One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "[email protected]" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.

cron jobs reports activity by email to the user (UID) they are running, historically UNIX boxes have the ability to handle mail locally (people would leave messages to each other by connecting to the same server via terminal), so that the root cron activity would land into the root (/root) account mbox file.

When email got interconnected more across servers, generally the service that would dispatch mail to the users account on their home folder on the server started to be able to forward to to others servers, if a domain name was provided. Add to it the ability to fallback to a _default_ domain name for sending email into the organization, and voilà, the root email account for the default domain name receives the entirety of the cron jobs running under root of all the servers running with the default configuration and domain fallback.

In practice, I have never seen a Linux server with an actual SMTP server configured correctly in 20 years, so the worst that usually happens is that cronjobs never actually leave the machine. You used to get a mail notification when you logged in if cron had written something, but that doesn’t happen anymore on recent distros.

In my case, I configured Postfix to redirect all mails looking like (root|admin|postmaster)@server to myemailaddress+(root|admin|postmaster)_server@domain and Postfix ignores what comes after the + in the user part. So I get all the emails but I still know where they come from. It has worked well for quite some years now but I'm not deluding myself, I know that at some time, that will rot too.

This is an important distinction because if you have configured mail forwarding, your cron jobs should be configured to output only on error.. then any emails are actionable.

https://github.com/skx/sysbox/

When I set this sort of thing up, I'd get myself a hostname on an internal subdomain. But that was a truly miserable experience. It was a multi-stage form submission on a server I imagine to be the closest possible relation to an actual potato. It was soul-destroyingly slow. Alternatively, you could just pretend your machine was hpe.com - the hostname was valid, even if the IP was totally wrong, and the SMTP server would accept it.

My guess is that there was a bunch of stuff that pre-dated the HP/HPE split and they took the quick and dirty option whenever the old internal domain name got yanked during the changeover. And if your process runs as root, you get [email protected] and hope there's something in the subject/body to identify the specific machine.

The QSECOFR (Security Officer) user is effectively root on OS/400.

I would've thought they would run these jobs as some other user, but apparently not.

(Not from "Brazil" the film, but Monty Python-originating regardless.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8n9xraFoNI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSJ8XPnJK1o

HPE was truly a trip. I paid $2000 to be able to disparage them online and it was worth every penny.

All the code is Apache 2 so I guess if I really cared I could just revive it... and as it turns out, I don't care that much. Other stuff to do.

This is exactly how Epic the Electronic Medical Record company operates, but on new college grads instead of Engineers.

I’ve been out of the work rat race for over 3 years now, but I’ll have to go back within a year… and I’m dreading it.

It’s my most valuable skill set, I just want to throw up when I see what the industry has become and I don’t know how to deal with it.

(My primary care doctor's office was venture-funded at one point and they actually have a great system. But all my specialists are on MyChart and everything there is always a disaster. Doesn't even have a "preferred name" field, so it has to be noted on my records on a case by case basis and it's ... inconsistent.)

You're saying that if someone offers me a small amount of money I should accept it, but if someone offers me a large amount of money I should maybe reject it?

That sounds backwards to me.

in that case, rightfully you should not take the money regardless of the amount.

but, if it's a tiny amount of money (tiny enough to indicate that the company probably isn't going to bother coming after you in court) then you can maybe consider taking it anyway and accepting the miniscule risk

whereas receiving a vast sum of money would carry a much larger risk of legal action

So now I'm free to tell people that they fired me with zero days' notice and zero severance. That's just the way they roll.

I find it funny that their nondisparagement policy specifically causes disparagement that otherwise couldn't have occurred.

† They also gave me an explicit reassurance that I shouldn't worry about my health benefits, because those would remain good until the end of the month. I didn't find this particularly reassuring, since it was Halloween.

bribe?

