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Hacker Typer

(hackertyper.net)
270 points rvnx | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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SamWhited ◴[] No.41879318[source]
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).

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syncsynchalt ◴[] No.41882638[source]
Ahh, I used to queue this up on another screen when I needed things to look "busy":

    cat /dev/random | hexdump -C | grep 'ca fe'
Note that it runs a lot faster now than it used to in the 90s.
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1. regentbowerbird ◴[] No.41883235[source]
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:

    cat /dev/urandom | pv -q -L 50k | hexdump -C | grep 'ca fe'
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2. taway-20230404 ◴[] No.41884113[source]
Alternatively, slow it down by a factor of 16 for every additional specified character.

    cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -C | grep '9 ca fe'