In school I worked as an intern for a U.S. defense contractor (which I feel rather bad about now, but that's neither here nor there). Every now and then some important general or captain type would show up for a meeting and walk around and look at what all the various labs were doing. When they came to the room where all the interns sat we would all pull up hacker typer and just furiously type away while they were looking in the door.
The important person would always be very impressed and say what a good job we were doing, and our boss who was showing them around (and knew exactly what we were doing) would have to nod and sweat bullets and then would get furious with us afterwards (but it was worth it and we did it every time we knew someone was coming to do an inspection).
Only tangentially related, but on my MacBook Pro simply running
cat /dev/random
causes my terminal to hang and my speakers start emitting a loud buzzing sound until the terminal is force-quit or system is restarted.
I can understand the terminal not being able to handle the amount of data from /dev/random but for the speakers to start emitting sounds as a result of this is certainly very strange. Almost like /dev/random was being piped into /dev/audio or something. Anyone have an explanation?
This ASCII 7 (C escape "\a"), which when printed emits a bell sound. The exact sound is terminal dependent, and modern terminals won't use the PC speaker but rather play a sound using the audio hardware (which is required on Macs because they don't have a PC speaker). The bell isn't expected to be emitted often and quickly in series, so depending on the capabilities of the terminal program and the audio hardware, it may go haywire trying to play a more complex/longer sound repeatedly or overlapping (like seeming to lock up or slow down as the audio is queued). Your terminal may be configured to "flash" instead of emitting a sound when ASCII 7 is printed -- this may be implemented as rendering the entire window in reverse video for a short duration. A series of discrete bells played quickly may sound like a tone with a rising pitch. Other terminal oddities could occur if ANSI escape sequences. There are many ANSI escape sequences, for changing colors of text, moving the cursor, changing the typeface, or for querying terminal capabilities or customizing the terminal window title bar, that when printed randomly may make the terminal go haywire.
My initial thought is you're getting escape sequences or other signals to trigger the bell/chime. I've never had it crash a terminal but I've never really used a macbook. A common one I'll see in gnome terminal is the terminal printing out some info about itself (I guess there's a way to get some info back from the other side of a link) or changing the title bar.
An easy test would be to have something dump that bell character to the terminal as fast as possible and see if that does it, and also try /dev/zero to check that doesn't.
When I was in college, the local news was interviewing a comp sec professor of mine in the computer lab. The cameraman was taking B-roll footage (blinking lights from racks, cables going everywhere, that sort of thing). He asked if he could film a few of our screens to show what we were diligently working on, which is how we got hacker typer onto the nightly news.
If you press it enough times, eventually three alt keys will get through to the page and it will pop up. I think it could could prevent the menu appearing by using preventDefault() on the keydown event.
Weirder, every time I see a code snippet on some video, it's the same "struct group_info ...". It is so common that I recognise it every time. I wonder where it is coming from, that makes this snippet so popular?
One of the first computer fair I went when I was about 12 I saw a guy demonstrating a software called Sued (Deus (God) backwards). The guy would ask the computer questions about the person he was showing the software to; questions like: what is the color of the hair on the girl next to me? And the computer would answer. Amazing! Later on I figured that while you type the answer the computer would show the beginning of a generic question, character by character. Even more amazing!
Oh, for an instant, I felt I'm a real hacker like the ones you see in movies! Just randomly press any key on the keyboard, and it will generate chunks of meaningful text quickly. Long-press any key, and it starts behaving like ChatGPT when generating an answer.
Disable "Search for text when you start typing" in the settings.
This 'feature' is so infuriating, as many websites have shortcuts that become unusable from this. There is nothing wrong with CTRL + F total idiotic feature to have on by default.
Coming from the other side, an annoying number of websites use '/' to focus their own search box, while I am used to using it to activate quick-search, which it's bound to by default. It's like the ctrl-f search, but disappears when it loses focus.
