Hacker News

by Ryan Harman

Project Blinkenlights (blinkenlights.de)

60 points by doener 5 hours ago

jolt42 5 hours ago

Is this still well recognized?

ACHTUNG! ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENSPEEPERS! DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKEN. IST NICHT FÜR GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS. ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.

andai 3 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights

Has some nice photos. More welcome!

And on the modern computer, there is:

Blinkenlights: PC Binary Emulating Visualizer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31473846

https://archive.ph/GgGeZ

I was always fascinated by stories from older professors about how they could hear when something had gone wrong with an algorithm, because the sound would be wrong.

In my case, I could hear when some Windows malware (its indexer, updates, etc.) was running, because the computer would make funny noises. These days, everything is so silent, and the LEDs are gone, I only notice from the lag!

I sometimes wish there were still sounds, and more besides (e.g. sounds for strange network packets, and so on).

You can do a lot "artificially"; I set it up so my computer makes a frog croak sound when the LLMs finish cooking, and I have a colored orb in my notification bar showing the packet loss.

vincent-manis 2 hours ago

Back around 1968, I did some work on an IBM 1130 (small-scale 16-bit computer, definitely not a minicomputer, as it filled most of a room). The disk drive was driven by a voice coil, and made an audible click as the head moved from one track to the next. I would do a Fortran compile, then walk to the other end of the building to the break room to get a coffee while the compiler was working. The disk made a distinctive sound when the compiler went to write the executable, and I would immediately walk back to the computer room to see the compilation results.

bradrn 5 hours ago

Yes! I know it! (And I’m not old at all.) I saw it at, as I recall, a model train exhibition when I was very young, and I found it so hilarious I’ve never forgotten it. In fact I was quite surprised when I eventually learned it was a well-known thing, considerably older than I am.

m4rtink an hour ago

Stuff like this is even more funny if you can actually read German. :)

jdsnape 4 hours ago

I have a letterpress print of this from the Cambridge (UK) museum of technology when I was a kid (so about 30 years ago I guess!). I love the juxtaposition between letterpress and the idea of relaxen und watschen der blinkenlichten

pjot 5 hours ago

Thought this was the ascii Star Wars in your terminal à la

  telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

atmavatar 33 minutes ago

It's wild that it still works to this day. I just checked it the other day via PuTTY.

I first ran across it over 30 years ago while I was still in school, and I'm sure it's been up longer than that.

hellojason 3 hours ago

Haha yep, first thing I thought of as well.

NDlurker 2 hours ago

Same. That was my introduction to telnet

lacunary 3 hours ago

me too and I hadn't thought of it in what feels like 20 years. I'm mad that's not what it was

positive_sec 4 hours ago

So nice to see this here! We were inspired by Project Blinkenlights to conceive BlinkenCity, a city-wide installation of the same idea (abusing the radio-controllable individually-addressable street lamps in many German cities): https://positive.security/blog/blinkencity-38c3

sunir 4 hours ago

When I was younger, I was in Berlin and wandered unannounced into the Chaos Computer Club and I met Tim there. What a legend.

The whole club is legendary. We need more of their spirit of the art of the possible and irreverent. Life is for the living, and computers are for the hackers.

Animats 5 hours ago

Downtown Shenzhen is rigged for that.

For a while, the SF Bay Bridge was. I once went to an Autodesk event in SF where the guy behind it was controlling the lights from his laptop.

kukanani 4 hours ago

You’re probably thinking of the Bay Bridge Lights or Bay Lights. They first ran from 2013-2023. They were so popular, that starting this year, the lights are back on, every night.

https://illuminate.org/projects/thebaylights/

Animats 23 minutes ago

If there was ever a site that needed a .gif main image, that one is it.

karim79 5 hours ago

I think it got the HN kiss of death. We need a new page about how to avoid this. Basic scaling skills I tells ya.

esseph 4 hours ago

It's a lot of the same people that refuse free CDNs.

Gigachad 2 hours ago

You don’t even need a cdn. The cheapest vps can handle HN load serving static pages. The problem tends to come when it’s some inefficient dynamic page triggering db calls to load a blog post.

nullc 3 hours ago

Ever wonder why those CDNs are "free"?

andai 3 hours ago

zahlman 5 hours ago

> Stereoscope — Toronto 2008, City Hall: two towers, one matrix (96×32 pixels, 16 greyscales).

Oh man, I think I remember that.

unprovable 5 hours ago

It's been so long since I last saw this. Stalwart of the internet.

Xikaku 3 hours ago

This was so cool when I first saw it at Alexanderplatz on the way to Sternradio (who remembers the best Soundsystem in town?)! Dialed in with my Nokia and played pong.