Tell HN: YC company Anima Health is spamming email addresses posted to HN

by catharsisatlast on 12/4/2023, 2:04:46 PM with 24 comments
I just received a seemingly personalized message from Anima Health (YC21). The email is signed with the name of the CEO (Shun) with his name in the From field, too. This is not the first time I've seen it. I received an identical message in my inbox through another address previously posted in plaintext on HN months ago under a different username.

The reason I know it's spam: It's literally the same message. The only difference is the person (HN username) it's addressed to. It also starts out:

> Saw your profile on HN and we think your skills look like a good fit for our team - wondered if you'd be interested in our YC company, Anima.

This doesn't make sense, given what I've posted through this account. Motivated by the recent Ask HN thread "Who needs help this holidays", I posted a little about my situation.

It's bad enough to spam people here, let alone what is in reality just an invitation to spend your time applying to their company, masquerading as a personalized message like this. But to do so indiscriminately, such that it will necessarily also ensnare people who are literally struggling to pay for food and facing homelessness is cruel. It's a careless cruelty, but it's cruelty all the same.

Shun: You need to stop this immediately.

  • by Kiro on 12/4/2023, 3:37:12 PM

    Everyone complaining about this here has posted their email in a thread that is literally called "Who wants to be hired?" and now they're upset that a company is reaching out? What am I missing?

  • by 101008 on 12/4/2023, 3:25:32 PM

    Why startups needs to spam for candidates? Is it too hard to find good engineers, especially now that your pool is almost worldwide (if you accept remote)? Consider the amount of layoffs lately, I'd say startups should have it easy.

    The explanation is probably that I don't understand the market at all...

  • by dirtybirdnj on 12/4/2023, 3:26:45 PM

    They've been at this for a while, I got one in Sept 2022

    "Saw your profile on HN and we think your skills look like a good fit for our team"

    If it had been "we saw you are engaged on hacker news" instead of "we saw your profile" I might have actually responded. I don't have a profile on this site. I have a barely reputable profile, and I'm lucky when my engagement is received positively.

    It's like when I get spam images from thirsty IG bots, NOBODY ever talks to me like that. Even if they did, the context / content of what they say immediately tells me whether this is a scripted interaction or genuine. When you are at the depths of despair it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to have a properly calibrated bullshit detector and you will fall for seemingly "easy to see" things like this.

    I agree with the other posters, it's less than optimal. I'm lucky to be on the greener side of the grass today but I can see why others responded more hostile.

  • by beepbooptheory on 12/4/2023, 5:08:30 PM

    They reached out to me pretty normally.. I did a "who want's to be hired" and got back a friendly message from the CEO. Then they had me do a test I thought I did pretty well on, but never heard back.

  • by e2le on 12/4/2023, 3:28:27 PM

    "Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness later"

  • by wantlotsofcurry on 12/4/2023, 3:20:57 PM

    I received the same email after the first time I posted to the monthly “Who wants to be hired?” thread. Gross, really.

  • by meiraleal on 12/4/2023, 3:16:56 PM

    That's really shameless and cruel. Not much can be done but I endorse the public shaming. The right thing would be for YC to call their attention but who knows what they think about it.