6 ms·

Show HN: Doomguy as a Service

41 points by ejfinneran 13y ago

benologist 13y ago
This is cute but it needs to be obnoxious, not cute. Give me monsters coming out, the screen flashing red when you're hurting and dying etc. If this dude shows up in the middle of your dashboard attacking you you're going to notice. http://cdn.gametop.com/download-free/doom/b2.jpg http://cdn.gametop.com/download-free/doom/b2.jpg Also if the enemies, one per metric, are killed with a chainsaw when your numbers improve or stabilize that would be somewhere close to the pinnacle of awesome.
Paul_S 13y ago
I didn't know they released the WAD as public domain.
aiiane 13y ago
Are we really so desperate to stick with buzzwords and "hot tech" that we wind up creating Heroku-powered Ruby apps with Bootstrap UI widget-filled pages to serve up a set of 5 static images over HTTP, rather than just, say, uploading them to imgur?
- Paul_S 13y ago
  I think it says more about humanity circa 2013 that you fail to see the irony of your post. Apologies if you meant it as a joke.
  - aiiane 13y ago
    The irony of saying "write less code"? Yes, imgur is itself a service, but it's one with much less complexity (and more generalization) than the OP, and the OP gains nothing from its increased complexity.
    - Paul_S 13y ago
      The difference being that the author of the doomguy website seems to me is just having a laugh and you're being dead serious.
- icambron 13y ago
  ...or maybe it's just for fun.
- zalzane 13y ago
  I think OP's post is tongue-in-cheek. Like you said, it's essentially 5 different gifs with lots of bootstrap and buzzwords in the title. But hey, it got on the front page too.
- spongle 13y ago
  Whilst this is a post of derision, I do think people only know the highest level abstraction mankind can accomplish these days. It's embarrassing really. There is elegance in simplicity. Please continue to take the piss out of it :) I actually knocked up a single new static error page for our main web application a few weeks ago in 620 bytes including inline css (quite big if you ask me). It had no dependencies. My coworkers were actually astounded that it was so small!?!?! Go figure!
  - gizmo686 13y ago
    For some reason seeing a size expressed in bytes makes it seem small. Saying 620 characters sounds much more reasonable.
    - spongle 13y ago
      It was UTF8 so no guarantee about character versus byte size.
- ejfinneran 13y ago
  It was just a fun toy app that I whipped up. Didn't mean to offend anyone with my "hot tech". :-)
  - tinco 13y ago
    Though I think GP is being a bit of an idiot, I read your source and I was a little surprised. The app only consists of static files, yet you run every request through a rack app that does nothing but send the static files (except for the indexing of the face files, which could've been done ahead of time too). Why?
    - ejfinneran 13y ago
      The idea was that the image URL could just be a number between 0 and 100 and the app would handle translating that to 1 of 5 possible images. If I just served a file for every possible number, the browser would have to potentially download 20x the data.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
mistercow 13y ago
I don't understand the point of redirecting every number between 0 and 100 when there are only five gifs.
- tdicola 13y ago
  I'm guessing his intention is that you build an app which scales its metrics to values between 0-100 and then construct a URL directly to the image--that way you don't need to worry about mapping the value to the damage inflicted.
  - mistercow 13y ago
    I guess, but then you have to scale to 0-100 (don't forget to round!), which doesn't seem any more convenient.
- ejfinneran 13y ago
  That way the browser can download and cache 5 possible images rather than 100 and the user just has to think in terms of 0-100.
  - mistercow 13y ago
    >and the user just has to think in terms of 0-100 This is the part I'm not understanding. Why would the user want to think in terms of 0-100? What benefit is there to that? One way or another, you're going to be doing Math.floor(val*N/maxVal). What difference does it make if N=5 or N=100? The only advantage I can see is that setting N higher means that you can later add more steps without breaking backwards compatibility. But this is one case where that definitely won't happen, since the steps are a historical reference.
tdicola 13y ago
Don't forget there's a god mode face image too: https://www.google.com/search?q=doom+god+mode&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=-2pQUqrkBMbtiQKgmYHQBw&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1246&bih=971&dpr=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=doom+god+mode&source=lnms&tb... I made a similar doom guy visualization long ago to monitor server health that got some laughs from coworkers. Like it was mentioned, be careful since the Doom assets are still copyright id software even if the code and shareware WADs are free.
antihero 13y ago
I'm genuinely disappointed that IDDQD did not turn him god mode.
ozh 13y ago
The Linux utility the creator of this couldn't find: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

41 points by ejfinneran 13y ago

This is cute but it needs to be obnoxious, not cute. Give me monsters coming out, the screen flashing red when you're hurting and dying etc. If this dude shows up in the middle of your dashboard attacking you you're going to notice. http://cdn.gametop.com/download-free/doom/b2.jpg http://cdn.gametop.com/download-free/doom/b2.jpg Also if the enemies, one per metric, are killed with a chainsaw when your numbers improve or stabilize that would be somewhere close to the pinnacle of awesome.