This is so nostalgic. Many of the engineers at a company I worked for over a decade ago used this one day when our little startup was visited by some Important People. We were so 1337. Haha! Good times. Good Friday post. Thanks.
Reminds me of certain (music) keyboards where you can select some built-in songs and then just press random keys and it will play the song correctly, but in the tempo of your keypresses. Who needs piano lessons?
By "true" hackers, I meant the old-skool type that learns things on the fly from limited resources and then uses creativity and problem-solving skills alongside their newly-minted knowledge to create nifty things or solve thorny problems. :)
Guessing from the rest of your comment there, with the nifty examples that you might be one of those "old-skool hackers" yourself. ;)
Pure genius. Finally, an opportunity to parley my effusive laziness into a promising career as a “coder!”
BTW I hate that term with a passion.
As someone who has crafted software for the last 45 years, it’s like implying that learning the alphabet makes you a Tom Robbins.
Writing software is about understanding the problem and the information involved in such a way that you can craft algorithms and data structures to efficiently and reliably solve those problems. Putting that into code is the smallest, least important part of that skill.
That’s why software engineering is mostly language agnostic. Sure, there are paradigms that fundamentally change the way that the problem space is handled, but at least within a paradigm, languages are pretty much interchangeable. Some just have less hidden footguns.
Interface design is another thing altogether,
And is either fruitless drudgery or fine art, depending on your predisposition.
There is definitely room for a subclass of brilliant interface designers that do not need deep data manipulation intuition …. But they do need to have a deep understanding of human nature, aesthetic principles, color theory, some understanding of eye mechanics and functional / perception limitations, accessibility/disability engineering, and a good dose of intuition and imagination.
In short, nothing about producing quality software is something that you gain by writing code snippets to solve simple problems. But you do have to learn the alphabet to write, and “coding” it is still a prerequisite to learning to write software. It just shouldn’t be sold to people as if it was some kind of degree lol.
Give me some kid who’s been building things with Arduino in her basement for a few years over a coding bootcamp graduate any day. I can teach her how to write good code. I’ll just pull out more of my non-existent hair trying to reach the “coder” to actually solve problems, unless I get lucky.
The fact that someone entered software engineering through either building things with Arduino or through a coding boot-camp does not indicate what is their potential when it comes to software engineering.
I've seen people who are really great at combining "recipes" off the web for anything (including hobby electronics and programming), but never really get to the bottom of things or develop clear understanding of how things work and tie together.
I imagine you'd only get more out of that kid toying with Arduino because of persistence ("few years"), and not because of the type of things they did, but I ultimately believe you'll have similar chances of developing a great software engineer out of any of them in general.
You’re right on about the time part, that was definitely a big part of what I meant.
You can start anywhere, and coding boot camps are useful, just as following YouTube tutorials. But until you learn to identify, quantify, and characterise the problem and data space you aren’t really doing the job of software engineering.
My experience is that many people are deceived into thinking that language fluency is the core skill of software engineering, and coding bootcamps tend to foster that misrepresentation.
That doesn’t make them bad. It just means that often, thrashing around with no real knowledge of the tools and solving a problem with the tiny set of syntax you can get to work is much, much more educational towards the goal of becoming a software engineer than getting a good grasp of the language as it pertains to solving toy problems that require little effort to characterise.
Anyone that is willing to hack around a problem long enough that the solution emerges is doing the real job.
It doesn’t matter where they start, or how much they “know” about “coding”. The real task is to fully characterise the problem and data structures, and sometimes that emerges from the horrific beast that rises from the tangled mess of a hacking session, a malformed but complete caricature of the actual solution.
Then, all you have left to do is to code the actual solution, the structure of the algorithm and data has been laid bare for you to see by your efforts.
That, I believe, is the essence of software engineering.
No disagreement there, but one other thing I'd throw in for learning coding is that it increases confidence for someone embarking on this journey, and sometimes that's all the motivation they need to dive deep and persist.
I've obviously seen people who misjudge this (they can code, hire them), but ultimately, developing someone requires an amenable minds of both a mentor and a mentee on top of talent and persistence.
