I would hire people to go through a bunch of online dating sites, filter through the results, attempt to initiate conversation and upon a reply I would take over.
This has since been changed to a parsing bot I wrote that utilizes the sites search feature & a bunch of full text searching for keywords.
How did that work out? I read about this wallstreet guy who kept a meticulous spreadsheet of all the women he met on dates, and she got him to send it to her, then she leaked it all over the net... http://deadspin.com/5902760/finance-guy-keeps-incredibly-det...
I like that idea. Can you give us an idea about the results so far? Would love to see the metrics, i.e. from shifting from a personalized approach to a bot based mechanism. But the main problem I see is that you might get flooded by responses from relatively unattractive candidates as the system seems to have no picture-attractiveness evaluation before initiating the contact.
In the "romantic era" (pick one really) people were paid to write very long and detailed and more-or-less made up love letters, either because the buyer could not write or because they did not have such a way with words.
I would gander that romantic letters are probably the most ghost-written of any category of letter, for all periods in all of time.
That seems a little sad to me. I tend to value genuineness. I married a socially awkward introvert who wrote me incredibly bad poetry during our courtship. I found it endearing that such an intelligent well-read person (who scored higher than me on the verbal portion of the SAT) was willing to regularly look like an idiot to try to sincerely express his feelings for me.
I found the videos amusing, but I was expecting the post to go in a different direction.
More specifically, I had thoughts at some point of a Twilio app that you could set up to send some SMS on your behalf now and then. (similar to http://bufferapp.com/ seen through another post, but for SMS) A (sad surely) example would be to set up a few variations of "I love you", "thinking of you" to be sent to your significant other during the day. :)
Another thing that I'd actually really like, though I'm not sure how viable/expensive it would be, would be to automate your birthday card sending by having a service that sends you physical birthday cards for you to fill or sign and send to the recipient. I.e. the service has the list of all the people you want to send a card to with their birthdays and address (and more…), and when a birthday approaches, send you a card appropriate for the age with a pre-filled, pre-stamped envelop.
Though, these are more on the automation side, rather than outsourcing.
I've thought about the buffer for texting and the problem is that you can't send a message from your real number, it would have to be from a separate number, thereby kind of defeating the purpose...
Oh wow, you're right! I've always thought you could use a verified phone number as the "From" number, but it turns out that's true only for phone calls, not SMS.
Parameter Description
From A Twilio phone number enabled for SMS. Only phone numbers or short codes purchased from Twilio work here; you cannot (for example) spoof SMS messages from your own cell phone number. If you haven't purchased a Twilio number yet you can use the Sandbox Number to send SMS to verified numbers.
I've built many PoCs with Twilio but it seems that I've never tried to send an SMS on behalf of somebody. Good to know, very good to know.
The only thing I really, really need help with and can't seem to figure out on my own is an online income adequate to support myself (or a sudden windfall of at least $50k). I wish I knew how to outsource that for $5.* :-/
* There is evidence I could get some money rolling in if I could get sufficient traffic for my websites. But for the umpteenth time, just this morning someone was telling me how wonderful one of my websites is. Geez, don't tell me. Please tell 500 other people via your twitter account or something. I don't need pats on the head. I need traffic. Why oh why does everyone react that way to me? Can I get this curse removed? Augh.
Ah sweet, now I can pay to have someone else to show the people I care for how much I care for them.
There's really nothing that beats a crappy looking home made card with an actual message in it. It takes less time, money, and has more impact if you make your own cards. Instead of driving the store, clustering around everyone trying to find 'the perfect card', and paying money for an overpriced piece of paper, why not take an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, print/draw something on it, and write a nice message in it?
We outsource the things that should matter most, short of spending time with our loved ones. But when we can outsource that, I'm sure many people will.
Maren Kate Donovan (maren here on HN) founded http://Zirtual.com a startup that lets you outsource assignments to personal assistants in 15, 30, or 60 minute blocks.
Not really sure in how far this is a competitive advantage. At least I can not point at a single outsourcing/personal assistant site, that doesn't offer the option to pay by the hour/minute.
This confirms something I learned from many birthday parties as a child: Indian people cannot sing Happy Birthday, for some reason. Anyone who knows the "chicken dance" meme from Arrested Development, where everyone in the family has a different-yet-wrong impression of a chicken -- that's how it is when many Indians get together to try and sing this song.
