

Show HN: ASCII Animals in Your Terminal - ivolo
http://ivolo.me/ascii-animals-the-perfect-loading-indicator/

======
raldi

        curl -s [url] | sh
    

Please don't train people to do that.

~~~
fletchowns
npm used to suggest something similar as an easy way to install...

    
    
      curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh

~~~
juan_juarez
That's a different case. Installing software implicitly means you trust an
installer. Throwing random data into a shell prompt to see an ASCII cat is the
sort of shit that gave my dad email viruses in the late 90s.

~~~
delllapssuck
And today it's Javascript. Same problem. Running someone else's code without
reading it first.

Why?

Because people want to see a "doodle" or some other silly graphic.

Truthfully, it's gotten worse: "Please enable Javascript." "You need to enable
Javascript to use this website." (9 times out of 10, that's a lie.)

In the 1980's, it was telling people to run some ANSI codes through printf to
see a blinking Christmas Tree.

~~~
sciurus
Your web browser is designed to sandbox and safely run code.

Your shell isn't.

(People are working on it though, see for example
[http://berrange.com/posts/2012/01/17/building-application-
sa...](http://berrange.com/posts/2012/01/17/building-application-sandboxes-
with-libvirt-lxc-kvm/))

~~~
delllapssuck
I can "sandbox" code using the shell far easier than I can control what a
"modern browser" can do.

Because I know the shell and my OS better than I know a "modern browser".

"People are working on it..."

C'mon, man. This sounds pathetic. You can learn to use the shell safely. How
do you think sysadmins do their jobs?

Or you can pretend the shell is too difficult and something to be feared. The
simple fact is _you_ control the shell. You don't expose it to the world
(unless you're playing games with CGI or doing like the OP said: feeding it
random bytes from the internet). You can read the code for a basic shell (e.g.
rc, sh, dash). You can modify and compile it yourself. You can write your own.
CS students routinely write their own shells as part of the curriculum. A
"shell" is something relatively simple.

You really think you're ridiculously complex "modern browser" is "safe"? Safer
than your shell?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8cQ0yU89sk>

When your use the shell, you trust the people who provide your OS's kernel,
the compiler, libraries and userland and those 3d party applications, if any,
you choose to run. That's already a lot of people and a lot of code. When you
use a "modern browser" who do you trust? I can't even begin to quantify it.

As a very well respected cryptographer once wrote, security may be less a
matter of reducing privilege than of reducing the amount of trusted code. The
only reason you even have a concet of "privilege" is because it's a relic of
shared computing. Everyone has their own computer now. There's no such thing
as "root" in Plan 9.

Compare the LOC in a basic shell with the LOC in your web browser.

~~~
sciurus
This discussion began when people pointed out that running shell scripts
directly from the web was a Very Bad Idea. You then seemed to claim that
browsing with javascript enabled was a similarly bad idea. I simply pointed
out that they weren't equivalent at all, since the web browser was explicitly
designed to execute untrusted code while your shell most certainly is not. I
did not argue that web browser security was foolproof, and you're welcome to
disable javascript and similar browser features if you feel it's a good
tradeoff of functionality and security for you.

------
fletchowns
Reminds me of

    
    
      telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
    

(can't believe this is still up after all these years)

~~~
makmanalp
My god, I remember being spellbound by this for hours as a novice, after
learning my first few shell commands and managing to get the damn modem to
work on linux.

------
gpmcadam
Also similar to _cowsay_ [1]:

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay>

------
thebigshane
skip right to the purdy pictures:
[https://raw.github.com/ivolo/animals/master/public/assets/an...](https://raw.github.com/ivolo/animals/master/public/assets/animals.saved)
[400kb text file download]

which apparently are all _borrowed_ from here:
<http://www.heartnsoul.com/ascii_art/ascii_animals_indx.htm>

------
sciurus
Speaking of ASCII art in your terminal,

    
    
      $ apt-get install sl
      $ /usr/games/sl

~~~
bayesbiol
Yay for steam locomotive! I think of it as a handy reminder from your sys-
admin "don't drink and ssh!"

~~~
peterwwillis
That same sys-admin probably won the Crash And Compile drinking game at DEF
CON. Don't listen to him.

------
jewel
There are practical uses for ASCII animals. When I built a command-line tool
to let the developers sign out for a 15 minute break at my last job (because
doing it via the AS/400 interface was a big hassle), I used a big, yellow
elephant [1]. This made it easy to remember to hit the enter key to go back on
the clock when they got back to their computer.

[1]: I think it was this one: <http://thesteve.org/up/elephant.txt>

~~~
dhimes
You had developers do WHATTTTT????

------
xyzzyb
My favorite (useful!) ASCII terminal animal is the Nyan Cat RSpec formatter. I
love that little guy.

[http://mattsears.com/articles/2011/11/16/nyan-cat-rspec-
form...](http://mattsears.com/articles/2011/11/16/nyan-cat-rspec-formatter)

He makes the tests slower, but I still have him check my entire suite of specs
at least once a day.

------
anveo
/usr/games/cowsay -f `ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows | shuf -n1`
`/usr/games/fortune`

------
mixmastamyk
Neat, but it seems to make an http request for every frame. Unclear if
requests caches that, but I did get a socket error on KeyboardInterrupt so I
don't think so.

------
makmanalp
And if you want to generate ascii text: <http://www.figlet.org/>