You’ve got a good point. I honestly hadn’t considered the self confidence angle. I’ve always just been stupid enough to expect to be good at whatever I am willing to put time in to learn. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out, but I can usually write it off to “lost interest” even if I suspect intrinsic incompetence lol. I mean, demonstrated intrinsic incompetence is a good reason to lose interest, right?
In school I worked as an intern for a U.S. defense contractor (which I feel rather bad about now, but that's neither here nor there). Every now and then some important general or captain type would show up for a meeting and walk around and look at what all the various labs were doing. When they came to the room where all the interns sat we would all pull up hacker typer and just furiously type away while they were looking in the door.
The important person would always be very impressed and say what a good job we were doing, and our boss who was showing them around (and knew exactly what we were doing) would have to nod and sweat bullets and then would get furious with us afterwards (but it was worth it and we did it every time we knew someone was coming to do an inspection).
Ahh, I used to queue this up on another screen when I needed things to look "busy":
Note that it runs a lot faster now than it used to in the 90s.Super cool, thanks.
I wondered how its speed could be adjusted and found `pv` can be used for throttling pipe throughput, so thanks for that too!
Limited to reading 50kB per second:
Alternatively, slow it down by a factor of 16 for every additional specified character.
Only tangentially related, but on my MacBook Pro simply running
causes my terminal to hang and my speakers start emitting a loud buzzing sound until the terminal is force-quit or system is restarted.I can understand the terminal not being able to handle the amount of data from /dev/random but for the speakers to start emitting sounds as a result of this is certainly very strange. Almost like /dev/random was being piped into /dev/audio or something. Anyone have an explanation?
This ASCII 7 (C escape "\a"), which when printed emits a bell sound. The exact sound is terminal dependent, and modern terminals won't use the PC speaker but rather play a sound using the audio hardware (which is required on Macs because they don't have a PC speaker). The bell isn't expected to be emitted often and quickly in series, so depending on the capabilities of the terminal program and the audio hardware, it may go haywire trying to play a more complex/longer sound repeatedly or overlapping (like seeming to lock up or slow down as the audio is queued). Your terminal may be configured to "flash" instead of emitting a sound when ASCII 7 is printed -- this may be implemented as rendering the entire window in reverse video for a short duration. A series of discrete bells played quickly may sound like a tone with a rising pitch. Other terminal oddities could occur if ANSI escape sequences. There are many ANSI escape sequences, for changing colors of text, moving the cursor, changing the typeface, or for querying terminal capabilities or customizing the terminal window title bar, that when printed randomly may make the terminal go haywire.
PC Speaker - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker
ANSI Escape Sequences - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
My initial thought is you're getting escape sequences or other signals to trigger the bell/chime. I've never had it crash a terminal but I've never really used a macbook. A common one I'll see in gnome terminal is the terminal printing out some info about itself (I guess there's a way to get some info back from the other side of a link) or changing the title bar.
An easy test would be to have something dump that bell character to the terminal as fast as possible and see if that does it, and also try /dev/zero to check that doesn't.
That's the ascii bell symbol being rendered on your terminal.
See parent's comment, how he piped output from /dev/random into the next command and not to stdout.
just a guess “visual bell” might fix it perhaps ?
(Sorry if too off-topic)
I just saw this and thought this was pretty cool! Running your command in nushell, and eventually aborting it gives the following output
Just wanted to random praise the nushell team for this amazing level of detail!I have always wondered if anyone used it in a "real life scenario". This was hilarious, thanks for sharing :D
When I was in college, the local news was interviewing a comp sec professor of mine in the computer lab. The cameraman was taking B-roll footage (blinking lights from racks, cables going everywhere, that sort of thing). He asked if he could film a few of our screens to show what we were diligently working on, which is how we got hacker typer onto the nightly news.
God damn that is funny
LPT : If you are using this website to hack the FBI or whatever, don't forget to triple press SHIFT and to triple press ALT :)
I knew about this website for a long time, but I just learned about this easter egg!
