9 ms·

Outsourcing Birthdays and Flirting

31 points by matznerd 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
sp332 14y ago
Maren Kate Donovan (maren here on HN) founded http://Zirtual.com http://Zirtual.com a startup that lets you outsource assignments to personal assistants in 15, 30, or 60 minute blocks.
- stfu 14y ago
  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.
  - sp332 14y ago
    True, I was just trying to summarize it. This page is probably better: http://zirtual.com/how-it-works/ http://zirtual.com/how-it-works/
antifuchs 14y ago
Wow, this bus yelling thing is pretty creepy behavior.
toumhi 14y ago
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).
- matznerd 14y ago
  oDesk could definitely use some improvement in their tracking software, it can be a pain to use and does not give enough details...
jessedhillon 14y ago
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"
- danso 14y ago
  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)
- vishaldpatel 14y ago
  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. I woke up with a smile everyday =).
  - dr42 14y ago
    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.
    - jacoblyles 14y ago
      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-misunderstand-religion.html 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.
Timothee 14y ago
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/ 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.
- matznerd 14y ago
  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...
  - Timothee 14y ago
    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. From http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/sending-sms http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/sending-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.
ckdarby 14y ago
I outsourced my dating life at one point. 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.
- benjaminwootton 14y ago
  And who says Romance is dead!
  - simonsarris 14y ago
    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.
    - Mz 14y ago
      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.
- stfu 14y ago
  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.
- matznerd 14y ago
mercuryrising 14y ago
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.
scribu 14y ago
So you paid the gold price... http://i.imgur.com/wLu8T.jpg http://i.imgur.com/wLu8T.jpg
Mz 14y ago
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.

31 points by matznerd 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

sp332 14y ago

Maren Kate Donovan (maren here on HN) founded http://Zirtual.com http://Zirtual.com a startup that lets you outsource assignments to personal assistants in 15, 30, or 60 minute blocks.

stfu 14y ago
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.
- sp332 14y ago
  True, I was just trying to summarize it. This page is probably better: http://zirtual.com/how-it-works/ http://zirtual.com/how-it-works/

antifuchs 14y ago

Wow, this bus yelling thing is pretty creepy behavior.

toumhi 14y ago

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).

matznerd 14y ago
oDesk could definitely use some improvement in their tracking software, it can be a pain to use and does not give enough details...

jessedhillon 14y ago

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"

danso 14y ago
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)
vishaldpatel 14y ago
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. I woke up with a smile everyday =).
- dr42 14y ago
  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.
  - jacoblyles 14y ago
    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-misunderstand-religion.html 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.

Timothee 14y ago

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/ 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.

matznerd 14y ago
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...
- Timothee 14y ago
  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. From http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/sending-sms http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/sending-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.

ckdarby 14y ago

I outsourced my dating life at one point. 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.

benjaminwootton 14y ago
And who says Romance is dead!
- simonsarris 14y ago
  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.
  - Mz 14y ago
    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.
stfu 14y ago
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.
matznerd 14y ago

mercuryrising 14y ago

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.

scribu 14y ago

So you paid the gold price... http://i.imgur.com/wLu8T.jpg http://i.imgur.com/wLu8T.jpg

Mz 14y ago

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.