[HN Gopher] How did I get here?
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How did I get here?
Author : zachlatta
Score : 314 points
Date : 2025-11-07 20:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (how-did-i-get-here.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (how-did-i-get-here.net)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Previous Show HN: from the dev in 2023:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531604
| paulddraper wrote:
| Doesn't seem to be working?
| ninju wrote:
| HN Hug of death ?
| archmaster wrote:
| It's like when your uncle squeezes you at Christmas. You're
| glad to see him again, but it's just a liiiitttleee... too...
| much... for... your... lungssss,.,.,.,
| arionmiles wrote:
| I thought this was going to play a Talking Heads song
| fredland wrote:
| letting the days go by
| archmaster wrote:
| check the html :)
| arionmiles wrote:
| Nice!
| Razengan wrote:
| I thought this was going to be a review of life choices
| einpoklum wrote:
| The review of life choices happens in our heads when we click
| this link on the main HN page.
|
| (sigh) I'm just thinking those thoughts right now.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| And if you haven't ever seen it before, run
| tracepath -m60 bad.horse
|
| and also openssl s_client -connect
| signed.bad.horse:443 -servername signed.bad.horse
| fragmede wrote:
| also ssh funky.nondeterministic.computer
| avipars wrote:
| noice, got rick rolled
| lenova wrote:
| Nice! Dr. Horrible would be proud of this geeky tribute:
| > tracepath -m60 bad.horse [...] 16: bad.horse
| 81.233ms asymm 10 19: he.rides.across.the.nation
| 85.365ms asymm 11 20: he.got.the.application
| 96.067ms asymm 13 23: it.needs.evaluation
| 112.377ms asymm 15 24: a.heinous.crime
| 114.826ms asymm 17 25: a.show.of.force
| 120.842ms asymm 18 26: bad.horse
| 133.089ms asymm 20
| avipars wrote:
| also
|
| ssh watch.ascii.theater
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Doesn't work. Traceroute showed only 1 hop.
| metabagel wrote:
| Read the green text
| decafbad wrote:
| Mine too. Maybe it's CGNAT.
| F00Fbug wrote:
| This is not my beautiful website.
| reaperducer wrote:
| This is not my beautiful home-page.
| googlryas wrote:
| There are packets at the bottom of the network stack
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| And you may find yourself
|
| Behind the keyboard of a large PC
| fragmede wrote:
| Typing in code you don't understand
| tres wrote:
| And you may find your site in beautiful cloud, with a
| beautiful bounce rate.
| chickensong wrote:
| And you may ask yourself
|
| Well, how did _ip route_ here?
| helix278 wrote:
| Letting the bytes go by
| andrewshadura wrote:
| Same as it ever was.
| FredPret wrote:
| > "You may have noticed that the traceroute progressively loads
| in lines above the bottom line. Web pages can only load forward.
| Since I didn't want to use any JavaScript, I did the hackiest
| thing possible: every time I update the traceroute display, I
| embed a CSS block that hides the previous iteration! Since
| browsers render CSS as the page is loading, this made it look
| like the traceroute was being edited over time."
|
| Love this
| tshaddox wrote:
| You can also do out-of-order HTML streaming without JavaScript
| using declarative shadow DOM. For example:
|
| https://lamplightdev.com/blog/2024/01/10/streaming-html-out-...
| archmaster wrote:
| oh yeah i saw this! newer than the website though :)
| advisedwang wrote:
| > This reverse traceroute is still helpful. The paths will be
| roughly the same, likely differing only in terms of which
| specific routers see your packet.
|
| This is categorically incorrect. While the AS path is often the
| same, the actual peering points are almost always quite
| different. Most ASes use hot-potato routing - getting packets to
| the next AS at the closest peering point to the source of the
| traffic. (And even if cold-potato routing is used, that's still
| asymmetric). In addition if there are two options with the same
| AS-path-length hot-potato routing can lead to different AS paths.
| This can happen if there's two mutual transit providers between
| source and destination and various other situations.
|
| (EDIT: fixed hot/cold mixup)
| archmaster wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've run a bunch of traceroutes and reverse
| traceroutes to different locations and they tend to follow the
| same AS paths -- although sometimes the traceroute will surface
| more routing through your ISP (especially from college
| networks). In general you are correct, though, and I would love
| to explain more about hot-potato vs. cold-potato (and other
| interesting routing decisions) in the future. Either way, the
| results the reverse traceroute provides are good enough for the
| purposes of explaining the internet, IMO!
| immibis wrote:
| FYI what you described is hot-potato routing: each AS gets rid
| of it as soon as possible.
