
80x40 - ingve
http://blog.mattbierner.com/80x40/
======
broodbucket
I think it'd be a lot more interesting if there was a limit to how many
characters could change per pull request. It could still be botted, but
there'd be more interesting art than at present where people are resetting it
constantly instead of several people building something "interesting".

Fun concept regardless.

~~~
Roodgorf
That sounds cool, but I wonder if there would be a problem if the repo hit
anything close to a critical mass where several people were editing forked
repos at once and submitting pull requests. I imagine it would be pretty
frustrating to go through the process and make some changes only to find out
that your original revision is now too outdated for the bot to merge.

------
trymas
As I expected, it didn't take long for picture to become a bunch of dicks.

[https://github.com/art-dot-
git/80x40/commit/4f511b050a949bfc...](https://github.com/art-dot-
git/80x40/commit/4f511b050a949bfc7a5be6daf29d3570affb5f8a)

~~~
JustSomeNobody
I seriously don't get the humor in this.

~~~
jwr
Seconded. And some people are making themselves much less employable — that
commit history is there to stay.

~~~
seba_dos1
You made me want to draw some dicks in some public repo and get bad employers
filter themselves out :P

~~~
brwnll
Please do. If you consider a company expecting employees to have the maturity
above an adolescent boy "bad employers", we'd like you to help filter yourself
out.

~~~
seba_dos1
Don't worry, you probably already filtered me out. I have plenty of ponies
shown publicly in many places, including github profile. That degrades my
maturity level to a little girl - and I'm not even a woman! [/s]

Any company judging "maturity" of actions done by someone in their spare time
is not worth working for. It's just not their business to decide whether
someone is "mature" or not, so if they cannot manage their business properly,
why should I want to work with them? They probably won't be able to maintain
healthy relationship with their employees anyway if they're so keen to filter
out perfectly fine candidates over something so unimportant and nonharmful as
low-grade sense of humor.

~~~
CUViper
Liking something childish and acting unprofessionally are very different
aspects of immaturity. I wouldn't care about the former, but the latter may
reflect poorly on the company, especially in open source where developers are
like ambassadors to the community.

But if you maintain a good wall between your professional life and that
immature spare time, such that the employer doesn't even see the low-grade
stuff, then fine.

~~~
seba_dos1
How does employer seeing it or not make any difference? (except the obvious
one that it's hard to react to what you can't see)

It's hardly even "acting unprofessionally". It's a lighthearted project where,
well, some part of the fun is waiting for the first person to draw some dicks
in. If you can't get over it, that's more likely problem with your attitude,
not the person's who drew it.

~~~
CUViper
If the employer is worried about how you represent their public image, and
you've disassociated this activity well enough that the employer doesn't know
about it, then their concern is mostly satisfied.

Anyway, let the mutual filtering continue. You don't want to work for a
company that cares about drawing public dicks, and such a company won't want
to hire you. It doesn't really even matter to decide whose attitude has a
problem -- you're just culturally incompatible.

------
wetmore
He should set up a script to take a screenshot of it with each commit as well
and make an animated gif.

~~~
rootlocus
You would get penises every two frames. Depending on the speed of the GIF, the
result would be flickering penises...

~~~
TallGuyShort
Never have I seen an HN comment that would be this weird when taken out of
context.

------
informatimago
I was about to clone it and push a patch. But then, I realized how complex the
procedure was going to be:

1- clone the repo on github 2- clone the clone locally 3- patch the file 4-
commit (with a meaningful commit message) 5- push the patch to the clone on
github 6- go to the github web to post a pull request.

Plus, that would leave a trace on my github account (I assume that I could:

7- delete my github clone.

but only after the pull request is acted upon (which even if automatic is
bound to take some time during which this github activity could be seen).

The lesson here is that providing small patches is too costly.

~~~
panic
The GitHub pull request model is absurdly complex for drive-by changes. I wish
there were a way to just send a patch.

~~~
estsauver
The edit button lets you change it easily

~~~
panic
Obviously this doesn't apply here, but how does that work with changes across
multiple files? Even one-off changes sometimes need to touch different parts
of the codebase.

The ideal workflow for me would be:

1\. Clone the repo locally (not making a public fork that requires cleanup).

2\. Make changes and commit them (not making a branch that requires cleanup).

3\. Send the patch (or patches) for review.

4\. If the patch is reviewed, it's either automatically landed or a project
committer applies it and commits it. Either way, there's nothing else I have
to do at this point besides deleting my local clone.

I can see how the GitHub model works for people who contribute to the same
projects frequently, but there's too much stuff you have to do (forking,
cloning, branching) and then un-do if you're making a drive-by change and
don't want the project to clutter up your profile.

~~~
morgante
Why are you fixating on this notion of cleanup? There's no need to "clean up"
your public repos.

Even if you're making complex changes, I think GitHub is _much_ easier to work
with than the classic "patch" emails.

I frequently will randomly fork a project that I'm using and submit a minor
pull request when I wouldn't hunt down their source control system, clone it
locally, make changes, find their preferred email/patch system, look up the
commands to create a patch file, and email the patch.

GitHub is drop dead simple:

1\. Click fork. 2\. Edit your fork online or clone locally, committing
changes. 3\. Click the "pull request" button.

Just because a model is new doesn't mean it's worse.

------
debacle
This would be a far more interesting experiment if users could only modify a
small subset of the characters per commit (a bit like GitHub Plays ASCII Art).

------
userbinator
The question whose answer I didn't see in the "Why" section is "Why 80x40?"
80x25, 80x50, and 80x43 seem obvious to me, but 80x40 feels odd... Maybe I'm
just old and everyone uses 80x40 terminals now?

~~~
guessbest
I'm not old, and I thought it would be a funny sized punch card. Also, his
ASCII art doesn't have rounded corners like the standard IBM cards dating back
to 1964.

~~~
efaref
I thought punchcards were 80x1. This is a stack of 40 cards.

------
vkjv
It would be a nice feature to reject any PRs that are over a certain # of
characters diff. That way it becomes more collaborative instead of wholesale
replacement.

~~~
tlrobinson
Along the lines of TwitchInstallsArchLinux, GitHubDrawsAPicture

------
slazaro
OF COURSE in its current state is a bunch of penises...

~~~
rootlocus
OF COURSE it's scripted so that it's almost always in that state.

------
Thiz
Interesting. Put it sideways, allow to save many frames and then play ASCII
movies. That may start a new fad. The internet is all about fads.

------
wisienkas
An Interesting approach would be to use it as a GIF or video by using some
distance formular to sort all the changes in the least changing way.

------
jlebrech
sudo curl [https://github.com/art-dot-
git/80x40/blob/master/README](https://github.com/art-dot-
git/80x40/blob/master/README) > /etc/motd

~~~
jwilk
You didn't actually try it, did you? :>

It should be:

sudo curl -L [https://github.com/art-dot-
git/80x40/raw/master/README](https://github.com/art-dot-
git/80x40/raw/master/README) -o /etc/motd

~~~
jlebrech
yeah I wouldn't run that, the content of that url looks nasty. any chance it
could buffer override the motd command?

------
Tepix
No Unicode, no graphical characters for ASCII art. Sad.

~~~
teach
Maybe I'm just old, but I don't think of "ASCII art" and "graphical
characters" as belonging together.

Traditionally, ASCII art is limited to ASCII 32-126 plus tabs.

