I'm kinda baffled how this recipe for using ssh, rudimentary sysadmin skills and scripting is deemed news. Maybe back in the heyday of Slashdot, this would be half-interesting -- like, uhh, when OpenSSH actually introduced tunneling, or when Iodine was introduced, or whatever... At best, a "protip" everyone could've discovered himself through a few minutes of Googling.
Not so much 'news' but perhaps a quick hack, nice reminder, a quick intro for the less experienced (who may not know what they are missing in the first place). Or perhaps someone who has set this up before in a different way might want to change how they do it.
Because not everyone knows everything, and the entire point of being HACKERS (I assume the uppercase is useful) is to promote learning and sharing knowledge.
So whilst this is probably not front news worthy of LEET HACKERS it's probably made someone go 'hey thats cool' and that's all it needed to do.
No, it implies that you think that the other person is stupid AND they use some form of Unix. Any way you put it, your response is unfriendly and rude. And Hacker News should not be known for arrogance. In fact, the person reading this article might not know much about tunnelling, but maybe writing the next greatest app. You won't know who you are displaying your arrogance to, so don't do it.
… because we are not all doing the same kind of hacking. The variety of news here is proof for that.
Back to the topic: I my own router to create a tunnel similar to the one described by the OP. It is not as fast as an Amazon instance but free wi-fi is neither.
Sadly as HN has become more popular it really ought to be renamed Larval Stage Hacker News. Recently some pretty bad articles have made the front page, like The 5-minute Guide to C Pointers which embarrassingly conflates arrays and pointers, or my personal pet peeve, the endless stream of puffy $EDITOR advocacy posts, for those folks who are still on the fence about what tool they're going to use to edit a fucking file.
Anyway, as much as I complain about all the puff pieces, there are still plenty of articles with real technical meat on HN, you just got to wade through some crap to get to them.
Actually, a lot of us come for the articles but stay for the conversation. That pointer article may have had an error, but it was discussed in the comments.
That's the hacker ethos - show what you know, if you are wrong someone will point it out and others (and hopefully youtself!) will learn from it.
The sort of attitude you are display is the sort of hypercritical one that prevents people from submitting "Show HN", which is a real pity.
Agreed, I'm also not sure why he didn't just use the SOCKS proxy in ssh as opposed to sshuttle. ssh -D8080 and then point your network config to localhost 8080 as the local proxy and everything is encrypted.
