I fell head over heals for a girl. I thought about her way too often, missed her way more than a normal person ought to, and was pretty much in a constant state of love-induced sugar shock. I didn't want to seem overzealous or desperate, so I tried to play it cool -- and yet, the impulse to post embarrassing, saccharine love quotes to Facebook was overwhelming (I am but only a dork, after all).

So I did what any self-respecting geek would do in my position: I computed a SHA-2 hash of her name and put it in that weird little box thingy on the left hand side of my Facebook profile. It provided just the right balance of self expression and social tact. I was happy.

I liked the idea so much that I decided I would wrap it in a small application and dedicate it to the object of my dorkitude. As I knew it would take a few weeks to flesh out and things were (shockingly) starting to work out between this lovely individual and myself, I thought that the final product might make for a cute little way of sharing my feelings. The idea of tiny "cupidcode" links spreading across facebook and the twitters -- each rooted in my nerdy affection for this particular young lady -- seemed like a terribly powerful way to say "I really think you're great". And because I suck at music and writing, it was pretty much my only option.

Fast forward a few weeks, and cupidco.de is done. It's probably not well suited for the sorts of folks that read YC so I hope you don't mind me sharing my link with you. My hope is that this post will kick-start the spread of a few cupidcodes 'cross the nets so that my crush (who I've been seeing now for about two weeks!) may casually stumble upon one while checking her facebook or reading a blog and discover just how special she is to me.

tl;dr -- fell in love with a chick, wanted to do something special for her, suck at everything else, so I built her a webapp.

Everything about this project was meta-interesting. I feel like someone could write a very entertaining NYT piece about this project. If this was not posted on HN, I would think the narrative was bogus. However, being posted on HN, I doubt you are feigning hopeless romanticism.

P.S. I am half-convinced XKCD started for a similar reason. http://xkcd.com/55/

I'm flattered that you think that! As embarrassing as it is, I'm really as dorky as described.

I once bought a girl I was semi-obsessed a six-volume set of a series about WWI published three years after WWI. She was a FP nut, so I thought it was cool. I did so even though I knew she was taking a plane the next day. I even wrote a good essay length inscription, informing her that she was awesome.

Sometimes, it's fun to say f*ck rationality. Good luck to you, sir.

Did it work? Was she touched?

Yet to be determined.

What is this series? Gotta love the Great War :) Best of luck to you too.

I found it in an antique bookstore near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. (where I live.) I forget the name.

You're probably talking about Second Story Books & Antiques at 20th & P St. http://www.secondstorybooks.com/

That's the one. Dupont is pretty fantastic for books and girls.

I know that place. It's a pretty good place to meet women, if I recall.

What's WWI? World War I?

I wouldn't be surprised. I started writing stories for fun when I broke up with a girl, and I'm still sticking with it. It's almost like these crushes supply a kind of necessary activation energy for some large projects.

This is adorable, and I hope things work out for you. I showed my girlfriend (who is a geek, but not a programmer or engineer or anything of the sort) and she commented: "Okay, that's the cutest f*ing thing EVER."

Some suggestions--What about alternate spellings? It would be unfortunate if someone typed in "Kat Smith" and came up as incorrect because the original poster typed "Kathryn Smith". Also, it would be nice if there were some kind of personalization that you could apply to the public page; you know, like "Guess John Smith's crush" instead of "Guess My Crush".

Thanks so much, especially for your ideas. I wanted to avoid any sort of sign up, so I don't actually collect the "crusher"'s name (just the "crushee"). The system will tolerate names within an edit-distance of 2, so many common spelling errors will be ignored (not to mention the added layer of plausible deniability). I also recently added a "really close"/"close"/"sorta close"/"way off" hinting system -- so when you guess, you'll see that the prompt reflects how similar your guess is to the actual crushee.

One thing I'm going to add is a little cookie-based cache of your recent cupidco.de tracking pages, as they start to get difficult to juggle after some time.

Hmmm. But, there is still a secret tracking page connected to the public page, right? Shouldn't it be possible to use the secret tracking page to enter your name, and have the changes be reflected on the public page?

Kudos for completely avoiding sign up, btw. If there's no way to do what I described above without adding sign up, then for God's sake, don't do it. You're a champ for breaking the sign up trend already.

The hinting system is such an awesome idea. I'll have to spread this around to a couple of my buddies so I can try it out!

Thanks! I wanted to keep the site as simple as possible; sign up is a pain in the butt and typically totally unnecessary.

It should be possible to let you recycle your cupidco.de (so as to switch out the crush name, etc). Is that what you mean? I'll look into that tonight.

Alternate spellings would be great, and guessing the first name would also be good. Maybe you could facilitate this:

1. What's your crush's full name?

2. What's your crush's first name?

3. What's your crush's screen name?

I got 3 guesses for her twitter handle, and 1 for her first name, and 2 for first and last name. I happen to know her middle name, and entered that, so it registered all of these as incorrect.

I agree, I entered the full name and people I sent it to are guessing mostly first names and getting it wrong even if they guess the right first name.

Added a number of words in name hint on the guessing page! Hope this works!

Definitely a great idea... I'll try to throw this in ASAP. Perhaps I'll have it update the prompt as you've described instead of increasing the flexibility of the comparison.

Thanks for your excellent idea. I added a number of words hint to the guess page -- let me know if you think this'll do it :D

Nope, not doing it.

The font is way too small. Is there any way to make it case-insensitive? Or perhaps tell someone how close they were, or if they matched any of hte parts of the name?

If she was a geek this would be a pretty good icebreaker. Or a really creepy one. Keep it smooth!

yeah -- that's definitely true. I would have silently swept the project under the rug/archive.org if things hadn't worked out, but we've really started to connect, especially about our respective geekitude-- so I'm pretty confident that she'll think this sweet and not weird.

