Hacker News Hug of Deaf
114 comments
·April 10, 2025AndrewStephens
AndrewStephens
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
devrandoom
It's https://sheep.horse/
tbalsam
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).
butlike
Ok, I played Voyage of the Marigold for a little bit now. Is it possible to get out of the shoals? Also can you beat the dreadnaught near the last two sectors with 1 torpedo and lasers, or do you need 2 torpedoes?
Good stuff. Cheers.
rietta
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...
eyelidlessness
I clicked to satisfy the earnest request for attention. I even read some of the blog once I got there!
butlike
I had fun with the game show quiz. Thanks.
nemomarx
oh a game that uses Ink? super cool!
rietta
Just visited!
cubefox
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
You probably already know this, but that comic is substantially improved without the cat.
AndrewStephens
Hey, it's not like that at all. I don't have a rotary phone or a cat.
DeathArrow
It beeps when Googlebot visits, too?
AndrewStephens
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.
codazoda
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
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.
squigz
Why is wanting validation on something you spent hours on a bad thing to you?
AndrewStephens
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.
indrora
When I was hosting a site run on bespoke PHP pages, I had a hit counter that used straight text files under the hood. It was surprisingly effective and a fun experience.
TonyTrapp
My obscure answer on an obscure comment buried in a regular HN thread made it into an article \o/
stronglikedan
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.
huijzer
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
Gud
Yet nobody visits my website! ;-(
amiga386
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
thesuitonym
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
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
Nothing is stopping someone from rigging it up to continue the absurdity.
smallpipe
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 allowedzoky
Well you're really helping the sitch here, ain'tcha…
drittich
It's like when you are in a traffic jam. It's the other drivers fault, not you!
alexjm
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.
choult
FYI, next time try `watch -n 5 <cmd>`
MisterTea
What benefit does running another program offer when the program running the command (shell) already provides that functionality?
RunningDroid
Watch also clears the terminal between runs
fc417fc802
That logic seems to apply to quite a few basic utilities. For that matter, the shell is turing complete so ...
b3lvedere
"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
A phrase I heard someone say once is "useless is not worthless" and I love that phrase.
the_third_wave
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...
macintux
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 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
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
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
Was the port documented, or did you need to do a scan?
macintux
We needed to scan. If 30-year-old memories can be trusted, it was on port 666.
notpushkin
TIL: HTTP/0.9 responses (no headers, just text) still work in modern browsers. Neat!
ape4
Hopefully forever. Its useful for small projects.
firefoxd
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
> 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
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.
aucisson_masque
Alright. Thanks.
pwagland
Given that http://susam.net:8000 has stopped responding, I suspect that there will be a lot more beeps today.
nom
I got an ok!
zombot
Did not get one. Somehow I'm relieved, I would have hated to torture the poor man with beeps :)
dgacmu
Got 2 ok's out of about 14 attempts. ;)
pekim
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 8000baxtr
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
Oops, that'll teach me to read articles properly before commenting, rather than just skimming.
null
collinvandyck76
To get an OK I had to force curl to use http 0.9
> curl -v --http0.9 susam.net:8000
grantcarthew
I 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.
drummojg
TIL '\a' is bell on POSIX. That's neat to me all by itself.
extraduder_ire
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.
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.