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Comment by coderjames | Hacker News Reader

> the Woz is one of the few figures that many of us in the tech industry look up to and aspire to be like.

Relatable. My Woz story is from junior high school (middle school) in the late 1990s. I was writing a report on him and read two different biographies that seemed to report conflicting information. So I emailed him asking what actually happened back at a childhood science fair. And he actually responded and recalled the history that knocked my report out of the park <3. That left a lasting impression on me that you don't have to be scared to reach out to "famous" people. They're people too and appreciate hearing from polite/civil fans.

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That's wonderful. Do you happen to remember the true version of the science fair story?

cool sentiment, but becoming increasingly harder to do. So many people an too many to not discount that some crazies will pop in. Few public/semi-public figures can just keep their contact info around freely.

Even if it all is in good faith, they will just get so many mails about business inquiries, recruits, media reqesting interviews, academia, etc. Very hard for little Timmy to ask a quick question via email these days.

emailing famous people or their handlers is kind of a hobby of mine.

over about a hundred emails i've received about 30 replies.

the surprising thing to me is that their level of 'fame' has little to do with whether or not they reply to me. I've received replies from some famously impressive people, and have been ignored by some real 'niche' ones.

I have a suspicion that there is a bit of a bi-modal distribution between 'small enough to reply to fans' and 'so big that there is a reply crew on-staff', most of my emails that were ignored were "Famous but not that famous" types of folks that are in the middle between the two.

So for the really famous ones you think it wasn’t really the person who replied to you?

A hobby? Sounds like stalking to me. :)

stalking, because he had sent one e-mail to many people across some time?

if he'd constantly sending one person dozes on messages, maybe demanding a response or something, that would be stalking

One of my hobbies as a preteen was to mail a hand written letter to famous people to ask for their autograph.

I don’t remember what made me start doing it nor what my letters said but I have dozens of autographed pictures of famous people from Elton John to John Stamos just from asking.

> Very hard for little Timmy to ask a quick question via email these days.

There was a time in HS when I had several to-fro with DMR about Unix philosophy without fully realizing what a giant he was in our CS galaxy. I truly miss him.

I suppose it depends on the reason for their celebrity.

If you email someone who is famous for trivial media I’d doubt you’d get a response, but I know some people who have had conversations with more intellectual celebrities over email.

When you reach out with a genuine interest or point in a specific topic I’d like to think they often enjoy speaking about it.

I never would have expected my brother to get an email back from Noam Chomsky but he did after he wrote a decently cogent and complex question.

At the end of the day it possibly wasn’t actually him, but who knows.

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