On mobile, so I can’t try this - what does this do?
Triple shift pops up a red "Access Denied" message in the middle of the screen. Alt just shifts focus to the browser's toolbar, at least in Chrome.
Alt alt alt should show a big green Access Granted :)
It just opens/closes the file/edit/view menu.
If you press it enough times, eventually three alt keys will get through to the page and it will pop up. I think it could could prevent the menu appearing by using preventDefault() on the keydown event.
> Come on... come on...
Suddenly, the screen flashes red: "ACCESS DENIED."
> Dammit, they're trying to lock me out.
Fingers fly across the keyboard. Sweat drips from their forehead.
> Not today, FBI...
The warning turns from red to green: "ACCESS GRANTED"
> I'm in.
> Let’s see what you’ve been hiding...
super cute, haha. mac keyboards hit OPTION (⌥) btw
Fun fact, the site fetches the textfile from the server at '/kernel.txt' and stores it in the browser local storage.
The code is obviously from the Linux kernel, specifically managing group memberships and permissions for processes.
The file is groups.c from the Linux Kernel, circa sometime before 2015: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/8f6c5ffc8987f4f5b5a3e...
ahhah, thank you
this code appears in the loading screens for the new game "forever winter"
I was wondering if it was from the game or not, so it seems not!
Weirder, every time I see a code snippet on some video, it's the same "struct group_info ...". It is so common that I recognise it every time. I wonder where it is coming from, that makes this snippet so popular?
EDIT: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:786/format:webp/1*3YdG... from https://towardsdatascience.com/teaching-an-rnn-to-write-code...
The thumbnail to this image says "the source code to the Matrix"... so perhaps the movie had used some Linux code, and everybody is copying the movie
It literally says under the image: code of the matrix (Cloned from Keanu’s GitHub), and links to hackertyper.net
I think it's popular due to hackertyper. If you search for things like "hacker code" on google, hackertyper comes first.
It’s the modern Wilhelm Scream
I only have 3 minutes to hack into the mainframe.
*still finds time to write neatly crafted comments on what the code does
Two people typing on the same keyboard can help speed things up.
For anyone that doesn't know the reference, it's this classic scene from NCIS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ
The power of the NCIS series! So unrealistic in so many ways, that it becomes fun to watch.
>still finds time to write neatly crafted comments on what the code does
My man!
I'M IN!
One of the first computer fair I went when I was about 12 I saw a guy demonstrating a software called Sued (Deus (God) backwards). The guy would ask the computer questions about the person he was showing the software to; questions like: what is the color of the hair on the girl next to me? And the computer would answer. Amazing! Later on I figured that while you type the answer the computer would show the beginning of a generic question, character by character. Even more amazing!
Just found out that somebody made an online version of it.
https://suedoraculo.com.br/
The key is to type ; before and after the answer.
The version I saw those years ago leaned on the god backwards theme, very dark, suggesting that the guy was dealing with obscure forces
I remember getting banned from the computers at school for a month for going on this and hitting F11.
A fork for Lisp code^^ https://vindarel.github.io/Hacker-Typer/ code is from the Mezzano kernel OS.
I remember going on this site in middle school. I now have a degree and can actually understand the code being written here... time flies
There's a VS Code plugin that does something similar: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jevakall...
I never knew they had a job board: https://jobs.hackertyper.net/
A true hacker typer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzZAtrw_XDI
note that there is also superficially similar hackertyper dot com which contains a cesspool of advertising plugins/links/cookies/javascript.
It worked well, was able to stop a nuclear bomb within 1.2 minutes but I've also found a defect:
codeaidenhacked11010100100101010101010010101001001001010101001010101001010100101001010100101-10010110101001010101010010101010101001010101001010111111000000000010101001010101001010101010001010100101010100010101010010101010
Oh, for an instant, I felt I'm a real hacker like the ones you see in movies! Just randomly press any key on the keyboard, and it will generate chunks of meaningful text quickly. Long-press any key, and it starts behaving like ChatGPT when generating an answer.
