Mosh's tolerance for high packet loss helps a guy escape from an elevator | Hacker News Reader

Mosh's tolerance for high packet loss helps a guy escape from an elevator

mosh.org

145 pointskumarharsh34 comments

Related from yesterday:

Mosh: The Mobile Shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28150287 - Aug 2021 (132 comments)

lots of other threads at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28150719

> I managed to get logged in to the SDF MetaArray, open mutt and send an email. Within minutes, the fire brigade had been called and were on their way to rescue me.

All I can think of when I read this is Maurice Moss (Richard Ayoade) from the IT Crowd sending an email about a fire in the office.

Edit: Here is the clip for those who haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EBfxjSFAxQ (Here is it queued up to the most relevant bit: https://youtu.be/1EBfxjSFAxQ?t=110)

"Dear sir/madam"...

Should've called 0118999 88199 9119 725 ... 3

Wild that so many of us have that memorized.

The song is a great mnemonic.

This is a good endorsement!

It's kind of crazy how hard it was for him to get out of there though; I would have expected his flatmate to take care of it straight away.

I wouldn't blame the flatmate. No one should be expected to be available on the spot.

There are a million reasons for them not to be available.

I suppose that is likely true. I just put myself in the poster's situation and started breathing real shallow, haha.

Fair enough!

I can as well easily picture myself thinking differently when locked in a lift, compared to sitting in the comfort of my couch, commenting on HN :D

Without sounding like a dick … I totally would have let one of my old flat mates chill for a bit! No immediate danger there, and potentially kinda funny, but yea every situation is different.

The more worrying thing is the alarms button seemingly does nothing

I don't think there is a way to say that without sounding like a dick.

I would go as far as to say that it's awfully hard not to sound like a dick when you are, in fact, a dick.

It’s all in the eye of the beholder. I once had a friend trick me into running barefoot through a few cactus patches. We’re still great friends to this day.

Did you forget to add /s to that?

No.

Lowering the risk of a situation, ignoring the potential panic of your "friend", all of it for some laugh... Sure sounds like a solid example of being a dick.

Note that I'm doing evidence-based work and hypothesis, in no way am I being judgemental. We're on HN, after all ;)

With all due respect… you sound like a dick

I used to have a friend who, whenever he was going to say something incredibly rude to people, would preface his remarks with the statement "I don't mean to be rude but..."

"I'm not ___ but ___" is a classic.

"I'm not a racist but [something racist will soon leave my mouth]"

How did you conclude there is no immediate danger? There is something obviously wrong with the elevator. What if it plummeted down and someone died? Even a couple of floors can turn out badly.

Everything you ever not wanted to know about elevators.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-do...

> I managed to get logged in to the SDF MetaArray, open mutt and send an email

Is there an easier way to set something up to contact 911 via command line in a pinch?

> Is there an easier way to set something up to contact 911 via command line in a pinch?

One could, say, connect the emergency phone that most elevators used to have, that worked, or wire the alarm to something, or... lots of options that work for "normal people" too.

Still a shame that the nominal emergency procedure is so broken and inefficient.

Also, special points to the 2 a*holes that ignored someone needing assistance.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with them? There is no excuse for that kind of shitty behavior.

I once was stuck in an elevator that had an emergency phone. However, when I picked it up...there was nothing. No voice on the other end, no tone, no background noise, nothing. My immediate assumption was that it was a dead line. The head of maintenance indicated the phone was working when he tested it after I got out of there, but if it was working when I was in there, that is a -major- UX issue, since despite having used both landlines and cellphones, I had -no idea how to use the emergency phone-.

Theoretically, too, the fact it was lifted at all should have triggered something that led to them calling me back; they never did. I got out by calling the fire department, since I thankfully had just enough signal

In many places you can text 911 - and mobile text is much more likely to work than mobile data.

yea that could have gone worse

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/06/asia/china-elevator-death...

How does mosh do this? Would TCP with faster retransmit timers be similar?

I've read the explanation on the website, the github readme, the faq, but it's never mentioned how it copes with packet loss.

Can you explain for those of us who've carefully avoided reading the RFC for all these years, how faster retransmit timers would work?

I would've guessed a longer timeout or UDP wrapping a custom protocol maybe.

Mosh is more than changes to the transport layer so it's an apples to oranges question. Some of what Mosh does is related to the way the transport handles loss but a large amount of what Mosh does is about how it avoids synchronizing things it doesn't need to by changing some assumptions (it's really a terminal emulator synchronization not a raw byte stream synchronization like ssh) and using knowledge of the type of thing it needs to sync to integrate with the transport protocol instead of transporting arbitrary byte streams.

Specifically, it synchronizes the state of the the screen rather than the entire byte stream that created it. When you first log in these are the same thing, but they rapidly diverge since mosh knows that you really don’t care that the cursor moves in exactly the right way, and that you don’t care to see anything that has already been erased and rewritten.

<3 SDF, glad to hear it's still running. Was one of my first shell accounts, like 20 years ago.

[2012]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com