If someone is a skilled human, they can have a fascinating conversation with most people in 2 minutes. I'd look at the creator of Humans of New York as a shining example of how to connect with someone - I'm sure that many of the convos are much longer, but I highly doubt that the first 2 minutes are just talking about the weather.

Of course, not everyone will be open to talking at any given time. And it is probably especially difficult to have a genuine connection in a speed dating context, where the other party is probably posturing in one way or another. If you met them in any other situation, they'd probably be more open/authentic.

The two minutes is a very short amount of time — much shorter than a typical speed dating slot of 5-10 minutes. People chat about all sorts of things: from work to previous relationships to “where are you from”-style questions.

With regular speed dating I had all sorts of chats, it usually enough for 1-3 threads of conversations.

I kept waiting for the guy to share some lesson that was learned, and it never came. The self-satisfied writing was less interesting than his complete disinterest in two other humans and the entire event.

What a sad existence he leads. It's as if he's stuck in the 1990s, and proud of it.

And the date wasn't even "stolen" - though smooth guy probably did steal that girl after the exceedingly low bar set by this dude.

You're not missing anything - this is just a sad human who is not good at interacting with other people, or at writing.

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The tone on HN used to be that “Hacker” was synonymous with “VC backed startup founder”, there used to be whole discussions centered around the founder persona and its nature, the more traditional definitions of “hacker” got paid lip service.

I’d say that LinkedIn speech was born right here.

I feel like it did, it was always a weird combination of hacky things and entrepreneur things, and people writing to learn how to write.

I find the tone of the posts also changes by time of day. I often wake up in the middle of the night for about an hour or two, if I browse HN then I find the new posts to be completely different (and a little antagonistic)There's a bunch of stuff that briefly climbs the page between the hours of 2am and 4am for me. It's usually gone by morning. I often wonder what time it is in what part of the world influences that tone.

I don't remember so many non-tech or random posts on HN 10 years ago or so. I think now, as long as you're a self-proclaimed hacker, you can post basically anything. It's less consistent than most subreddits I've seen which is a shame - on the bright side Reddit's tech subreddits seem to be much stronger than 10 years ago and serve fairly well.