Also known as spam.
The Cold Email
91–100 of 133 posts
Re: The Cold Email
#92when I started my vidalia onion project, I cold called the vidalia onion committee, explained my domain purchase and rough plan, and asked if I could stop by their office to say hello & see if there were ways i could serve that industry. They said 'sure', so I did, and then I began selling onions on the internet.
Re: The Cold Email
#93Something I learned awhile ago is that most people that I consider "celebrities" really aren't that famous, and as such are generally pretty happy to respond to emails. In ~2014 I sent an email to Joe Armstrong (one of the creators of Erlang) asking some questions about concurrency because I still didn't fully understand why Erlang was supposed to be better for it. I expected him to just point me to an FAQ or simply…
A long time ago my mother sent a short hate mail to Mark Cuban after seeing him in a TV interview. He actually responded. Then he signed her up for the Mark Cuban newsletter. She could not figure out how to unsubscribe from it. It was honestly pretty hilarious.
Sometimes I wonder how much of Russ Hannemann from HBO's "Silcon Valley" was based on real life anecdotes of people who interacted with Cuban.
RADIO ON THE INTERNET!!!
Re: The Cold Email
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
The craziest part is that this tailored approach is now a red flag, because HR just assumes your covering letter is LLM-generated. “Damn kids, they're all alike” vibes.
Using a LLM is probably seen as a positive thing by recruiters, it shows you are an AI “Engineer”.
Once, an applicant had a pipeline to correlate open positions to his resume and generate cover letters. He was open about it and shared a public repo, thus it was perceived positively.
Finally the job didn't correspond to his profile and objectives. I have not checked if he improved it later, I guess he did.
Re: The Cold Email
#95Fuck it, I feel the hype. Time to cold email some people a couple of tokens of appreciation. I don't expect anything, but they need to know the positive impact they've had.
Thanks once again HN, this is gonna be fun.
Also, feel free to reach out to me ;-)
On average it currently happens once per month (or every 2 months?) so I have the bandwidth atm, haha.
The most fun conversation was when I met a fairly good Haskell or Erlang programmer (I forgot) and we were talking about dating and I think, I made it click for him a bit. It probably only helped slightly but it helped and that felt good.
For people with dating problems, I've had them too. If I can help engineers to find their dream partners, even if it's just a little bit, that'll probably the most productive thing I'd do in my life anyway.
I've been out of the game for the past 4 years already, happily married nowadays, kinda made a mini science out of it, haha.
Also open to other topics, I love to learn about everything.
Now, I'm going to cold email a couple of people!
--
Edit: damn this is getting me emotional. It really presses the question who has had such a positive impact on my life that I feel the need for them to know that.
I'm literally writing mails now with stuff like "in 2006 you had a talk and it really helped me build the foundation of my current life. Thank you."
Epic.
Re: The Cold Email
#96I got a cold email recently and was happy to engage, but I warned them upfront that LLMs change the game, and asked for more info about their background (to authenticate them as a human). They replied with another unnecessarily long email that was light on details and reeked of AI Voice, so I ghosted at that point, unconvinced they were acting in good faith. Demonstrating authenticity and effort are super important i…
You can also try a reply like "please send back a photo of yourself with a shoe balanced on top of your head" and see how they reply. The replies from a human who is going "wtf?" will be very different from an LLM.
Re: The Cold Email
#97I was rejected from a job interview a few years ago - wow 13 years ago now - and was honestly shocked after how well the interview went.
I decided to write a letter (email) to the HR department implying they'd made a huge mistake (the head of HR was in the interview too). She (as much as I knew at the time) overruled my would-be boss and the rest is history.
Best email I ever sent.
Re: The Cold Email
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Erlang is so freaking cool, I’ve been itching for a project to use it (or Elixir, especially because I’m a huge Ruby fan) with ever since I learned about it/OTP when digging into the internals of Chef (server) and RabbitMQ, followed up by the book “Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good!” (an adaption of /book inspired by another wonderful book I read called “Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!”). Non-sequitur but I us…
I'm here to make your itch worse! we're using Elixir to build a fintech SaaS and it's by far the most dependable, boring, lovable part of our stack. We built critical parts with it (syncing data with external services, for one) and were just able to basically forget about it for years because it just... ran? Erlang/Elixir are definitely not the best for everything, but if there's a good match it's unbeatable
I remember reading about Elixir (or was it Erlang) and tried to follow a tutorial and trying to solve some simple exercises. I don't remember the details but I do remember writing the simple functions and they just stacked and fit like Lego bricks. I kept thinking that I will get stuck but I didn't and just kept going. Didn't have to engage in any flow-control or if/else etc. It was nothing like I had seen before. Unfortunately my curiosity pivoted to something else and I didn't complete it but I hope to swing back to Elixir someday soon.
Re: The Cold Email
#99One thing about this is you never can tell how one thing will lead to another, so even if you don’t get a good response to your cold email, if you do it well, it can still unlock doors later on that you never expected to. To illustrate this I’m going to share a personal anecdote that actually isn’t a cold email, but it’s similar enough that hopefully it demonstrates the point. I made the crucial connection in a meeti…
That's such a nice story! I'd like to think that having integrity pays off on the long run.
Sometimes the payoff is simply feeling good about yourself. Anything extra is just bonus.
Re: The Cold Email
#100Hold up.... you created good-tutorials in high school? I credit that site with launching one of my first 'hobbies' back in middle school and teaching me a new skill I was able to use to help friends/family for years to come. Thank you!
Cheers! That era of the internet was such a fun chunk of time. All the little design tricks and bite-sized approaches people shared… it was a lot of fun.