|
| You may think this is unfair, and yes, it is, but it's also
| quite logical when you consider you don't know where the packet
| is going in the destination AS. If you have a network spanning
| Berlin and Hamburg and the packet is going to a different
| network that also spans Berlin and Hamburg, and you
| interconnect at both points, and you don't know which city it's
| actually going to, handing it off at the closest interconnect
| doesn't risk round-tripping it for no good reason.
| advisedwang wrote:
| ha yes thank you. I worked for a AS that mostly did cold-
| potato routing so grabbed the wrong term trying to describe
| the common case.
| toast0 wrote:
| > You may think this is unfair, and yes, it is
|
| I'm interested in your definition of fairness that makes hot
| potato routing unfair.
|
| In my mind, hot potato is fair, every packet gets treated the
| same, and (mostly) every provider does the same thing.
|
| > it's also quite logical when you consider you don't know
| where the packet is going in the destination AS. If you have
| a network spanning Berlin and Hamburg and the packet is going
| to a different network that also spans Berlin and Hamburg,
| and you interconnect at both points, and you don't know which
| city it's actually going to, handing it off at the closest
| interconnect doesn't risk round-tripping it for no good
| reason.
|
| There are ways to help with this, BGP MED (multi-exit
| discriminator) or path extention can help guide towards the
| best place to deliver traffic. But especially for last mile
| traffic, you do want it on the destination network sooner
| than later; if traffic is genetated in Berlin, and the
| ultimate destination is Hannover and the Hannover endpoint is
| connected to both Berlin and Hamburg on the destination
| network, delivering at Berlin provides a better experience
| than delivering to Hamburg, even though Hamburg is closer to
| Hannover, because the transit to Hamburg was unnecessary. And
| if the destination is only connected to Hamburg, delivering
| in Berlin works about the same as delivering in Hamburg
| (depending on capacity and use from Berlin to Hamburg on both
| networks).
|
| There's certainly situations where having options would be
| nice, but having options makes things complex, so typical
| users can't really influence routing. If you have v4 and v6,
| you may find that routing differs between the two and that
| does give you a bit of a choice.
| mjmas wrote:
| > Seems like this hit the Hacker News front page again, and the
| server's having some trouble pinging all of you. Feel free to
| read the article, but if you want to see your tracereoute you
| might need to bookmark and check back tomorrow :)
|
| > - Lexi, Nov 7, 3:16 PM PST
| archmaster wrote:
| somewhat better now! added a bit more concurrency. lesson
| learned: use tokio next time
| o11c wrote:
| Hmm, after several seconds it gave up and displayed raw markup
| ... I'm not sure _exactly_ why in this case, but ...
|
| One of the major infelicities of the web is that CSS is specified
| to ignore truncation, and there is no way to fix this. Now think
| about what happens if something like `display: inline-block` gets
| truncated before the `-`.
| bagels wrote:
| I tried it out, and found out that my primary internet connection
| had failed, and I was on the backup due to a power outage earlier
| today. Useful!
| mr_toad wrote:
| The route less travelled.
| cat-whisperer wrote:
| it's not loading for me. :'(
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Now you must visit how-didnt-i-get-there.net
| msephton wrote:
| I see the trace route, but none is glowing green
| chrismorgan wrote:
| The page _started out_ working without JavaScript as it says, but
| then the replacement HTML was encoded as text:
| <noscript> <style>#strYQt8 { display: none; }</style>
| <div id='stro29i'> ...
|
| (Edit: filed https://github.com/hackclub/how-did-i-get-
| here/pull/3.)
| aiiotnoodle wrote:
| Sometimes my 'You are here' top part reads, Host
| ASN Network Region
| 123-456-789-101.static.kc.net.uk AS19905 UltraDDoS Protect
| Global
|
| And other times it reads, Host
| ASN Network Region
| 123-456-789-101.static.kc.net.uk AS12390 Kingston Communications
| Europe
|
| What's going on here? I found the provider but what's with the
| 50/50 swap? It seems to randomly alternate between the two.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Hetzner, yuck.
| immibis wrote:
| Does it really exist if it's not a pile of AWS Lambdas?
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Lambda is even more yuck.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Why is Hetzner yuck?
| donatj wrote:
| I have old components on my personal site that used to do a
| similar trick for streaming data without JavaScript but between
| nginx buffering and cloudflare I have not been able to sort out
| getting it to actually work these days. Worked fine on Apache in
| 2005 lol
| reisse wrote:
| So they blocked me by IP (I guess) and I didn't get there! Nice.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| Or ICMP is blocked on your network
| basilikum wrote:
| 502
| archmaster wrote:
| check again!
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I can't help it. The Once in a Lifetime link is tattooed on my
| brainstem.
|
| I read this title and that opening bass line just starts flowing.
| kgwxd wrote:
| I instantly started having an existential crisis.
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(page generated 2025-11-08 23:01 UTC)