How Did I Get Here?
Posted2 months agoActive2 months ago
how-did-i-get-here.netTechstoryHigh profile
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Traceroute
The website 'how-did-i-get-here.net' uses a creative technique to display a traceroute without JavaScript, sparking discussion about its implementation and usefulness.
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- 01Story posted
Nov 7, 2025 at 3:01 PM EST
2 months ago
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Nov 7, 2025 at 3:05 PM EST
4m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
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Nov 10, 2025 at 6:05 AM EST
2 months ago
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ID: 45850382Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 4:44:33 PM
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(sigh) I'm just thinking those thoughts right now.
ssh watch.ascii.theater
Behind the keyboard of a large PC
Well, how did ip route here?
Love this
https://lamplightdev.com/blog/2024/01/10/streaming-html-out-...
This is categorically incorrect. While the AS path is often the same, the actual peering points are almost always quite different. Most ASes use hot-potato routing - getting packets to the next AS at the closest peering point to the source of the traffic. (And even if cold-potato routing is used, that's still asymmetric). In addition if there are two options with the same AS-path-length hot-potato routing can lead to different AS paths. This can happen if there's two mutual transit providers between source and destination and various other situations.
(EDIT: fixed hot/cold mixup)
You may think this is unfair, and yes, it is, but it's also quite logical when you consider you don't know where the packet is going in the destination AS. If you have a network spanning Berlin and Hamburg and the packet is going to a different network that also spans Berlin and Hamburg, and you interconnect at both points, and you don't know which city it's actually going to, handing it off at the closest interconnect doesn't risk round-tripping it for no good reason.
I'm interested in your definition of fairness that makes hot potato routing unfair.
In my mind, hot potato is fair, every packet gets treated the same, and (mostly) every provider does the same thing.
> it's also quite logical when you consider you don't know where the packet is going in the destination AS. If you have a network spanning Berlin and Hamburg and the packet is going to a different network that also spans Berlin and Hamburg, and you interconnect at both points, and you don't know which city it's actually going to, handing it off at the closest interconnect doesn't risk round-tripping it for no good reason.
There are ways to help with this, BGP MED (multi-exit discriminator) or path extention can help guide towards the best place to deliver traffic. But especially for last mile traffic, you do want it on the destination network sooner than later; if traffic is genetated in Berlin, and the ultimate destination is Hannover and the Hannover endpoint is connected to both Berlin and Hamburg on the destination network, delivering at Berlin provides a better experience than delivering to Hamburg, even though Hamburg is closer to Hannover, because the transit to Hamburg was unnecessary. And if the destination is only connected to Hamburg, delivering in Berlin works about the same as delivering in Hamburg (depending on capacity and use from Berlin to Hamburg on both networks).
There's certainly situations where having options would be nice, but having options makes things complex, so typical users can't really influence routing. If you have v4 and v6, you may find that routing differs between the two and that does give you a bit of a choice.
> - Lexi, Nov 7, 3:16 PM PST
I read this title and that opening bass line just starts flowing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531604
No, it's actually a time, it's just that it has a precision of 1 second.
RFC 791: "The time is measured in units of seconds, but since every module that processes a datagram must decrease the TTL by at least one even if it process the datagram in less than a second, the TTL must be thought of only as an upper bound on the time a datagram may exist."
One of the major infelicities of the web is that CSS is specified to ignore truncation, and there is no way to fix this. Now think about what happens if something like `display: inline-block` gets truncated before the `-`.
Traceroute isn't real, or: Whoops! Everyone Was Wrong Forever: https://gekk.info/articles/traceroute.htm