Nah, I don't think it's creepy at all.

I once received a love-letter in obfuscated perl. I married the sender. Good luck :-)

That is absolutely amazing. Any chance that you might share, or was it (unsurprisingly) very personal?

Well, it is personal, it is also seriously obfuscated - it started off something like

  for(split(//,'*)))*1)11.41))9291:.3+*A11:1:3)/+,))9:'

and of course that was part of the fun - since I had received it in paper form, I had to type it all in to figure out what it said (no I couldn't parse it by sight), which heightened the effect.

Anyway, point is - once a geek always a geek, and the right person for you is somebody who appreciates it, not runs away from it.

Honestly though, she'll probably take it better if you tell her yourself. Otherwise it'll look like you were hiding this from her, and that'll start to bring up uncomfortable questions. :P

haha -- a veeeeeeeery valid point. we're both comfortable and open with one another right now, so I'm very confident that this would fall into the "sweet" category and not the "creepy" category. I'll tread veeeery carefully though :)

Just philosophizing here... Falling head over heels for a girl without knowing if it will be reciprocated is not much unlike building a beautiful webapp without a concrete business model planned yet.

All the best on both.

You, sir/madam, have been quoted. I'll throw that one up on the about page later tonight.

About a year ago, I wrote an iPhone app to propose to my girlfriend. She told me that she didn't want a ring so I had to come up with something unique. It worked -- we got married 3 months ago! :)

I did something similar once...just with a less happy ending. This girl had a dream to be a guest on Oprah, and had an idea for a mobile app that just might get her there. I was in love with her and thought that it would be a very thoughtful Christmas present to make the app for her. She was a designer, so she just had to style it and launch.

I built the app over a few weeks by sleeping an hour less each night, ultimately giving it to her for Christmas. She loved it. Unfortunately, things went way off course between the two of us. I don't think the grand gesture helped. It's a lot of pressure to put on a person.

If I had to do it over again, I probably would, but I sure as hell wouldn't have let her go at the end.

We don't talk anymore and she has let the project go. C'est la vie.

I'm really sorry to hear that :( I hope that this isn't too grand a gesture though I'd be very excited were it to become one! Computer hackery is how I've always "expressed" myself. I didn't really know else how to do something extra special for her than to code up something sweet and so I went with my gut. That stinks that things soured between you two :(

I'm sure you're not like this, but there's a worry to keep in mind as users of such an app:

There was a meme app like this that went around on LiveJournal a few years ago. It seemed all cool and sweet, but they announced a few months later that they'd let you come back and pay them $5 to see what the crushes actually were.

Lots of people paid to see who had crushes on them. I'm sure they made a killing.

In this case, imagine rampant capitalism, and that people who visit the link (who aren't the submitting IP) get to see a "Shhhh: Pay $10 to see who this person has a crush on."

In theory, from a technical perspective, it may not be stored on the back-end, but you have to trust t3mp3st isn't storing the actual names.

There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that I would ever do this whatsoever. That's so sleazy. I'm not looking to exploit people -- just to channel my cheesiness into something productive and possibly make my own crush (cupidco.de/a) smile :)

Guess my crush!

http://cupidco.de/07

That makes the two of us.

I think, however, that he is already married.

Paul Graham! 3rd guess…after pg and paul!

paul graham

Your story is cool and all, but I'm a bit confused about your app. Normally the selling point of crush-management webapps (over the alternative, i.e. 'just effing tell the person already') is that your crush won't be revealed unless they indicate, on their own, that the feeling is mutual. With cupidcodes there's essentially no secrecy, because anyone who visits a cupidcode page can just type in their own name and see if it's them. Or, honestly, someone could just try all of the code-maker's Facebook friends and at 10 guesses a day it would take a few weeks at most to crack the code. Is there some other social problem this solves that I'm not thinking of?

The site's intention seems to be that you don't want it to be an impenetrable secret, and you wouldn't really mind if your crush typed his/her name in and found out.

I love the design. (Lovebirds on the computer - awesome). The process was confusing to me. I didn't know what the goal was. I used descriptions from here to figure it out.

I would emphasize the flirting component more. It's a great idea: send a flirt anonymously, with your own code, and then you can safely see if the feelings are mutual.

I wasn't sure which would be more fun. I decided to just post things as is and then evolve as people started giving me feedback. Speaking of which, thanks for your suggestion!

When I saw this post earlier today I initially didn't know what to make of it. So I decided to ask my girlfriend what she thought of it.

She said "why doesn't he just tell her?", Thus, we clearly don't understand the purpose of the application. She said "it seems pointless".

What a brilliant idea. This has already ben said in another comment but I have to say that I'm impressed with the no login system.

You just need to make sure there is still a way to see what is happening if you clear the cookie cache.

The "secret page" needs to say the name of the person I have a secret crush on so I remember who it was when I created it. I mean, if it's not the current Maxim cover girl, then I may forget.

too true :P I'm working on a bit.ly-esque "your recent cupidco.des" list that'll help you keep track of your most recent (per-computer) codes. I'll also throw the name up on the monitoring page, too, for good measure.

Cool!

Once I had written some javascript to encrypt/decrypt mails between me and my girlfriend...

Brandon, Andre and Sharon might get a lot of spam soon, they should avoid email addresses as plaintext in the source.

Just an advice.

you need to work your headline/story here into your site somehow.

I don't know whether it is by design but it answers: "You've cracked the cupidcode" almost for any input.

edit: Oh, I see: "The system will tolerate names within an edit-distance of 2,"

Great idea. What did you built it with?