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Hacker News Hug of Deaf
- pwagland 2y agoGiven that http://susam.net:8000 http://susam.net:8000 has stopped responding, I suspect that there will be a lot more beeps today.
- pekim 2y agoIt's not an http server. Try with something like nc or telnet, and you should get an 'ok' response before it disconnects. telnet -4 susam.net 8000
- baxtr 2y agoFrom the article: > The other party can use whatever client they have to connect to port 8000 of my system, e.g., a web browser, nc HOST 8000, curl HOST:8000, or even, ssh HOST -p 8000, irssi -c HOST -p 8000, etc.
- collinvandyck76 2y agoTo get an OK I had to force curl to use http 0.9 > curl -v --http0.9 susam.net:8000
- pekim 2y agoOops, that'll teach me to read articles properly before commenting, rather than just skimming.
- lukan 2y agoNow I feel a bit like writing some tool to automatically follow your posts (easy with existing HN replies) do a semantic analysis on them to determine when you will make that misstake again and give some alert (the hard/expensive part).
- thesuitonym 2y agoMaybe the alert could be four beeps on your terminal
- lukan 2y agoAnd then I write a blog post about it. But maybe I find something more novel. (And I have, but maybe I can actually use it for the task above)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nom 2y agoI got an ok!
- dgacmu 2y agoGot 2 ok's out of about 14 attempts. ;)
- TonyTrapp 2y agoMy obscure answer on an obscure comment buried in a regular HN thread made it into an article \o/
- stronglikedan 2y agoJust goes to show that even the most obscure comments can net thousands of views, considering only a small percent of people that have read the comment will actually engage, and that small percent was over 4k folks. Kind of puts things in perspective for me.
- notpushkin 2y agoTIL: HTTP/0.9 responses (no headers, just text) still work in modern browsers. Neat!
- ape4 2y agoHopefully forever. Its useful for small projects.
- Sonnigeszeug 2y agoProbably also bots
- rvnx 2y agoTotally. Most websites where you show and vote for a product (HackerNews, ProductHunt, etc) are ridden with bots. For example, one person here offers: > Our AI generates relevant, useful replies to selected mentions, that aim to genuinely help the original poster, and that include a subtle mention of your product. and ProductHunt: https://wakatime.com/blog/67-bots-so-many-bots https://wakatime.com/blog/67-bots-so-many-bots
- Scoundreller 2y agoLet’s test this. D0 n0t r3ply!!! Hi everyone, my VPN is running slow. Anyone have any tips?
- rust_c 2y ago[dead]
- inkcapmushroom 2y agoHave you tried HeadOn? Simply apply it directly to the forehead!
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoIs a `beep in terminal` just the system alert sound (4x)?
- zombot 2y agoIf you read the article, you'll get the answer :P
- Foxhuls 2y agoI may just be blind but I don’t think I see it referred to as anything besides “terminal beeps” throughout the entire article.
- zombot 2y ago> Here is the exact command I ran on my server: ... Look at the quoted command, there it is.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoHe's printing BEL (or \a), which could result in almost any sound depending on how the terminal is configured.
- thesuitonym 2y agoTry it out, open a terminal and type `for i in 1 2 3 4; do printf '\a'; sleep 1; done`
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoI'm a blue collar electrician, who knows just enough to be dangerous... which is why I won't type random code in on my local terminal (see: am idiot).
- nottorp 2y agoNow it will be 5k connections from HNers and 45k connections from "AI" crawlers.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoThis has been the way it is for a long time, even before the AI startups got going. Seems everyone and their mother has built some sort of HN-aggregator with builtin link scraping.
- extraduder_ire 2y agoHitting common ports looking for poorly configured drupal/wordpress/django installs is a thing I've seen bots doing for as long as I can remember.
- nottorp 2y agoMalicious bots looking for security issues are actually a lot nicer to your bandwidth than "AI" scraper bots.
- b3lvedere 2y ago"At the end of the day, this was a fun experiment. Pointless, but fun!" The best kind of experiments. And sometimes huge innovations/inventions/medicine/progress/more fun will arise from it.
- boleary-gl 2y agoA phrase I heard someone say once is "useless is not worthless" and I love that phrase.