There’s something of Bob Hoskins’ heating engineer in what you’ve described.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

This company had a rule where the mail was first name + last name initial. So, [email protected] if you're Tim Cook. Naturally they ended up hiring a customer success person called "Ana Lopes".

She of course noticed on the first day and complained, but IT dragged their feet until some high-profile customer saw "reply to ANAL" in the automated ZenDesk email and send an angry email to the CEO.

It takes an Act of Congress, a Papal Conclave who produces white smoke on the first vote, Divine Intervention, and Interdiction by a Vice President, all offered in triplicate upon the altar of subpar IT support organizations, to get a ticket closed -with- a resolution in less than a year. If it’s not something they already have a script for it’s almost certainly impossible as far as IT support is concerned.

The company makes billions of dollars a year, employs tens of thousands of people, and they still can’t craft a competent and empowered IT support organization. Even if just for their own developers and technical experts.

I look at it more like a "productivity multiplier", where spending money wisely can make other departments more cost efficient beyond the cost you put into IT. I guess they don't teach that in business school, or everyone is already as productive as they can possibly be. Somehow I doubt it, though.

It was insane to type that, and no one could really work with it. And we had several alias domains.

An IT director actually came to me and said “we can shorten that if you’d like”.

Sure. I ended up with lastname@company. That created a lot of chaos for a few days because my initial username had already been fully propagated. These were the days before niceties like SCIM, so everything was in-house glue, manual work, or obscure third party solutions.

on edit: I do remember we had to come back to the course the next day, so it took a day to get it fixed.

I read the last sentence 'And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.' in Newman's voice:

From the Seinfeld episode The Diplomat's Club:

"I took over his route. And boy, were there a lot of dogs on that route."

At a high-profile place, I too used an automated IT thing to make a first-name email alias for myself, and there was a semi-famous person there with the same first name.

It played out much like this story: I started getting email for the VIP, so I told them, and switched it over to them. I don't recall them being as gracious as Steve Jobs that time. Then, the only other interaction I had with them was them during my time there, was them declining my request to participate in something. :)

I started to receive mail across the entire company for people who typed "myname<TAB>".

I deleted the distribution list a few minutes later.

For the love of God, use the right tool. Portfolio back testers are a dime a dozen and easy to use and get 100% accurate answers. LLMs are the wrong tool to get investment expertise from.

2003, when the share price was $0.37

Steve was a mischievous person himself, so surely a part of him respected this.

But he was a very good businessman who made a lot of money, and that's what's important.

and i hate to play mr. ceo defender but "a very good businessman who made a lot of money" is selling him rather short, i think. he developed several products that radically changed the paradigm of computing and consumer electronics. that deserves a certain degree of veneration, i think. he didn't get rich by jacking up the price of insulin or dumping chemical waste into rivers or selling petroleum products or developing a human psychology-hacking enterprise to sell ads.

For the pollution thing, the truth is that many of those who got rich polluting the rivers and such actually produced lots of innovation. Plastics fit your description, and I think few things have been more of a paradigm shift than plastics.

I get you with the ads business, but Google made a revolutionary search engine, Amazon disrupted e-commerce. I have a hard time defending Facebook/Meta but they have their fair share of innovation.

Almost all "very good businessman who made a lot of money" actually made great things, that's how you make a lot of money doing business. Though usually, there is a dark side, and Steve Jobs is no exception. You can also make a lot of money just being an asshole, think crime lords, or Martin Shkreli, but it often doesn't end well.

That's the justice system for you.

sure, he wasn't John von Neumann. fine. certainly one hell of a visionary and one hell of an executive, though, and a sharp and insightful person. for anyone here who hasn't yet seen it, check out "steve jobs: the lost interview". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m68auPIPRk&t=1s

jobs wasn't a charlatan and he was certainly no slouch.

Humans are complex and when you already changed the course of history by 25 or whatever, you are going to be even more complex.