Paul_S 13y ago

I didn't know they released the WAD as public domain.

aiiane 13y ago

Are we really so desperate to stick with buzzwords and "hot tech" that we wind up creating Heroku-powered Ruby apps with Bootstrap UI widget-filled pages to serve up a set of 5 static images over HTTP, rather than just, say, uploading them to imgur?

Paul_S 13y ago
I think it says more about humanity circa 2013 that you fail to see the irony of your post. Apologies if you meant it as a joke.
- aiiane 13y ago
  The irony of saying "write less code"? Yes, imgur is itself a service, but it's one with much less complexity (and more generalization) than the OP, and the OP gains nothing from its increased complexity.
  - Paul_S 13y ago
    The difference being that the author of the doomguy website seems to me is just having a laugh and you're being dead serious.
icambron 13y ago
...or maybe it's just for fun.
zalzane 13y ago
I think OP's post is tongue-in-cheek. Like you said, it's essentially 5 different gifs with lots of bootstrap and buzzwords in the title. But hey, it got on the front page too.
spongle 13y ago
Whilst this is a post of derision, I do think people only know the highest level abstraction mankind can accomplish these days. It's embarrassing really. There is elegance in simplicity. Please continue to take the piss out of it :) I actually knocked up a single new static error page for our main web application a few weeks ago in 620 bytes including inline css (quite big if you ask me). It had no dependencies. My coworkers were actually astounded that it was so small!?!?! Go figure!
- gizmo686 13y ago
  For some reason seeing a size expressed in bytes makes it seem small. Saying 620 characters sounds much more reasonable.
  - spongle 13y ago
    It was UTF8 so no guarantee about character versus byte size.
ejfinneran 13y ago
It was just a fun toy app that I whipped up. Didn't mean to offend anyone with my "hot tech". :-)
- tinco 13y ago
  Though I think GP is being a bit of an idiot, I read your source and I was a little surprised. The app only consists of static files, yet you run every request through a rack app that does nothing but send the static files (except for the indexing of the face files, which could've been done ahead of time too). Why?
  - ejfinneran 13y ago
    The idea was that the image URL could just be a number between 0 and 100 and the app would handle translating that to 1 of 5 possible images. If I just served a file for every possible number, the browser would have to potentially download 20x the data.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

mistercow 13y ago

I don't understand the point of redirecting every number between 0 and 100 when there are only five gifs.

tdicola 13y ago
I'm guessing his intention is that you build an app which scales its metrics to values between 0-100 and then construct a URL directly to the image--that way you don't need to worry about mapping the value to the damage inflicted.
- mistercow 13y ago
  I guess, but then you have to scale to 0-100 (don't forget to round!), which doesn't seem any more convenient.
ejfinneran 13y ago
That way the browser can download and cache 5 possible images rather than 100 and the user just has to think in terms of 0-100.
- mistercow 13y ago
  >and the user just has to think in terms of 0-100 This is the part I'm not understanding. Why would the user want to think in terms of 0-100? What benefit is there to that? One way or another, you're going to be doing Math.floor(val*N/maxVal). What difference does it make if N=5 or N=100? The only advantage I can see is that setting N higher means that you can later add more steps without breaking backwards compatibility. But this is one case where that definitely won't happen, since the steps are a historical reference.

tdicola 13y ago

Don't forget there's a god mode face image too: https://www.google.com/search?q=doom+god+mode&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=-2pQUqrkBMbtiQKgmYHQBw&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1246&bih=971&dpr=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=doom+god+mode&source=lnms&tb... I made a similar doom guy visualization long ago to monitor server health that got some laughs from coworkers. Like it was mentioned, be careful since the Doom assets are still copyright id software even if the code and shareware WADs are free.

antihero 13y ago

I'm genuinely disappointed that IDDQD did not turn him god mode.

ozh 13y ago

The Linux utility the creator of this couldn't find: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/