- bebopfunk 2y agoOne day you’re just trying to figure out if there’s any fresh coffee in the break room down the hall, the next day you’ve invented the webcam. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
- b3lvedere 2y agoCool! Reminded me of this gem: https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts
- the_third_wave 2y agoHere's a more advanced - and 'ancient' (2000) - version of this idea: Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring Your Network With Sound [1]. I ran this for a number of months back in the day, it made my living room sound like a jungle. Running the same setup nowadays would probably make it sound like the gates of hell given the increase in network traffic. You can still find it at Sourceforge but it will need some work or maybe a VM running an older Linux distribution: https://sourceforge.net/projects/peep/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/peep/ [1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2000/full_papers/gilfix/gilfix_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
- budmichstelk 2y agoSaw the title and immediately guessed it was something playing sounds when a local server is accessed which then exploded in popularity.
- amiga386 2y agoInstead of ringing Susam's bell, you should be watching the Fish Doorbell, and let them know if you see a fish waiting to get through https://visdeurbel.nl/en/ https://visdeurbel.nl/en/
- thesuitonym 2y agoThe Fish Doorbell would be a great use case for AI, but I'd rather live in a world where volunteers just watch the video and ring a bell whenever a fish wants to get through.
- smallpipe 2y agoFun. You can tell it's receiving some love right now while true; do; sleep 5; curl http://susam.net:8000 ; done curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 11 ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 8 ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 8 ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 10 ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 11 ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed
- zoky 2y agoWell you're really helping the sitch here, ain'tcha…
- drittich 2y agoIt's like when you are in a traffic jam. It's the other drivers fault, not you!
- choult 2y agoFYI, next time try `watch -n 5 <cmd>`
- MisterTea 2y agoWhat benefit does running another program offer when the program running the command (shell) already provides that functionality?
- RunningDroid 2y agoWatch also clears the terminal between runs
- drummojg 2y agoTIL '\a' is bell on POSIX. That's neat to me all by itself.
- extraduder_ire 2y agoIt's character 0x7 in ascii and has existed since before ascii was even standardised. You can type it in a terminal with ctrl-g. It won't be displayed in most cases and if you've configured your terminal like me won't make a sound.
- jFriedensreich 2y agoBut why 4 times? Is this something random to write about a higher number of total beeps or is there a reason?
- edoceo 2y agoThere are four lig...beeps!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoThe cadence and consistency of it would differ from pressing backspace too many times.
- susam 2y ago> But why 4 times? When I originally shared this in 2022, it was just a comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30146019#30146451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30146019#30146451 I didn't expect it to get much attention, so I went with four beeps. I felt that a set of four beeps spread over three seconds would be long enough to grab my attention, even if I was busy with something else. Also, as another commenter pointed out, a sequence of four beeps is distinctive enough that it doesn't get lost among the stray, ordinary beeps I might hear while working in a terminal or Emacs (like from hitting backspace or pressing ctrl+g, etc.).
- jFriedensreich 2y agothanks! that was my suspicion, but was not sure if i did not get a unix insider joke that has to do with 4.
- macintux 2y agoSometime circa 1998 there was a group looking for new technical hires for startups they invested in. They posted somewhere, perhaps /., that they were accepting résumés via SMTP on a non-standard port, as a filter mechanism. I never heard back, although I ended up working for one of their companies the next year anyway.
- eszed 2y agoAround the same time people sometimes posted job openings in the html source of their websites. I never answered any, 'cause I wasn't looking for technical jobs at the time, but it always seemed clever to me. Any, and only, nerds who were interested in web development incessantly "View Source"ed on every page that looked interesting. It was a major vector by which early-web frontend techniques spread themselves, and it was great: you could cut-and-paste the html, direct download the .css and other resources, and get an offline model of their site running for you to tinker with to learn their secrets. All the magic was out in the open (for those who cared to pull back the curtain), and the future seemed limitless.
- dpcx 2y agoI recall a similar company that advertised their jobs through DNS. I think they had a TXT record that suggested how to actually apply.
- internetter 2y agoWas the port documented, or did you need to do a scan?
- macintux 2y agoWe needed to scan. If 30-year-old memories can be trusted, it was on port 666.
- dirtybirdnj 2y agoI feel like this is really to the heart of "your vibe attracts your tribe". It's kinda risky to but something like this in the comments, what if nobody ever sees it? What if it never beeps? It's just weird enough people (like myself) would do it. I would have if I saw it, but I missed it.
- AndrewStephens 2y agoThis is cool. I am a total hypocrite; I say I blog for the love of it and being a slave to analytics is terrible but in reality I love the sense of immediate feedback when I see a bunch of hits on a project I spent hours on. I did end up implementing a simple hit counter on my site just to satisfy my craven need for validation without resorting to full analytics. It doesn't beep at me, but maybe it should.
- AndrewStephens 2y agoJust to prove I am degenerate, I just threw a quick one-line shell script together that beeps when my hit counter triggers: tail -F -n 0 /var/log/visitlog | while read ; do printf '\a' ; done Now if only somebody would visit my site.