I don’t idolize Steve Jobs but I do find him to contrast positively against other similar figures like Gates and Ellison. Low bars, I know. But I guess I wanted to defend that people can have a soft spot for Jobs without ever making a dime from any of his endeavors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN02z1KbFmY

And this particular anecdote is the poster child for it.

'Printing out and framing the response' as the daydream reaction to receiving that e-mail is wild, even with the caveats.

Steve Jobs was deeply loved and respected by his family, friends, and colleagues. People who knew him intimately, who lived and worked with him every day for decades in many cases.

So is being asshole to a few thousand employees worse or better than improving life of tens of millions (at least) with great products that they use everyday? Not an easy question to answer. But it's certainly not just about money and shareholder value.

https://www.afribundance.com/2023/04/03/bill-gates-is-fundin...

What an absolute load of tripe.

Straight from disease surveillance being a bad thing (it isn't) to this drivel /eyeroll.

Disease surveillance helps stop potential pandemics before the cost of addressing them and the damage the can cause, including loss of life, reaches colossal proportions. Recommended reading: The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett.

I note how the conspiratorial assertion of Africans being used, in effect, as guinea pigs is entirely unsupported by any evidence whatever. Vaccine trials happen everywhere, not just in Africa, and no national healthcare system in Africa blindly accepts vaccines as if people were experimental animals.

Did you give informed consent yourself for the childhood vaccinations you received?

And honestly a lot of the praise in this thread is a recent shift.

Please don't break the guidelines like this. You might not owe Steve Jobs better, but you owe this community better if you'd like HN to be a place for having good discussions about interesting topics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

3 years later I accidentally took down all the ATMs for one of the largest consumer banks in America for a while in the middle of the night.

My boss came in "Hey you finally did it, you took longer than most, but that was a good one!" and that was all that was ever said about it.

> set up a mail alias so that [email protected]

> would go to me.

> This was a bad idea, I'm sorry.

> I've changed it to [email protected] goes to you,

> not to me. I think that makes more sense.

> My apologies.

> Signed, new guy.

What a great example of how to own a mistake, apologize, communicate, and get it fixed. I can think of so many past situations with coworkers that would have been so much better handled with quick communication like this.

It's a super nice example. Explain the situation as early as possible, don't be afraid and roll with it.

The fawning over the response bothers me no end.

You’ll have 1,000x more headaches and burned operational cash getting everyone to approve everyone else’s every step than handling one security incident in a decade. And even with very tight security, something will still happen. It’s best to have backups, a good restore plan, and a relaxed culture*. Or that’s what I think, anyway.

I’m in SME land though, not big tech. But then again, 99.99% companies are.

* common sense exceptions apply.

The best companies that realize this can minimize it, but its inevitable.

The virtual space is locked down so so so much harder than the physical because it's "free" to automate, but the vibe is it's outrageously uncontrollable. I get it when we're talking the whole Internet, but the same group of insiders?

Sure. But if that's the case why do you even have individual email? Make everything a group email and group IM. Not allowed to send messages to a specific person; can only send messages to everyone. What would happen?

Can you see the flaw in this logic? Email isn't only for discussing work projects. It needs to be private for discussions involving HR, legal, and other personnel matters.

I think your point would be better made if in your hypothetical, we still had individual mailboxes, but everyone could see into everyone else's mailbox.

Of course you likely had no immediate way to reply to an internet email address like that at the time out of the box.

This story is quite old, security culture in tech was really quite basic and forgotten in a lot of places. I would hope that a similar thing would not be allowed today at anything like a big company.

This is 1991, the actual number of people on the internet was tiny back then. Things like SMTP servers were commonly open relays (for some reason I'm remembering sendmail being an open relay out of the box).

A lot of the internet culture wasn't based on security, but of the premise you shouldn't be a dick.

It quickly changed in the next few years as the number of people online exploded.

