Show HN: Doomguy as a Service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Doomguy as a Service

doomguy.herokuapp.com

41 pointsejfinneran22 comments

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?

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.

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.

The difference being that the author of the doomguy website seems to me is just having a laugh and you're being dead serious.

...or maybe it's just for fun.

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.

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!

For some reason seeing a size expressed in bytes makes it seem small. Saying 620 characters sounds much more reasonable.

It was UTF8 so no guarantee about character versus byte size.

It was just a fun toy app that I whipped up. Didn't mean to offend anyone with my "hot tech". :-)

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?

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.

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

Don't forget there's a god mode face image too: 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.

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

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.

I guess, but then you have to scale to 0-100 (don't forget to round!), which doesn't seem any more convenient.

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.

>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.

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

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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com