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.

My obscure answer on an obscure comment buried in a regular HN thread made it into an article \o/

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/

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

"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.

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...

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.

TIL: HTTP/0.9 responses (no headers, just text) still work in modern browsers. Neat!

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.

Given that http://susam.net:8000 has stopped responding, I suspect that there will be a lot more beeps today.

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.

TIL '\a' is bell on POSIX. That's neat to me all by itself.

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.

It does not listen on IPv6 address!

Such a shame susam.net still has not adopted IPv6 in 2025 :-Q

This is a great way of not feeling alone.

I also made something similar, time to time I get tones people play when they interact with it. https://trails.aeonax.com/

When 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!

I would like to see a followup on that graph in a few days :)

Now it will be 5k connections from HNers and 45k connections from "AI" crawlers.

Probably also bots

But why 4 times? Is this something random to write about a higher number of total beeps or is there a reason?

He got less than 5,000 visits, it seems like far less than the number he logically would be getting.

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.

What motivated choosing 4 as the number of beeps to occur?

Is a `beep in terminal` just the system alert sound (4x)?

So it's indian timezone? right?

[dead]

Saw the title and immediately guessed it was something playing sounds when a local server is accessed which then exploded in popularity.