Stupid long route | Hacker News Reader

Stupid long route

joeyh.name

50 pointszdw15 comments

I miss the early versions of Netscape, when they used to show the server domain lookups that the packets were transiting through to get to you in the status bar.

I remember being amazed at the 'magic' of the internet back then, when I would sit in Australia and request a page in the UK, and see responses flickering through at the bottom from France, Japan, Malaysia etc. Really brought home that each packet was coming to you via bouncing around all over the world, and two consecutive packets could come by incredibly different pathways.

That was dial up days too. Now I complain when NetFlix take an extra second to begin streaming a show. The magic has become mundane. I wish someone would bring out a Chrome extension that could display what the ancient Netscape browsers did...

Hmm... I'm not sure how you'd reliably do this. AFAIK routers don't usually bounce back a notification to origin every time they route a packet.

You'd have to do some kind of traceroute and then look up the ips in the geoip database. The former is pretty slow in my experience, and the latter might be pretty noisy data.

Makes me wonder what Nexflix was doing way back when!

When Netflix first started they only sent out DVDs via mail, and it was three DVDs at most at once. You paid a monthly fee, and you would mail back DVDs when you wanted a new one on your queue. It took them three or so years to get streaming set up, long after YouTube had made the idea of streaming video realistic. I believe VidX had also put a lot of effort into making high quality streaming realistic before YouTube supported it. This all occured before Netflix offered any streaming.

I think GP meant to type 'Netscape' in the last sentence ...

Whoops :/

>The magic has become mundane.

Classic Louis CK routine: "It's going to SPACE!"

https://youtu.be/q8LaT5Iiwo4?t=1m31s

This past week, I, living in country Australia, a few hundred kilometres from Melbourne, needed to help a coworker in Melbourne to diagnose something on his VM. It was easiest for us both to hook the SSH connection via a server in New York—increasing 30ms of round-trip latency to about 560ms. A terminal alone was fairly painful to use, but this is the part that I found really interesting: stdout line buffering goes from being a performance optimisation to being a significant slow-down—nay, a nightmare. Installing packages via Yarn, for example, suddenly took minutes, where it took only seconds with `> /dev/null`, because of a progress bar that kept on flushing its stdout buffer.

This is one of those issues that Mosh handles well - it essentially emulates a terminal on the server and sends snapshots to the client, varying the rate based on network conditions.

I contemplated mosh while waiting for things to install, and wondered whether it’d resolve that issue; but I’ve never set it up, and would seldom indeed have any use for it, so I expect I’ll continue to not use it.

I remember back in the 90´s when phoning from the US back to France you had a second of latency, forcing you to do like journalists on TV when they have to wait for the answer to travel to space and back.

You needed to be a little bit focused !

Come on, the juiciest tidbit was the latency and he left it out what it ended up being! I'm guessing the latency was around 1.5 seconds. It can't get much faster than that; the speed of light is too slow.

The only thing I noticed was it took a full second

> And finally, after 178000 and change miles of data transfer, the letter I'd typed a full second ago appeared on my screen.

The black magic behind those complex communication pipes is what made me love computers back in the days. Ever since then I have been obsessed by networking and how It just works even though things are thousands miles apart. I'm still amazed today but somehow the magic is gone for me. Everything is transparent in the modern internet and nobody really cares anymore about the complexity.

Everything is now about frontend and javascript design. Hard problems are not cool and trendy anymore, and that is sad.

This was cool. But what interested me more is the site it’s hosted on branchable.com. Is anyone else drawn to the ability to fork things on the net?

Fun to do and something to think about.

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