The vst3 plugin 'RipChord' does similar...but your key presses aren't strictly random.
This website is not complete without the Igor-3000 coding robot: https://youtu.be/q-HvY8stFxk
Greetings from Novosibirsk!
That was funny, the "Igor is only powered by Ethernet" phrase made me laugh way too much.
Also, I did not know about Hacker Typer, I will keep it around :).
tykhytohtohkytohtyhkhtohyohtyhthkthhtyhytkhtohthyyhthtyohkth ythktyohktyhoktyhotkyhtokhtyht hoktyotykhyohkthththtkhthokhythkth ytktkhtyhokhotyhtyhthktyokhhotphkpto hkhktyhyhthktyhokthkthk khoptkhtohphhthyhthkthtkhtyhkot kopkhtyhopyhkhopkhpthotypohhythhokthophkthkothyh hhtyhktphkytohkthpthpyhkykhyohkhhhtkhoykhtyohktyoh thtyhhhoytkhyohkhthoytkhtphoktyoytthythththokt kophpohhthpotyhptyh
This doesnt work on default Firefox, as when you start typing it automatically brings up the Ctr-F search box and starts typing in there :(
Disable "Search for text when you start typing" in the settings.
This 'feature' is so infuriating, as many websites have shortcuts that become unusable from this. There is nothing wrong with CTRL + F total idiotic feature to have on by default.
Coming from the other side, an annoying number of websites use '/' to focus their own search box, while I am used to using it to activate quick-search, which it's bound to by default. It's like the ctrl-f search, but disappears when it loses focus.
Thanks :)
I'm in.
This is so nostalgic. Many of the engineers at a company I worked for over a decade ago used this one day when our little startup was visited by some Important People. We were so 1337. Haha! Good times. Good Friday post. Thanks.
10190101001010100101010
Reminds me of certain (music) keyboards where you can select some built-in songs and then just press random keys and it will play the song correctly, but in the tempo of your keypresses. Who needs piano lessons?
I wish there was something like this that could somehow turn off OS keybindings.
I tried letting my niece and nephew play with this once but they kept hitting the Super key, minimizing the window, alt-tabbing, etc.
Don't forget the banana!
For scale?
You're one of today's lucky ten thousand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcmaNJfRQf0
Drgyjgddbvhfb ftyd
I will hack mobile without password
Robo..jari toco123
Love this app, the GitHub is easy to clone and modify as well. Used it for a game once.
Kajal3417thakur id hack
What does hacking have to do with cybersecurity?
True (real actual) "hackers" often make the best cybersecurity experts? :)
Not always. A lot of hackers aren't even networking related.
An easy hack would be to use echo, netcat and less to browse either Reddit or HN over Gopher:
By "true" hackers, I meant the old-skool type that learns things on the fly from limited resources and then uses creativity and problem-solving skills alongside their newly-minted knowledge to create nifty things or solve thorny problems. :)
Guessing from the rest of your comment there, with the nifty examples that you might be one of those "old-skool hackers" yourself. ;)
I suppose they mean the pop-culture term "hacker" which is someone who breaks into digital systems in movies etc.
In which case, it has everything to do with Cybersecurity.
>No syntax highlighting
(anxious)
ghbgb bbfefaazsrffrv55445545t5grggr4fncdnyyyyyhy
A gigabyte of Ram should do the trick
Mess with the best, die like the rest.
Abosaary1414@gmail
Vb2g
Cb8078jj Asdf@1234 11000 Allpanelexch.com
bnffnd
I'm in
Willy Beele
unyhbgtfvdcsx7hy5
yep. thats hacker typer.
f wklhvu befihvbevbeuv
# calculator.py
class Calculator: def __init__(self): self.history = []
def main(): calculator = Calculator() if __name__ == "__main__": main()allpaanel.com
Finally I can write code faster than LLM! /s
Now we just gotta combine Hacker Typer with GPT streaming a token of code on every key press.