Fun times :)

I soon set up a website and webcam as they were shipped. CU-See-Me blew my mind. ;-)

His WebObjects demo from 2001 is one of the most entertaining tech demos I've ever seen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfWnDJtUyrw

Sometimes I wonder what happened to these ideas.

Really refreshing to see.

Have to ask…what’s up with that avatar for Tim Cook?

All speculation of course.

But this style of keyboard has been done in various forms as far back as '92. They're awful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_keyboard

Side effects of living in a world where wealth and power have become virtues. I think we subconsciously judge our own value based on how many degrees we came to stepping onto the world's "stage".

That time I ran into Larry Bird, or just missed having dinner with Douglas Adams, or the time I talked to Jonny Kim-- they're little markers of time in my existence. I know they're not gods, and I've done pretty cool things myself, but I'm still in awe of the cool stuff they've done.

More than 20 years ago now, my brother (who was maybe 9) had his friend over for lunch and the night before my brother had spent the night at his house.

So my mother asks what they got up to, and the friend says they were playing water pistol fights with his sister’s boyfriend, “Wa-kin”, who was visiting.

We then ask what the boyfriend does, and he responds that he’s an actor. (Just be aware now that we live in Johannesburg, South Africa.)

So we say, cool, has he acted in anything we might know?

And friend says something like “Oh, lots of movies, Gladiator, Signs, others…”.

At which point I remember thinking, “no way!” and “so that’s how Joaquin is pronounced” (as I’d only ever seen it written).

Turns out the friend’s sister was a model living in New York which explained the situation I would never have guessed.

I respect Steve Jobs for his ruthless and uncompromising focus on quality and his attention to detail. He wasn't just a sales guy.

Engineer: I don’t think we can build that with our current technology.

Steve: I don’t give a fuck. You’re a nerd who is meant to like inventing. Do it.

It’s really easy when we live in the world of the Mac, and the iPhone to say “Ah it was inevitable” but Steve’s approach to product is what got us here. He made sure that the GUI was computers, that capacitive touchscreens were smart phones.

Being arguably the greatest product guy and salesman of all time is some feat.

Apple switched to "Retina" displays in 2012 and haven't looked back. They don't produce anything with low DPI or low contrast.

My work HP laptop (latest model ZBook workstation) has a low contrast unreadable 1080p screen. Plastic trash that costs the same as a Macbook Pro. HP and all these other shit companies don't give a fuck about quality.

https://medium.com/initialized-capital/how-founders-must-cha...

Can you imagine “Apple Intelligence” being this bad under Jobs?

Contrast that with Cook…

“where can we put more ad units that make the product worse”

“Let’s ignore Phil Schiller’s advice, the judge’s court order and make the experience of paying outside of the App Store as shitty as possible”.

“Let’s keep our base model Macs at 8GB for over a decade to save a little money and get people to pay for upgrades”

I really hate Tim Cook.

There's nothing wrong with the stories, just the overall sentiment behind them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130301092249/http://www.next.c...

that didn't stop me from registering it again at my next employer, where i received more complaints, but in this case they were less out there and i actually knew the people who could do something about them (smaller company, support shadowing shifts), and there i was eventually able to wire the alias into their official process after forwarding enough of them to the people i knew.

I eventually grew so annoyed with it that I ended up surrendering the email to said person as it was a losing battle.

Now that the company uses Slack however, I imagine there’s a lot less confusion.

Needless to say, he sometimes gets emails he shouldn't.

https://xkcd.com/1279/

I even have to begrudgingly admit that he has to navigate the political waters in both China and the US doing things I don’t like.

But he consistently makes Apple’s products worse in the name of money - advertising on the phone, malicious compliance in the EU, what came out in the recent court case where he ignored Phil Schiller (head of App Store and long time a Apple employee) who suggested they do the right thing as far as the courts ruling, and how the experience is worse not being able to buy third party content (kindle) and subscriptions within apps. Well you can now. The Kindle app has been updated.

Of course I don’t care if they skim 30% from games, loot boxes and coins where 90% of their revenue comes from.

