I question whether enough women will bother going through puzzles in order to find a match. History might prove me wrong, but I feel this will turn the site into even more of a sausage fest than your average OKCupid. Women don't need to look that hard to find a nerd on a dating site.

On OKCupid, you can narrow your search by languages spoken. Two of the languages they list are C++ and Lisp. It's worked for me.

Interesting idea, but oh dear does the dating site need some serious help from a web designer.

Though clunky and perhaps not entirely well thought-out, it does get at the question of how to meet the literally like-minded. While I doubt that I'd poke around with Mensa-esque puzzles to prove my intellectual worthiness, I do think there needs to be some way to get male and female nerds in the same room with the potential for more than just a keynote speaker.

Though clunky and perhaps not entirely well thought-out, it does get at the question of how to meet the literally like-minded.

I will now reveal my super secret method to meet literally like-minded people:

1. Find a group engaging in something you like, perhaps a fantasy book club, or a frisbee team, or a wicker furniture building class, anything you have a real interested in.

2. Join that group.

3. There's no step 3.

I love your super secret method!! In the circles I travel in, there's quite a bit of shoe-gazing... so I am going to try and find that wicker furniture building class - it sounds delightful.

Sometimes Scott Adams says it better than words alone can:

http://www.dilbert.com/2011-07-14/

... then argue about which of you is smarter.

Yeah, came over here to say, "Looks like an excellent place to meet pompous Mensa clowns, if you're into that sort of thing."

The problem with a lot of dating sites is the spam factor: people with fake profiles, scammers, etc. Why can't dating sites use a SMS-based verification system to filter out the riff-raff?

SMS verification is useless. Spammers have just as easy (if not easier) access to numbers as ordinary users.

That, and most people don't want to share their numbers with some site. For all they know, you are just collecting the numbers and reselling them.

I bet most people don't care. On a dating site for "fellow nerds" though, it might not fly.

Spammers increase conversions and activity on the site. I worked for a dating site and they condoned spammers that weren't out of control. Hell, they tacitly approved of hookers working the site as long as they weren't blatant.

If you're looking for a date, take the effort of going out and meeting someone. Online dating is a total waste of time for most people, unless you're looking for someone who sits at their computer all day.

Just write well. You'll stand out on any dating site.

Photogenics factor in more than you might expect.

The first dating site designed not to get you laid.

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