[HN Gopher] Hacker News Hug of Deaf
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Hacker News Hug of Deaf
Author : susam
Score : 405 points
Date : 2025-04-10 09:09 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (susam.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (susam.net)
| pwagland wrote:
| Given that http://susam.net:8000 has stopped responding, I
| suspect that there will be a lot more beeps today.
| nom wrote:
| I got an ok!
| zombot wrote:
| Did not get one. Somehow I'm relieved, I would have hated to
| torture the poor man with beeps :)
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Same here. Did a bunch of F5's in a browser and always 'ok'
| alluro2 wrote:
| You do know each of those was 4 beeps? :D
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Yes i do know that. :D
| pekim wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| From 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._
| pekim wrote:
| Oops, that'll teach me to read articles properly before
| commenting, rather than just skimming.
| lukan wrote:
| Now 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 wrote:
| Maybe the alert could be four beeps on your terminal
| lukan wrote:
| And 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)
| collinvandyck76 wrote:
| To get an OK I had to force curl to use http 0.9
|
| > curl -v --http0.9 susam.net:8000
| dgacmu wrote:
| Got 2 ok's out of about 14 attempts. ;)
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| My obscure answer on an obscure comment buried in a regular HN
| thread made it into an article \o/
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Just 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.
| Gud wrote:
| Yet nobody visits my website! ;-(
| huijzer wrote:
| Yes I've had that too. Linked to a blog of mine and saw
| traffic spike in the Cloudflare dashboard.
|
| Talking about that, I have a great blog that...
|
| Just kidding
| notpushkin wrote:
| TIL: HTTP/0.9 responses (no headers, just text) still work in
| modern browsers. Neat!
| ape4 wrote:
| Hopefully forever. Its useful for small projects.
| Sonnigeszeug wrote:
| Probably also bots
| rvnx wrote:
| Totally. 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
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Let's test this. D0 n0t r3ply!!!
|
| Hi everyone, my VPN is running slow. Anyone have any tips?
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Is a `beep in terminal` just the system alert sound (4x)?
| zombot wrote:
| If you read the article, you'll get the answer :P
| Foxhuls wrote:
| I may just be blind but I don't think I see it referred to as
| anything besides "terminal beeps" throughout the entire
| article.
| zombot wrote:
| > Here is the exact command I ran on my server: ...
|
| Look at the quoted command, there it is.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| He's printing BEL (or \a), which could result in almost
| any sound depending on how the terminal is configured.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Try it out, open a terminal and type `for i in 1 2 3 4; do
| printf '\a'; sleep 1; done`
| nottorp wrote:
| Now it will be 5k connections from HNers and 45k connections from
| "AI" crawlers.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Hitting 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 wrote:
| Malicious bots looking for security issues are actually a
| lot nicer to your bandwidth than "AI" scraper bots.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| A phrase I heard someone say once is "useless is not worthless"
| and I love that phrase.
| bebopfunk wrote:
| One 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
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Here'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/
|
| [1]
| https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
| budmichstelk wrote:
| Saw the title and immediately guessed it was something playing
| sounds when a local server is accessed which then exploded in
| popularity.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Instead 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/
| thesuitonym wrote:
| The 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.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| The point of the fish doorbell is educating people about what
| lives in the water. There would be much less resource-
| intensive ways of "solving" the problem, if that was the
| goal.
| munsonbh wrote:
| Nothing is stopping someone from rigging it up to continue
| the absurdity.
| smallpipe wrote:
| Fun. 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 wrote:
| Well you're really helping the sitch here, ain'tcha...
| drittich wrote:
| It's like when you are in a traffic jam. It's the other
| drivers fault, not you!
| choult wrote:
| FYI, next time try `watch -n 5 <cmd>`
| MisterTea wrote:
| What benefit does running another program offer when the
| program running the command (shell) already provides that
| functionality?
| RunningDroid wrote:
| Watch also clears the terminal between runs
| inanutshellus wrote:
| I guess that'd be a detractor, as he wouldn't've been
| able to make his post showing his results over time.
|
| I'd've said the benefit is that it's simply a concise
| single command instead of a "while true" loop and a
| "sleep 5" command.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| That logic seems to apply to quite a few basic utilities.
| For that matter, the shell is turing complete so ...
| alexjm wrote:
| You might want to add the --http0.9 flag to curl, to tell it
| that getting a response of just "ok" (HTTP 0.9 style, body only
| without headers) isn't an error.
| drummojg wrote:
| TIL '\a' is bell on POSIX. That's neat to me all by itself.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| But why 4 times? Is this something random to write about a higher
| number of total beeps or is there a reason?
| edoceo wrote:
| There are four lig...beeps!
