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The most private thing I'm willing to admit here I've always wanted a 70's Ford Pinto, preferably red-orange.

Yea, they were a group of friends from Harvard that majored in math & CS. They actually post some technical details of how they calculate the matches here. They even have a technology section where they say which programming languages they use as well as their own open source webserver. I don't work for OKCupid or anything, I just thought it was cool that it's run by our kind and they're not afraid to include such nerdy information on their FAQ pages.

Yea, they were a group of friends from Harvard that majored in math & CS. They actually post some technical details of how they calculate the matches here. They even have a technology section where they say which programming languages they use as well as their own open source webserver. I don't work for OKCupid or anything, I just thought it was cool that it's run by our kind and they're not afraid to include such nerdy information on their FAQ pages.

If you are interested in using an online dating site, there is basically only one important factor. The site that has the most people in your area. There are some really well-built, expensive, or high SNR sites out there. I'll leave out the commercial sites I've played with, but the freebie sites that I've used, and been pleased with, are PlentyOfFish and OkCupid.com. I've used craigslist as well, but got too much spam to pay attention to the good responses.

Good Luck.

Something online actually worked for me. I've been on OKCupid for the last 5 years, and I've made friends on there both dating or otherwise: in fact I met my male co-worker of two years on there (known him 4-5); my current g/f; and my old g/f, who turned out to live with a bunch of geeks I still live with 2 years later. In the last year a few of the local geeks have held meetups as well: usually to play board games and consume pot-luck items.

Well, first off*, you should have submitted this as AC instead of IndianaKim.
Your anonymity may already be compromised. (this 'IndianaKim' looks good in black! Hubba! Hubba!-)
[safe for work-but no guarantees on 'safe for wife/girlfriend', though...YMMV]

Secondly, as others have said, Tor+public wifi+wikilinks==decent solution if you fear hosting it yourself.

Thirdly, internet hosting is not the only solution here. News outlets/journalists love this stuff if there is any veracity!(well, whatever, YMMV)

And fourth, if the FBI and DoJ would be as interested as you believe, then it is your 'Patriotic American Duty as a Citizen' to give it to them. Really.

*LOL, 'IndianaKim' could also be a male Korean[or not] dude in Indiana! If so, no disrespect was intended[see:'subject']...just pointing out the possible problems of 'leaving tracks online' to be followed to the 'real world you'. I just liked the okcupid.com/pic's I found in the google search for that username, so I used that as an example!

http://www.okcupid.com/profile/IndianaKim yeah... not bad.

http://www.okcupid.com/profile/Daswolfen

Sure cutie :) http://www.okcupid.com/profile/Daswolfen

OKCupid is even better. Has a psychological spin to it (head to the site and you'll see what I mean), and is very clean/put together nicely/etc. Even uses Google's API for IMs, so bonus to them.

I think the better route would be to use a completely unique handle to represent yourself online. For instance, I spent 12 years in the military as both a commanding officer and a chef. Did I mention I was stationed in Mexico? So, when I left the service, I decided to use the handle "CmdrTaco" while browsing my favorite dating and BSDM sites...

WHAT THE HELL!

Someone is posing as me

"October 20, 2007 - Slashdot 10th Anniversary, with CmdrTaco (1)"

Damn him. He has hip glasses and a sexy goatee! How the hell can I compare to that!

I need to track this CmdrTaco bastard down so I can have a better chance on the dating scene.

(captcha=disclaim)

While I agree with most of what you've said throughout this thread, I have to say that at least on OkCupid, where I met my girlfriend, this is not the case, at least of the people I looked at. Now, this could be because of OkC's matching system (whereby the ones I was looking at were already the type that I generally wanted to see anyway), but I haven't really seen any profiles that said, "you must not be fat."

Thankfully, there are a lot of women out there that do consider personality and other aspects to be more important than physical appearance. It's like anything else; there are all types of women, just like there are all types of men out there. I did sometimes wish that people were more honest with what they were looking for in general on those sites.

I submit that if you aren't able to find them or keep getting rejected, that you may be either looking in the wrong place, or you need to consider that it might be something that you are doing that is repelling people.

Amen to that. Met my girlfriend on OkCupid, and we're both very happy. Also, it's free. And contrasting with eHarmony, you have control of who you search for and contact, rather than just being given a bunch of matches by a mysterious, closed system. OkCupid explains their system pretty well in their FAAAQ.

(No, I'm not an employee of them, though I wouldn't mind being one.)

mathematical dating.

http://www.okcupid.com/faaaq.html

I used to work for OkCupid, and they tabulate all of those kinds of stats and more. Only they get used behind the scenes in things like match calculations... the guys over there are all math grads and take a very scientific approach, but it mostly happens behind the scenes for the sake of usability. I remember coding their "Stranger Arranger" as something of a brute-force approach to the stable marriage problem, taking into account people's compatibility, some other minor stats, and yes, their likelihood of both initiating a conversation and responding to an initiation based on their messaging history.

(I'll take this opportunity to plug the fellas... they work hard to make what's just about the most awesome free dating site supported entirely through ad revenues... don't be stupid, use OkCupid!)