I wouldn’t consider it an honor to get an email from Cook. The enshittification of iOS is completely on him.

How do you like all of the ads in the App Store and they are thinking about adding more?

How did you like having an 8GB MacBook and the overpriced upgrades until Apple Intelligence forced them to have 16GB minimum?

How did you like being stuck with Lightning ports until the EU forced them?

And the malicious compliance in the EU.

Didn’t make much difference for me, in fact I still use a phone with lightning.

The rest don’t really matter for me, I have not downloaded anything from the App Store after the initial phone setup and I don’t spend money on subscriptions. Apple being hostile to open platforms and competitors is a forty year old story.

I feel like I'm in crazy town...

Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and set up a mail alias so that [email protected] would go to me. This was a bad idea, I'm sorry. I've changed it to [email protected] goes to you, not to me. I think that makes more sense.

My apologies. Signed, new guy.

This was

> That is one of the most beautifully crafted “I did something dumb” emails

Why ? What is happening if you can't email your boss/upper on the regular like that ?

"Hey, I'm gonna be late today, ate too many burritos last night and had to visit the hospital"

BOSS : Great idea, thanks

> PROFOUND!

In a 40 person startup or small company, sure. In a 400 person company, the guy at the top is a few levels removed from "your boss" to be emailing with "on the regular".

OP had Jobs as his CEO for 20 years (hired in 1991, until Jobs passed in 2011), and says this was the only time Jobs directly emailed with him (of course, 400 people in 1991 was the smallest the company would be during that time, it would only grow from there).

You're right, I had to dig into OPs history to find that. I take back what I said. He gets every pass he wants, and now it makes sense.

I hate this pandering garbage.

Then I thought about the guy's name: D___ Hoover.

He had applied for, and got, 'hoover'.

My inbox was closed after graduation. My forwarding alias worked for years after.

Unrelated fact, a university ending email domain is enough to prove student status for a lot of software.

When Facebook first came out, it was the only way I could get an account.

In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs are the norm. People shift employers all the time without changing offices. It's a whole Thing.

USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the usual case.

Most places now seem to use the [email protected] style of address. This is a good idea, and creates collisions less often than flastname@ style addresses would. However, one of my customers -- someone who had been happily a [email protected] user -- got acquired by an org that insisted on the old style [email protected] addresses.

I will not provide the name of my customer, but the problem that ensued was of the same type, and yet a bit more severe, than it would have been if his name were "Steve Hithead."

To this day, though, his address honors the local convention. STANDARDS MUST BE FOLLOWED NO MATTER WHAT, apparently.

That created problems with contractors as any interruption in service required a new address. So we had a few [email protected] in the org.

I mean, Steve Jobs had to work with people, but he wasn't some prophet. He was a talented guy, who had his failures and successes, more of the latter.

It is a cool story, but if my boss of 15 years ago becomes world famous, I'm not going to personally treasure the email he sent with 4 words, possible 2 automated, write a blog post about it.

I'm just going to giggle to myself a little. Again, I might be in the minority here.

Just reading that email felt magical to me - to get something so visionary on your first day at a company in the early 90s would’ve convinced me they were leading me in the right direction.

I have a vision, not 20/20, but it involves you working for me. Good idea.

Write a blog about me when I'm gone.

> to get something so visionary

In what world are 4 words visionary ?

"Great idea, thank you"

You're idealizing a boss you worked with..

"Hi! Are you Steve Wozniak?"

"No, I'm Steve Jobs."

"Okay ... umm ... where is Steve Wozniak?"

I suspect people's preference for those who were actually building things, over selling them, may have twisted SJ's character ... I mean, more twisted than it already was.

Ironically, two people I worked with in the early Apple days -- Steve Jobs, enough already said, and Jef Raskin, who designed the first incarnation of the Macintosh -- both died of pancreatic cancer.