Also, I think it's a stretch to refer to hiring a stranger to yell a woman's name as "seduction"
There's a school right behind our home in India. It's pretty big and it's someone's birthday everyday.
School starts at seven in the morning. After prayers in three different religions and the singing of the national anthem, at least one class wishes someone a happy birthday by screaming out the birthday song.
Amazing even in this modern era how much of culture revolves around mythology and provincialism. If we skipped the flag waving and the mod365 business, not to mention the time wasted bothering the deities (in triplicate) we might actually emerge from this age of mythology with some real progress.
Every time someone tries this, it leads to some sort of inhumane dystopia (french revolution, communism).
Nationalism is flawed, but imposing one set of values from the international order will stifle cultural and legal competition, and thereby progress.
Religion is flawed, but it causes people to form tight-knit communities, gives them psychological comfort, and moves them to act morally (see: http://jacobexmachina.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-atheists-misu...). Just because something is not true does not mean it is not useful.
You might be comfortable living as a hyper-rationalist. But most people get joy from celebrations, myths, and community. You ever wonder why harvest festivals and winter solstice festivals are so widespread in disparate cultures? It serves a deep psychological human need.
A rationalist sees a tradition and thinks "this is irrational, abolish it!". The conservative sees a tradition and thinks "people must have put this in place for a reason, let's try to figure out what that is".
Hyper rationalist visions of human progress start with rejecting humanity, which is why they usually turn out so bad.
I bet I can guess your age. I'd say you're about 19 or 20, maybe as old as 22. How did I do? That's the age I was when I felt as you do.
Now, I realize that rituals are important and useful. I also realize that, any system that puts the good of others above the good of self, when needed, is what gives us much of our progress as a species. It doesn't matter so much, what that system is, but it does matter that such a system exists.
The larger the definition of "others" is, the better. We see this daily, where countries where tribalism trumps nationalism are always at a disadvantage. When you go beyond nationalism, to religion, you have a force that can move mountains.
The perfect world you envision, of no nationalism (I assume because of one world government) and no religion, seems like a recipe for decline and decay. Also, by human nature, I think, if nationalism and religion were taken off the table, we'd revert to tribalism within that framework.
Either I'm a terrible story teller, or you guys have some seriously large chips on your shoulders. I'll take responsibility for this one guys, I'm sorry. I just wanted to share about the time when a school full of kids, singing horribly out of sync woke me up laughing on a regular basis.
nope, 42, as my handle says. Sorry, not even close. I think you misread my words and interpreted it as idealism.
I was positing that when we move out of the dark ages of believing in mythologies that are outdated rationalizations of the physical world, we might, as a species begin to make real progress. However, while we remain mired in provincial (tribal) thought, and in paying homage to the deities, we will continue to circle around the "my tribe/god is better than yours". I think we need to move past that to make real progress as a species.
some of your views are interesting, regarding tribalism - which you seem to be implying we aren't currently living within that framework. I think that we are still living in a time of tribalism, we dress up with flags and uniforms, but it still boils down to the same thing.
I think we differ hugely on religion though, I don't agree that religion has done anything like moving mountains. In fact, it's hard to think of any positive outcome from the past few thousand years.
Religion is a means by which a few control the many.
Faith on the other hand is a personal choice that for some is useful in dealing with their lives. see Karl Marx for further information...
I love that you used that AD reference in a way that I hadn't interpreted before. Assuming this isn't just confirmation bias (remembering only the poorly sung birthday songs), I wonder what about their linguistics/popular music scales would lead to that. Just how Japanese have trouble's with "L"'s and Americans have trouble with rolling-r's (which I think are objectively harder than L's)
On a related note, I've started toying with the idea of providing better project management tools to handle projects on odesk (and related websites).
If you outsource work on oDesk, and you feel like the process could use some improvements, I'd love to hear your opinion about this (also, email in my profile).
I would hire people to go through a bunch of online dating sites, filter through the results, attempt to initiate conversation and upon a reply I would take over.
This has since been changed to a parsing bot I wrote that utilizes the sites search feature & a bunch of full text searching for keywords.