Hacker News Hug of Deaf

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

How the “bell” works and how to trigger it

  • The server on susam.net:8000 isn’t an HTTP server in the usual sense; it just writes ok and closes.
  • Many people initially tried browsers and normal curl, hitting errors until they:
    • Used telnet/nc/ssh or
    • Forced HTTP/0.9 semantics (curl --http0.9 susam.net:8000).
  • The beep is the ASCII BEL character (\a), which may produce different sounds or none, depending on terminal configuration.
  • Some shared shell snippets to trigger four beeps; one commenter refused to run “random code” locally, citing safety.

Traffic, bots, and the HN “hug”

  • The server quickly became unstable: intermittent connections, resets, and failures were observed, especially from people polling it in loops.
  • Several comments note that much traffic from HN-style sites is bot-driven:
    • Scrapers, SEO tools, “AI” crawlers, and vulnerability scanners have long been common.
    • Some think the relatively low unique-visitor count versus engagement hints at heavy bot activity.
  • One person describes dealing with scrapers by serving a compressed payload (a “zip bomb”) that apparently caused bots to stop requesting pages.

Playful experiments, validation, and “useless but fun”

  • Many celebrate the project as a quintessential “pointless but fun” experiment, echoing the idea that “useless is not worthless.”
  • There’s nostalgia for earlier playful hacks:
    • Network sonification tools like Peep.
    • Novel job application channels via odd ports, HTML source, or DNS records.
    • Stories of open FTP servers being “claimed” by pirates.
  • Several admit they enjoy seeing live traffic and built simple, privacy-preserving hit counters or log-tailing scripts that beep on visits.
  • There’s a tension acknowledged between healthy enjoyment of feedback and the risk of chasing validation or building invasive analytics.

Design choices and misc details

  • “Why four beeps?”: explained as a distinctive, ~3-second pattern that reliably grabs attention and is easy to distinguish from incidental terminal beeps.
  • Clarifications:
    • Graphs in the article use UTC; they were updated to show wall-clock hours instead of elapsed time.
    • The service is IPv4-only; lack of IPv6 is noted as a mild disappointment.
  • Some see setups like this as a charming way to feel less alone, especially when the beeps reflect real humans connecting rather than just bots.