I actually miss Jef. We lived together for a while, as I was finishing Apple Writer and my frequent commutes from Oregon were becoming impractical.

Here's a Jef Raskin story I think almost no one knows. Jet resolved to design an electric car. He packed a bunch of 12 volt car batteries into a relatively small, lightweight car, and, after removing the ICE, rigged an electric motor in its place.

First test drive, Jef tried to descend a hill, only to discover the car's brakes, which until then had gotten an assist from the ICE, were nowhere near adequate to stop the suddenly-massive battery bank. Very scary, briefly out of control, but no harm done.

I wonder if they'll ever move it out, put it in a museum or something.

I suppose one could periodically check for the presence of this artifact, and if it were to suddenly vanish, that would suggest that Google has decided to build another electric car. It is, after all, legacy IP, best hidden away.

I don't see it.

Turns out folks used to firstinitiallastname@ get confused pretty much every time I tell them to get me at firstname@

What a great career you’ve had to work with some really legendary people.

I wonder what kind of email flooding this was like in 1991. 1/day? 1/week?

When Abhi Talwalkar became CEO, they changed to firstname.lastname. My manager, who had a 17 character last name, was not pleased.

I jokingly emailed IT and asked to have P(eterclar)K@adroll and to my surprise they gave it to me. They even asked me if I thought it would be confusing for proper PK and I feigned confusion.

I promptly got a lot of email for proper PK and since he was co-founder, CFO and board member I decided this wasn’t a funny prank.

I tried explaining how we’d performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever.

When I explained to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!"

But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? He just wasn't in the mood to be told that he could have a better user interface.

So I gave him one of the a "NeRD" buttons I'd made for NeWS NeRDs, which he appreciated.

Up to that time, NeXT was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”!

Even after he went back to Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit. There’s no accounting for taste!

Here's the paper we published in 1988 showing that pie menus were 15% faster and had significantly lower error rates than linear menus, which I 3/4 unsuccessfully tried to explain and demonstrate to Steve Jobs. (At least I got three "that sucks" to one "Wow, that’s neat" out of him. ;)

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus. Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman, ACM SIGCHI '88:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...

The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures: An interview with visualization pioneer Ben Shneiderman:

https://medium.com/multiple-views-visualization-research-exp...

Here is a 30 year retrospective of pie menus that I wrote 7 years ago (the 37 year anniversary of the paper is coming up in a few days on May 15):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1

Lots of demos of different kinds of pie menus here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc&list=PLX66BqHq0q...

It's near impossible to convince people like Steve Jobs and organizations like Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Open Software Foundation, and even less open-to-outside-ideas open source projects like GIMP, to adopt unconventional ideas like pie menus.

One of Blender's outstanding qualities is that they listen to their users and don't suffer from NIH syndrome, fortunately!

I got frustrated at trying to get pie menus into official corporate user interface toolkits, and took a job in the game industry at Maxis, where you're not only allowed but even required to roll your own user interface, and got them into SimCity and The Sims:

The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs

Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27...

X11 SimCity Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA

Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA

Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE

- Also excluding rare words from the search allows finding several AI Summarizers for Hacker News [ "Steve next com" -amazed ]

[1] https://blog.hayman.net/2021/02/07/business-cards-i-have-kno...

In 1993 in was about 50c (there may have been stock splits since), and it peaked at about $255 in December last year.

> Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb

I work for a large company 50k employees (not in IT) with the standard email format <firstname>.<lastname>@company.com

The company has a automated way to change your email address if your name changes, so I changed my last name to @. which allowed me officialy change my email address to <firstname>[email protected]. Then raised an IT fault to get my email address 'fixed' and remove the . after my name.

Then we started to get big and it became less funny. Not my fault, and nobody blamed me, but one week we had a quarterly sales meeting and the company flew in 50+ reps from around the country... Those folks can spend money. I did my best to avoid reading, but receipts for extravagant food/drinks were hard to ignore.