From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."
blog.hayman.net
blog.hayman.net
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:
One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "root@hpe.com" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.
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.
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.
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.
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 root@hpe.com 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.)
HPE was truly a trip. I paid $2000 to be able to disparage them online and it was worth every penny.
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?
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.)
There’s something of Bob Hoskins’ heating engineer in what you’ve described.
This company had a rule where the mail was first name + last name initial. So, timc@company.com 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."
"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 feel like I'm in crazy town...
Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com would go to me. This was a bad idea, I'm sorry. I've changed it to steve@next.com 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.
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.
His WebObjects demo from 2001 is one of the most entertaining tech demos I've ever seen
Sometimes I wonder what happened to these ideas.
Really refreshing to see.
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.
Steve was a mischievous person himself, so surely a part of him respected this.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 firstname.lastname@corp.com 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 first.last@companyA.com user -- got acquired by an org that insisted on the old style flast@companyB.com 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 John.Smith183@example.com in the org.
I wonder what kind of email flooding this was like in 1991. 1/day? 1/week?
> set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com
> would go to me.
> This was a bad idea, I'm sorry.
> I've changed it to steve@next.com 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.
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.
Turns out folks used to firstinitiallastname@ are confused pretty much every time I tell them to get me at firstname@
https://web.archive.org/web/20130301092249/http://www.next.c...
- 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...
When Abhi Talwalkar became CEO, they changed to firstname.lastname. My manager, who had a 17 character last name, was not pleased.
I don't see it.
In 1993 in was about 50c (there may have been stock splits since), and it peaked at about $255 in December last year.
But this style of keyboard has been done in various forms as far back as '92. They're awful.
Have to ask…what’s up with that avatar for Tim Cook?
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.
> to get something so visionary
In what world are 4 words visionary ?
"Great idea, thank you"
You're idealizing a boss you worked with..
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.
What a great career you’ve had to work with some really legendary people.
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.
> Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb
All speculation of course.
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.
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. At some point I stood up a Quake server and invited friends to play. ;-)
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.
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.
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 as the physical space?
The best companies that realize this can minimize it, but its inevitable.
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>.@company.com. Then raised an IT fault to get my email address 'fixed' and remove the . after my name.