Dan.

I used to work for OkCupid, and they tabulate all of those kinds of stats and more. Only they get used behind the scenes in things like match calculations... the guys over there are all math grads and take a very scientific approach, but it mostly happens behind the scenes for the sake of usability. I remember coding their "Stranger Arranger" as something of a brute-force approach to the stable marriage problem, taking into account people's compatibility, some other minor stats, and yes, their likelihood of both initiating a conversation and responding to an initiation based on their messaging history.

(I'll take this opportunity to plug the fellas... they work hard to make what's just about the most awesome free dating site supported entirely through ad revenues... don't be stupid, use OkCupid!)

Dan.

OKCupid! has a much better implementation. Users post questions, users answer them, and a percent match is calculated. Wow!

http://www.okcupid.com/

``Apu: Could it be used for dating?

Frink: Well, technically, yes, but the computer matches would be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest.''

OkCupid does a fairly good job at that. Bonus points for the first slashdotter to find my profile. ;-)

If it opens people's eyes to parties outside the usual two, I'm in favor of it. Play with the OkCupid politics test if you haven't already. It's run by the same mathematicians who designed TheSpark way back when, and features the same scarily-insightful ratings engine.

For what it's worth (and I imagine it's worth a lot to slashdot readers), my experiences with online dating have always been best with okcupid. It is free, novel (fun matching tests), and its participants always seem, to me, to be more appealing than those of eharmony, match.com, and all the other paysites.

Tests indicate that I (Anonymous Coward) am 75% human.
Who would've guessed?

what we need is clearly some sort of Replicant Test

You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortise, The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?

Don't want no damn replicants posting in MY blog!

See social sites aren't all bad!

Facebook
MySpace
OKCupid (free dating site)

Hell think of all the underaged girls & boys you can meet and stalk! Hell it might even get you famous on TV!! Yea, Dateline!! (okay the last part was a joke)

I mean, regression to match candidates against an existing body of data, we have dating web sites which do that these days. Nice way of quickly sorting the candidates but Nature material?

She's single, bisexual and looking: http://okcupid.com/profile?u=janen.

Nonsense! There is nothing wrong linking linking as often as Wikipedia does

Perhaps we should amend the bill to fight the following sorts of fraud:

* Passing rejection hotline numbers as real phone numbers
* Willfully misrepresenting relationship status or sexual persuasion
* Transporting STDs across orifice lines
* Beeing sweet in a bar but an asshole in the morning

Me, I married a fabulous woman I met on OK Cupid, a dating site by nerds full of interesting people.

I'd also like to add a plug for OKCupid. Great site. No scams because it's free. I wish they would advertise a little so more people would use the site.

Have any of you had to take a personality test to get a job? Should I do it, or just keep looking?"

One time at a car dealership, I was given a set of tests. Showed I was the smartest applicant they'd ever had, extremely ambitious, with no social skills at all.
  So here I am posting to slashdot...
My current day job involves scoring tests.
OKcupid.com is a site where you can take lots of tests for fun or design your own, and use the test results as a basis for social networking.

ok so genetics have no effect, and then we have an increased incidence of autism when people with similar ways of thinking have kids...

Genes do influence the way people think and behave, they would be rather useless items if they didn't, now wouldn't they. Introverted and extraverted traits for example are influenced by genes.

okcupid btw, do describe their algorithm:
http://www.okcupid.com/static?p=faaaq

http://www.okcupid.com/profile?tuid=12079750184124 94804

http://amliebsch.yafro.com/profile

Dude, you need to know that even if you choose different user names (which shows at least some geek cred) for different systems, *don't* link them.

Geeze.

Try here instead. Someone also got fed up with that error

I'm seeing more sites that load slowly. Sites that need ten seconds or more to load over an idle DSL line are becoming common. Often, the delay is caused by page layout designed to delay loading until all the ads load. The renderer reformats frantically as the content trickles in. Sometimes it's because the server is overloaded servicing the within-page requests. This is a big step backwards.

On the hysteria front, there's a site devoted to AJAX page layout. It contains a long section on how to get a page with three columns of the same height. Javascript is used to compute the length of each column and align the columns. Differences between browsers must be handled. It doesn't work right in IE Mac 5, Firefox 1.0, or Opera 5 and 6. (But it's fixed in Opera 9b and Firefox 1.5!) Special cases are required for Opera 8 and Safari. All this to get three columns. Write once, debug everywhere.

That's what HTML tables are for.

The way the system works, a good number of people post to the first relevant post like I'm doing now, and all too often that thread becomes the discussion. The moderations are irrelevant(insightful) and inconsequential(informative). Everyone should have mod points, and people should be able to label the posts whatever they like. People should be able to see what labels other people use, and how many people use a given label. In fact scrap mod points altogether and allow the viewer of the label to decide whether they want the label to indicate +1 or -1 or even have a label from one user be a +1 while another person using the same label gets their mods to count 0 and still another using the label to count -1 to the viewer's customized moderations to the posts.

http://okcupid.com/ uses a similar system and it works rather well.

