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Comment by exolymph | Hacker News Reader

Nice. Some email recipients will be creeped out or annoyed by this tactic, but their negative response is far outweighed by the positive response from someone like OP. Too bad for the company that he didn't name them in the post — that would have been a real coup. Think of the backlinks!

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I thought he did mention them - PeoplesHost? Or is that a fictitious name?

I think the comment was a sly way of insinuating that the original blog post may or may not be 100% authentic.

I also wondered whether the blog post might be native advertising.

Can you tell me how I can get people to pay me to write articles on my personal blog? So far I've mainly written about my interests in machine learning and science, but as a graduate researcher an extra source of income would be great /s

I should have clarified that I looked around your blog and based on the other in-depth content there, I figured it was a genuine post. It was just that my first impression was that this might be native advertising -- which says more about how the rest of the internet is nowaways as opposed to anything about your writing style or blog content.

Oh I see, that's probably fair enough - I did toy with the idea of leaving a message at the end clarifying that I had received no money for writing it, but ended up leaving it out.

I didn't edit the names out when they were mentioned in the email but I did try to avoid gratuitous references to them in my main content.

Yep, PeoplesHost and JustHost are real companies. They kinda sound made up though :P

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