- cubefox 2y agoI picture this like the classic Garfield comic where Jon just stares in increasing frustration at his rotary phone for multiple panels, to finally shout JUST RING ALREADY. (His cat adds some dry remark which I have forgotten)
- yojo 2y agoYou probably already know this, but that comic is substantially improved without the cat. https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/ https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
- wholinator2 2y agoNow see I'm curious, would it be better if we had no context on what the comic _is supposed_ to be? Or is this only hilarious in comparison to the typical "i hate mondays, how many pieces of flair", type schtick the original goes for. Honestly i think it's the latter, cause after 20 of these or so they kind loose the appeal except for the very occasional guffaw. Though, is that still a higher laugh count than the original? I'm not about to read Garfield to find out
- mbfg 2y agoi clicked the link to see why it was the hug of "death", only to then realize after reading, it was hug of "deaf". i wonder what the unique user count was.
- gnfedhjmm2 2y agoHe got less than 5,000 visits, it seems like far less than the number he logically would be getting.
- itsme0000 2y agoRead between the lines: OP did this prove HN is botted. Look how well they circumvented the mods.
- xeonax 2y agoI also made something similar, time to time I get tones people play when they interact with it. https://trails.aeonax.com/ https://trails.aeonax.com/
- firefoxd 2y agoSlightly relevant, I made an animation of the HN traffic I got from a #1 post. https://idiallo.com/blog/surviving-the-hug-of-death https://idiallo.com/blog/surviving-the-hug-of-death (sorry not mobile friendly) There is a surprising number of bots. It will be fun to setup something like this whenever I get hn traffic.
- aucisson_masque 2y ago> At first, I fought back manually, feeding them fake data. But that got old fast. So I deployed my secret weapon: a zip bomb. > When their bot accessed my site, I served it a tiny compressed file. Their server eagerly downloaded and decompressed it, only to unleash several gigabytes of chaos. Boom. Game over. How did you know their bot would decompress it? I thought a bot would copy the HTML content of your article, maybe the images, and paste them on their own website. At no point does it involve editing or decompressing files? Impressive animation, by the way—the number of bots is staggering.
- firefoxd 2y agoAs soon as bots reach a page with the compressed payload, they never make another request. That's how I know it worked. Also curl, wget, or most libraries automatically decompress gzip content. Of course, Some bots just post spam without ever reading the content back, which defeats my scheme.
- aucisson_masque 2y agoAlright. Thanks.
- nasvay_factory 2y agoSo it's indian timezone? right?
- susam 2y agoIt's in UTC. The previous data from 2022 is available here: https://gist.github.com/susam/159c7d92659b3185eb0b0d683998a3b7 https://gist.github.com/susam/159c7d92659b3185eb0b0d683998a3... In the current graphs, the x-axis represents the hour of the day in UTC. For example, the first graph shows 43 connections between 10:00 UTC and 11:00 UTC, 407 connections between 11:00 UTC and 12:00 UTC, and so on. Previously, the first graph showed the number of hours elapsed since the experiment began (which started at 10:14 UTC). That's likely what you saw earlier today. After reading your question, I updated the graph to display the actual hour of the day (in UTC) instead of elapsed time, making the time of the day clearer. Thanks for the great question!
- iefbr14 2y agoI would like to see a followup on that graph in a few days :)
- nickvec 2y agoWhat motivated choosing 4 as the number of beeps to occur?
- bongripper 2y ago[dead]
- crosser 2y agoIt does not listen on IPv6 address! Such a shame susam.net still has not adopted IPv6 in 2025 :-Q
- grantcarthew 2y agoI put an unsecured open FTP server on the internet about 20 years ago, just to see what would happen. Within half a day I had some pirate "marking" his claim to my FTP server, then he/she started uploading a game. I deleted everything and left it open again. It was a long time ago, so I don't remember all the details, but all the pirates would create directories inside directories, upload files, then mark it with their mark. All of this was scripted I gather. After a while, I set up a file system watcher that deleted subdirectories. This gave me an FTP server I could use for anything. I shut it down a few months later. Interesting though.
- urbandw311er 2y agoWhen this gets popular, what does the author do at night? Sleep as far away as possible from the terminal so that the beeping doesn’t keep them awake? Or is the terminal at work? HN needs to know this vital information!
- susam 2y agoThe terminal is at home. I simply turn down the volume.
- urbandw311er 2y agoAh! For some reason my mind went back to the days when a terminal bell was an actual buzzer and had no volume control.
- nurettin 2y agoThis is a great way of not feeling alone.