Pure genius. Finally, an opportunity to parley my effusive laziness into a promising career as a “coder!”
BTW I hate that term with a passion.
As someone who has crafted software for the last 45 years, it’s like implying that learning the alphabet makes you a Tom Robbins.
Writing software is about understanding the problem and the information involved in such a way that you can craft algorithms and data structures to efficiently and reliably solve those problems. Putting that into code is the smallest, least important part of that skill.
That’s why software engineering is mostly language agnostic. Sure, there are paradigms that fundamentally change the way that the problem space is handled, but at least within a paradigm, languages are pretty much interchangeable. Some just have less hidden footguns.
Interface design is another thing altogether, And is either fruitless drudgery or fine art, depending on your predisposition.
There is definitely room for a subclass of brilliant interface designers that do not need deep data manipulation intuition …. But they do need to have a deep understanding of human nature, aesthetic principles, color theory, some understanding of eye mechanics and functional / perception limitations, accessibility/disability engineering, and a good dose of intuition and imagination.
In short, nothing about producing quality software is something that you gain by writing code snippets to solve simple problems. But you do have to learn the alphabet to write, and “coding” it is still a prerequisite to learning to write software. It just shouldn’t be sold to people as if it was some kind of degree lol.
Give me some kid who’s been building things with Arduino in her basement for a few years over a coding bootcamp graduate any day. I can teach her how to write good code. I’ll just pull out more of my non-existent hair trying to reach the “coder” to actually solve problems, unless I get lucky.
The fact that someone entered software engineering through either building things with Arduino or through a coding boot-camp does not indicate what is their potential when it comes to software engineering.
I've seen people who are really great at combining "recipes" off the web for anything (including hobby electronics and programming), but never really get to the bottom of things or develop clear understanding of how things work and tie together.
I imagine you'd only get more out of that kid toying with Arduino because of persistence ("few years"), and not because of the type of things they did, but I ultimately believe you'll have similar chances of developing a great software engineer out of any of them in general.
You’re right on about the time part, that was definitely a big part of what I meant.
You can start anywhere, and coding boot camps are useful, just as following YouTube tutorials. But until you learn to identify, quantify, and characterise the problem and data space you aren’t really doing the job of software engineering.
My experience is that many people are deceived into thinking that language fluency is the core skill of software engineering, and coding bootcamps tend to foster that misrepresentation.
That doesn’t make them bad. It just means that often, thrashing around with no real knowledge of the tools and solving a problem with the tiny set of syntax you can get to work is much, much more educational towards the goal of becoming a software engineer than getting a good grasp of the language as it pertains to solving toy problems that require little effort to characterise.
Anyone that is willing to hack around a problem long enough that the solution emerges is doing the real job.
It doesn’t matter where they start, or how much they “know” about “coding”. The real task is to fully characterise the problem and data structures, and sometimes that emerges from the horrific beast that rises from the tangled mess of a hacking session, a malformed but complete caricature of the actual solution.
Then, all you have left to do is to code the actual solution, the structure of the algorithm and data has been laid bare for you to see by your efforts.
That, I believe, is the essence of software engineering.
No disagreement there, but one other thing I'd throw in for learning coding is that it increases confidence for someone embarking on this journey, and sometimes that's all the motivation they need to dive deep and persist.
I've obviously seen people who misjudge this (they can code, hire them), but ultimately, developing someone requires an amenable minds of both a mentor and a mentee on top of talent and persistence.
You’ve got a good point. I honestly hadn’t considered the self confidence angle. I’ve always just been stupid enough to expect to be good at whatever I am willing to put time in to learn. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out, but I can usually write it off to “lost interest” even if I suspect intrinsic incompetence lol. I mean, demonstrated intrinsic incompetence is a good reason to lose interest, right?
To the untrained eye: "Coding is to a software engineer, as cutting is to a heart surgeon."
That is a fantastic analogy.
Genius, here comes the funding!
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hi