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| The cadence and consistency of it would differ from pressing
| backspace too many times.
| susam wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.).
| macintux wrote:
| Sometime circa 1998 there was a group looking for new technical
| hires for startups they invested in. They posted somewhere,
| perhaps /., that they were accepting resumes 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 wrote:
| Around 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 wrote:
| I recall a similar company that advertised their jobs through
| DNS. I think they had a TXT record that suggested how to
| actually apply.
| internetter wrote:
| Was the port documented, or did you need to do a scan?
| macintux wrote:
| We needed to scan. If 30-year-old memories can be trusted, it
| was on port 666.
| dirtybirdnj wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Just 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| You probably already know this, but that comic is
| _substantially_ improved without the cat.
|
| https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Now 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
| wredcoll wrote:
| I think they mostly work as a derived work / commentary.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Hey, it's not like that at all. I don't have a rotary phone
| or a cat.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| It beeps when Googlebot visits, too?
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Actually no. My hit-counter uses javascript which filters
| out almost (but not quite) all of the bots. It probably
| misses some real users that have javascript turned off.
| jofla_net wrote:
| cool, i just visited. Did you hear it!?
| devrandoom wrote:
| It's https://sheep.horse/
| rietta wrote:
| Just visited!
| nemomarx wrote:
| oh a game that uses Ink? super cool!
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Ink is such a cool language. I worked really hard on that
| game and entered it into an interactive fiction
| competition last year. It didn't come close to winning (I
| didn't expect it to) but people seemed to like it,
| especially if they grew up watching Star Trek.
| tbalsam wrote:
| I did my part and manually reloaded the page about once a
| second for 5 minutes so that Andrew could get their dev
| validation beep quota in for the day (unless it's not naive
| hits, and unique user based, in which case this has a been
| a fantastically hilarious waste of time).
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I clicked to satisfy the earnest request for attention. I
| even read some of the blog once I got there!
| rietta wrote:
| Your latest post about Google results inspired me to write
| on this too with a link back to your article! Google Search
| Results are Increasingly Disappointing as AI Results Are
| Pushed at https://rietta.com/blog/google-search-results-
| decline-with-a...
| butlike wrote:
| I had fun with the game show quiz. Thanks.
| squigz wrote:
| Why is wanting validation on something you spent hours on a bad
| thing to you?
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Good question, it is not bad to enjoy attention for a project
| you worked on.
|
| But I feel that, if unchecked, that same impulse can lead to
| deliberately doing projects specifically for validation which
| leads to low quality click-bait and vapid self-promotion. I
| think a healthy indifference for the public at large is a
| good thing.
|
| That is one of the reasons I got rid of detailed, real-time
| analytics in favor of a simple hit counter (the other is
| privacy). If I really stuck to my principles I wouldn't even
| do that but I am a hypocrite.
| codazoda wrote:
| This is what I did as well. Not wanting to take away my users
| privacy I built my own simple counter in 2022. I wrote about
| The Raspberry Pi 400 in My Bedroom on my blog at the URL below.
|
| I just downloaded a click sound and I think I'm going to see if
| adding it drives me crazy.
|
| https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Your solution looks very similar to what I implemented; only
| logging the page and time with no identifying data. I don't
| even have a real database.
|
| I really hate that modern websites include multiple trackers
| - there is really no need for invasive analytics.
| mbfg wrote:
| i 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 wrote:
| He got less than 5,000 visits, it seems like far less than the
| number he logically would be getting.
| itsme0000 wrote:
| Read between the lines: OP did this prove HN is botted. Look
| how well they circumvented the mods.
| xeonax wrote:
| I also made something similar, time to time I get tones people
| play when they interact with it. https://trails.aeonax.com/
| firefoxd wrote:
| Slightly relevant, I made an animation of the HN traffic I got
| from a #1 post.
|
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| As 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.
| nasvay_factory wrote:
| So it's indian timezone? right?
| susam wrote:
| It's in UTC. The previous data from 2022 is available here:
| 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 wrote:
| I would like to see a followup on that graph in a few days :)
| nickvec wrote:
| What motivated choosing 4 as the number of beeps to occur?
| crosser wrote:
| It does not listen on IPv6 address!
|
| Such a shame susam.net still has not adopted IPv6 in 2025 :-Q
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(page generated 2025-04-10 23:00 UTC)