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.

I made it to the robot full of prerecorded videos before my eyebrow went up and alarms and whistles went off in my brain.

I'd hope that is the furthest anyone would have to go to se the absurdity. I'd be interested if anyone made it past that before noticing it was a joke.

same here, the robot was the trigger. But i guess one point is to prove that everything is theorically possible.

I actually emailed this to all my friends/managers at work, then I got to the vibrator part, then I realized it was written in jest, then I frantically scrambled to recall the email.

And this is precisely why I no longer share articles/links unless I've had time to read every word of them.

The pre-recorded videos on a robot clinched it, but the first thing that struck me as weird was the pointless "in Ubuntu" when talking about the Python script at the start.

That didn't strike me as weird. I just believed his primary dev environment is Ubuntu.

Like people say, "I created a presentation on my Macbook", as opposed to "my iPhone".

Agreed, the tendency of people to refer to their phones/computers by their marketing names is much, much higher among Apple consumers.

Same, virtual assistant.

I could conceivably see someone utilising OpenCV to "try" to measure attractiveness. I could also see someone trying sentiment analysis with NLTK... but farming it out to a low paid worker is just insane.

Farm it out to many people in return for some tiny (but not monetary) reward.

OKCupid used to have a feature for "choose my best image". Users submit two images, then rate other people's images. One of your images is presented alongside one other image from some other user, and someone else has to pick which one they like most. OKC then used their stats to give some analysis to it.

It was sort of great, except there were usually too few people to get any kind of sensible results.

It's easy to see that this could be a useful approach.

I am curious, why do you consider it insane?

insanity is in the eye of beholder. There are probably thousands of executives in the world that use the help of their personal assistants when organizing dating. Leap from that to use virtual assistants is not a biggie. however, there are probably none or just a few crazy geeks that even try to use the help of machine vision for dating.

I have a friend who is, at this very moment, phone screening potential dates for her boss.

When he started about measuring attractiveness. And then the ignoring their message.

I started to suspect it with the second canned message. Virtual assistant made it almost certain and the robot sealed the deal.

yup - until he got to the robot, i thought this was real. sigh.

union of concerned robots may have some concerns wrt. your comment and attitude it projects

    The internet already has no small part in satisfying most of 
    my other needs.

That's the starting point.

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.

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.

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