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Comment by olyjohn | Hacker News Reader

This is gonna suck for the people who store their important documents in the trash.

Anyone impacted by this who needs a new cloud-scale trash service should check out https://devnull-as-a-service.com.

This is a joke, but a real service like this could be neat. For example, it listens on all ports and returns a "null" response based on the typical service of that port.

Not-very-well-thought-out-examples:

http - Always returns 404.

https - Always returns 404.

ipp - Returns whatever IPP says for "printer not found" or equivalent.

lpd - Takes data, does nothing with it.

dns - Always returns NXDOMAIN.

ident - Always returns nobody:nogroup

telnet - Accepts any username/password/credentials, returns "This account is not available" and immediately exits.

ssh - Accepts any username/password/credentials, returns "This account is not available" and immediately exits.

smtp - Accepts message, doesn't do anything with it.

pop3/imap - Accepts any login, always has 0 messages.

irc - Accepts any nick, PRIVMSG or other commands, commands don't actually do anything. Returns null list of channels and users when queried.

vnc - ?

rdp - ?

Etc.

Considering that /dev/null always reports success on read and write, I'd imagine that http(s) should give a 200 with no payload.

"I would have gladly released my tax returns but unfortunately it was saved in the trash folder"

Like this? https://dilbert.com/strip/2003-11-13

That reminds me of my customers that used to put documents in C:\Temp

Let's face it. We've all been there.

My C:\temp is so full of stuff, some unknown amount of which turned out to be not as temp as I first thought, that I've now had to create C:\verytemp for the really temp stuff, which I make sure is emptied daily.

Some 20 years ago, when HD space was at a premium, I wrote a small script to clear out various temp directories in Windows 98. I tested the deployment on a colleague's computer, only to have him inform me that he used c:\temp as "temporary storage for projects I'm working on". Oh, well.

I actually have a tmp on my desktop for this very purpose :-)

If you go back far enough then calling GetTempPath() from the win32 API would return C:\Temp. It was always meant as a place for programs to put temporary files, not for users to stuff their garbage.

You joke, but I have seven git repository checkouts there right now. It’s a convenient place to put things I don’t want polluting my drive forever or being backed up, but need to exist on my filesystem at some point.

On Windows, you can make a temp folder in appdata/local and use that - local is specifically for files that don't get backed up. Actual temp folders can get deleted at any time.

Not a windows user. Is this directory automatically emptied on reboot or something?

No but various programs will store and delete files in the temporary folder. Also if you use the disk cleanup utility it will clear them out. I think from Windows XP onwards it was moved out of the root to somewhere somewhat harder to find.

Of course it was never meant as a place to store users files temporarily, it was always for programs that needed to write a temporary file.

That reminds me of the early days of me doing sysadmin.

We had a BSD system and an Ultrix system. For convenience I temporarily NFS mounted the root of the Ultrix system into /tmp/foo on the BSD machine. After I was done I forgot to umount the volume.

The next day, the Ultrix machine behaved really weird. Things seemed to work fine, but a lot of files were missing. It took a bit of troubleshooting before we figured out what had happened.

As it turns out, the nightly /tmp cleanup script had run on the BSD machine, and this script deleted all files which had not been accessed in a week. Of course the script had traversed the NFS mount and cleaned up everything on the root disk of the other machine. This meant that all the files that were commonly used were still there, so things seemed fine until you tried to do anything that involved files that hadn't been touched in the last week.

That's when I learned never to use /tmp for anything important.

a decidedly nonzero amount of people, vis a vi https://xkcd.com/1172/

It comes up regularly on the subreddit for tech support stories, /r/talesfromtechsupport. Just a few:

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/22ke8...

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/c24q2...

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/flgsn...

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/65cam...

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/bks9e...

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/9wrsc...

am dying of laughter, wtf is wrong with these people

> CW: Yes, I move them to the recycling bin to make them new again so I can reuse the files.

> IT: This is the trash bin, you would move files here to delete them off of your computer.

> CW: IT IS NOT A TRASH CAN, IT IS A RECYCLING BIN! IT SAYS SO RIGHT UNDER THE ICON!

Ok, now wait a second, why the hell is it called a recycling bin anyway?

"Recycling" doesn't mean "plan to throw this away later, but maybe I'll still grab it out of the trash can in case I made a mistake." Who came up with this metaphor?

Probably because "Trash" had already been taken by Mac OS.

Direct consequence of Microsoft stealing the paradigm from the Mac, where it has been called the "trash" since 1984.

> Microsoft stealing

The word you are looking for is "copying".

You can find all sorts of interesting stuff in the recycle bin! The garbage bin is much worse, everything is covered in food waste.

well at least once in my life I had accidentally deleted something important without backing it up (nobody's perfect) and I was glad I could recover it from the trash.

I'd honestly prefer if the policy would at least excempt reasonably small files or textfiles.

You have 30 days to recognize your mistake still with this new plan

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