Emails I Received, the Collection | Hacker News Reader

Emails I Received, the Collection

daniel.haxx.se

46 pointsosadalakmal13 comments

"Subject: Just wanted to say you...

I hope you have a really nice day and that nothing is going wrong in your life. Just know that i don't know what you do or who you are and that I just saw your email address and name somewhere"

https://github.com/bagder/emails/blob/main/2020/2020-03-21.m...

As someone who has to respond to emails from the public, this one kinda warmed my heart.

Some of these emails are from disturbed and/or desperate people. [1] and [2] for example. I’m all for having a smirk at some clueless people now and again, but some of these strike a darker tone and it’s a bit unsettling.

At the end of the day it’s sort of his fault for having a domain called “haxx.se”, regardless of if that was his intention or not. Putting emails online of poor people who have found their way to emailing him, desperate to restore their accounts or begging him to not hack them again is… weird.

It’s beyond having a smirk, and putting these confused people’s troubles into some kind of GitHub zoo for us to laugh at feels wrong.

1. https://github.com/bagder/emails/blob/main/2023/2023-11-26.m...

2. https://github.com/bagder/emails/blob/main/2023/2023-07-16.m...

I think you're being a bit uncharitable with the intentions of the author.

From the author in the comment section of the blog post from your first link:

'I’m showing this email here on my blog as an insight into what it is to be Daniel, author of curl. I don’t understand how you can make this into “making a profit of”, since this is just an email someone sent me and I’m not revealing any details to allow anyone to identify who this person is.'

> I’m showing this email here on my blog as an insight into what it is to be Daniel, author of curl

The only insight I can draw from this is that “Daniel, author of curl” has to sometimes ignore unwanted emails?

> /2023-07-16.md

     Subject: Breakpad Open Source Project - INFORMATION REQUEST

     I'd like to know who you are.

     Found your Open Source Project tests on my phone 
     and laptop illegally and need to know what you use it for?

     I need a lawyer to sue people who Tazed my dogs to death so I need to know

     WHAT THE FUNCTION OF THIS IS FOR TO ENSURE ELECTRIC CURRENT 
     AND MIT ENGINEERING WITH GOOGLE DEVOPS ISN'T STILL
     BREAKING EVERY LAW, GLOBALLY AND IN THE MILITARY 
     AND POLICE WITHIN THE UNITED STATES.

     Copyright (c) 2006, Google Inc.
     All rights reserved.

Early version of Sciter was HTMLayout engine where I put my email in dll resources.

That was terrible idea. I did not realize how creative users are to get that email from resources.

HTMLayout was especially popular among shareware INDIE authors - HTML/CSS was easy to create cool looking UI.

So I started to receive tons of emails like "your electronic enlarger is a crap - she is still not satisfied". All such sort of things.

My favorite shared emails, are David Thorne's[0].

[0] https://27bslash6.com

Not to cast any shade on Daniel, but perhaps as a warning of sorts?

Actually reading through the emails was only sporadically fun — a lot of them are from people who seem like they need urgent help and obviously aren't getting it.

His "summary" is "somehow they help me remember that the world we live in is super complicated" and while true, it was more of testament how confused a lot of people are, how lost. And how privileged people who understand computers are, being able to avoid this confusion.

I don’t think this is about understanding computers vs not understanding them. We are seeing these particular ones because of a computing related misunderstanding but there are a lot of disturbed or confused people out there in general not getting help.

The Internet (and social media) has shined an uncomfortable light on how widespread our education and mental health crises are. I’m not going to hold myself up as an expert or doctor but jeez there seem to be a lot of people out there that have totally lost the plot yet they have Internet so we can all see them struggling with reality.

The whole COVID thing didn’t help either. It helped to normalize and mainstream: weird conspiracy theories, antivaxxers, unhinged behavior in public, and the Internet was right there with it, hand in hand, taking us further down the crazy train.

I used to think people going through mental health crises were few and far between but now whenever I’m in a crowd I start thinking to myself you know, 10% of these people probably have a tenuous grip on reality and 1% might just have an outburst right here.

Certainly, the problem is bigger than just computers. I was trying to say that if you don't understand how computers work your chances of getting confused are higher since they are ubiquitous and often the interactions with them are so poorly designed that it's easy to get confused.

This one is funny: https://github.com/bagder/emails/blob/main/2016/2016-01-19.m...

> ... I came across this information using my Spotify which has also been hacked into and would love your help hacking out of Spotify. Also, I have yet to figure out how to unhack the hackers from my Instagram ...

It's so funny to read these emails, but I would put some kind of disclaimer in the license about how to get actual help if you're being hacked, or something like that.

Always a fun read -- I'm glad he still updates this.

Well, fun except for the super scary ones he received.

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