Now for the attributions. If the person has a slashdot account, it should link to that account, if not, then no link. Alternatively an email address can be used. No page URL's!

Sign up for OKCupid. It's free, and it's a pretty interesting site. Back when I was single, I used it. I met a couple people on it. I met more on match.com though, and they were more attractive. :)

Don't worry. http://www.okcupid.com/ have that covered. Free too.

try http://www.okcupid.com/ as well, old thespark dudes, pretty funny and also free

There's also sites like OkCupid.com, which is IMO the best in terms of fun features, and actual real profiles, unlike all other sites (no exceptions) where you have to pay, none of which I will name them here, since they don't deserve any advertising.

Then there's meeting sites like MeetUp where you can find groups of people with similar interests.

General rule: don't waste your time and money on any paid sites, no matter how good the reviews (most likely written by the site staff) make them look.

Check out OKCupid.com. They have a phenomenal statistical matching algorithm. It's not going to tell you if there's physical attraction, or if there's romantic chemistry, but the people I've met on there that it said would be good matches for me really WERE my type, and not just on the basic stuff most dating websites consider (i.e., body type, religious preferences, etc). Their system collects so MUCH information -questions submitted by users that go far beyond the basics- and it weighs all of it properly- it really does an excellent job.

I met up with a girl from there last week when I was in NYC because it said she was a 90% match, which was the highest of all the users in their system. She was TOTALLY the kind of girl that I'd want to date, and we really got along well. Now if only I lived in NYC... :)

<rant>

</rant>

Okay...I'm curious...for the Slashdot - Politics section, is there any way to have a user preference indicating there political bias?

I am interested in some idea as to how much a persons bias effects there posts. I think peoples beliefs in a specific item can add some karma or weight to a specific article. If they respond one way to a article about a candidate, then they may be saying it just because they are a Democrat or a Republican supporter. If an opposing opinon says something against the opposed, there may be less credibility because they are saying it just because they support the opposition.

Maybe you could have some issue criteria (how do you feel about death penalty, how do you feel about abortion, how do you feel about certain types of drug use, etc) which can help establish your polticial bias settings. I could see this almost like a Ok Cupid or related matching site type of meta data.

I'm a cheap bastard. So I go for the free sites.

I met my current girlfriend on craigslist and dated someone I met on MatchDoctor. My friends (all in roughly your situation, it seems) have had good experience at OkCupid, Emode, and Yahoo.

I can't test any of these links at work cause the filter blocks them. I hope they're correct.

I have to strenuously disagree with you here.

1) I agree, it's best to meet face to face as soon as practical. However, you can know someone for years and still fill in a lot of their personality with wishful thinking. The best advice is to be extremely honest extremely early, and hit the topics that could cause problems as quickly as possible.

2) <sarcasm$gt;Good thing this only happens over the Internet.</sarcasm$gt; Admittedly, in face to face conversation it's impossible for a 300-lb. guy from Detroit to pretend to be a fifteen year old girl, but the point stands. It's the same as any other forum: watch out for falseness and pretension, and don't take anyone at their word.

3) Was this an online dating service? Or a real life one? I've never tried the latter.

4) Evidence? I don't see a huge advantage to having an online service run by someone with a masters in psychology or family counseling, because it's so difficult to apply anything they've learned in their studies to Internet dating. Those who think too highly of their own knowledge will end up running something like eHarmony.com, which (according to another poster) writes off 20% of their potential customers as hopeless.

5) Screw eHarmony. Try OKCupid. The system is pretty straightforward. You create an account, then answer as many of the hundreds of questions in their database as you like. You can also say how your ideal match would answer, and how important it is that they answer properly. Then it looks for people who match you well. It works pretty well so long as you're honest with yourself and actually know what you want.

It's absolutely free. No "Premium Memberships" crap.

To summarize my post: I met my girlfriend there, and I resent the implication that this automatically means our relationship is "screwed up".

OkCupid.com is by far the best dating site I've seen. Most datingsites say they can match someone for you by asking only 5-10 questions. That is bollocks. OkCupid takes a different approach: one can answer as much questions on all kinds of personal things as one wants (there are currently aprox. 1700 questions in the database (I, ehr, answered them all :-])). After that, the system can predict quiet good what person would match with you using the answers you gave, the answer you would the other one to give and how important you think that would be. Works like a charm!
Url: www.okcupid.com

check the stats page (you have to be logged in I think).

best part is the comparison pages (example*). Love the graphs.

* Apologies to the subjects. They matched well, had complete profiles, and happened to come up near the top of searches.

try http://okcupid.com/, it's at least free and (in my experience at least) pretty decent at finding people. it's kinda quirky, kinda funny, and they at least explain their matching rationale. they start with a mbti-esque personality profile which takes a while to fill out. after that, you're free to answer as many questions as you want to. answering questions works like this: you choose 1) your answer, 2) what acceptable answers for your match would be, and 3) how important their answer is to you. this all gets mushed together and they come out with two scores. you choose if you want people ranked by how compatible you are as friends or as lovers/dating material. also, if you don't like the questions that are asked, you can ask some of your own.