I am somewhat surprised that there is actually somebody out there who is reading these free PR distributors

Hacker News has submissions from press-release aggregation services all the time. (I'm thinking of PhysOrg and ScienceDaily, among quite a few others.) Many of those submissions reach the front page. Knowing how to write a gee-whiz press release about yourself is a skill that appears to go a long way in the tech community.

P.S.

Comments about PhysOrg:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077869

"Yes Physorg definitely has some of the worst articles on the internet."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198249

"Straight from the European Space Agency, cutting out the physorg blogspam:

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1116/ (press release),

http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/ (video),

http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/scien... (paper).

"PhysOrg: just say no."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3611888

"The physorg article summary is wrong, I think."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108857

"Phys.org is vacuous and often flat wrong."

Comments about ScienceDaily:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206

"Blogspam.

"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):

http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dn...

"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...

"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:

http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603

"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."

Comments about both PhysOrg and ScienceDaily:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689185

"Why hasn't sciencedaily.com or physorg been banned from HN yet?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875529

"Original source:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole-asymmetry...

"What ScienceDaily has added to this: (1) They've removed one of the figures. (2) They've removed links to the Hinode and SOHO websites. (3) They've added lots of largely irrelevant links of their own, all of course to their own site(s).

"Please, everyone: stop linking to ScienceDaily and PhysOrg."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867361

"Those sources don't have RSS feeds, and ScienceDaily and PhysOrg have a bad habit of not linking to such things."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083766

"Added value in PhysOrg article: zero.

"Please, everyone, stop submitting links from PhysOrg and ScienceDaily. I have never ever ever seen anything on those sites that isn't either (1) bullshit or (2) a recycled press release with zero (or often negative) added value. (Sometimes it's both at once.) It only takes ten seconds' googling to find the original source."