[HN Gopher] parrot.live
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parrot.live
Author : jasonthorsness
Score : 208 points
Date : 2025-06-04 23:05 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| You have to use curl:
|
| > curl parrot.live
|
| Otherwise parrot.live redirects (which HN followed otherwise link
| here would be parrot.live).
| maxmcd wrote:
| yep:
| https://github.com/hugomd/parrot.live/blob/f349d2788fc47ac5f...
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Reminds me that I made a rainbow unicorn that jumped across your
| screen as a cmdline utility to be run after all tests passed.
| Coworkers got a good laugh if nothing else. Fun times.
| nine_k wrote:
| Now you can just ask an AI to write the code to show a jumping
| unicorn. All the magic is gone from programming!
| charcircuit wrote:
| Parrot.live uses computer generated ascii art rather than one
| made by a human artist. It seems as if people already don't
| value the art part either.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Others can ask AI to write it, but I don't have to use it. I
| can still write my own and use what others have written by
| hand.
| brookst wrote:
| "You can use AI to write code to show a jumping unicorn"
| feels pretty magic to me.
| nine_k wrote:
| That was my attempt to be ironic.
| vunderba wrote:
| Nice. I'm reminded of the IntelliJ extension that replaces
| progress bars with the Nyan Cat.
| rozhok wrote:
| I still use it!
| joshdavham wrote:
| This is awesome! Are there any other things like this?
| nine_k wrote:
| Sadly the domain never.gonna.give.you.up was not available.
|
| (Damn, that's the kind of stuff we entertained ourselves as
| freshmen on a PDP-11 with a few terminals in 1991.)
| fragmede wrote:
| ssh funky.nondeterministic.computer
| agos wrote:
| telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
| jks wrote:
| curl wttr.in
| focusedone wrote:
| https://ascii.theater/
| layer8 wrote:
| telnet telehack.com
| baalimago wrote:
| In powershell??
| microsoftedging wrote:
| didn't work in powershell for me, had to do it in warp
| DaSHacka wrote:
| I'd imagine it should work, so long as you use `curl.exe` and
| not `curl`
| neuroticnews25 wrote:
| curl.exe parrot.live to bypass the invoke-webrequest alias
| mtekman wrote:
| Reminds me of smithers.el
|
| https://gitlab.com/mtekman/smithers.el/
| troupo wrote:
| Remonds of when you could watch ASCII Star Wars with telnet:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqJrI12ruxg
| ku1ik wrote:
| Or in actual ASCII: https://asciinema.org/a/569727
| hsx wrote:
| Wow! Surprised to see this on the front page.
|
| I built this about 8 years ago on a whim, and it blew up. Only
| recently did I learn there was a memory leak, after getting a big
| traffic spike that caused an OOM.
|
| Over the years it's burned through several TB of bandwidth per
| month.
|
| I built ascii.live to support different animations for fun,
| although I don't have as much time to review PRs as I'd like.
| zavec wrote:
| Ooh, I had a coworker who had one with zoidberg dancing once,
| though it seems to be dead now so maybe he didn't renew the
| domain. He probably used ascii.live!
| petepete wrote:
| There's an actual parrot emoji now for your GitHub description
| LorenDB wrote:
| > Over the years it's burned through several TB of bandwidth
| per month.
|
| I hope you're hosting it on Hetzner (or somewhere else with a
| generous traffic plan). They give you 20TB traffic per month.
| diggan wrote:
| Or if you're running a bunch of smaller projects, get a
| dedicated server with Hetzner and enjoy unmetered connection.
| oytis wrote:
| Author's github history looks like an absolute coding machine
| shreddit wrote:
| I wonder what happened on May 11th
| gwhr wrote:
| And what happened in Nov 2023
| roflmaostc wrote:
| many of those commits are in private repos.
|
| I've seen people pushing e.g. weather data to GitHub in regular
| intervals blowing up their commit numbers.
|
| Just check this to find crazy numbers: https://committers.top/
| cg5280 wrote:
| The days with lots of commits start rather abruptly at the
| end of 2023, so it being some sort of automation seems
| plausible.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| Lots of organic explanations for that.
|
| A lone developer can get away with infrequent commits at no
| practical cost. Maybe something happened in 2023 that made
| them a more prolific committer.
| elif wrote:
| Spending a little bit of my free moments throughout the day
| interacting with coding agents on my phone, it's almost
| impossible to not have solid dark green for every day.
|
| These charts are less useful than they have ever been for
| determining how much code a person writes, but they are
| probably a good metric overall to measure the productivity
| gains going on in the industry overall.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| wow, using coding agents from your phone is interesting.
| what's your workflow look like?
| fragmede wrote:
| With ChatGPT Codex connected to GitHub it's pretty neat.
| From my phone I throw some tasks at it and go about my day
| and then check in with it later. After giving it some time,
| I come back and look at what it's done and kick off some
| more or look at diffs and create PRs right from my phone.
| It's fairly limited in what can be done from the phone so
| you'll need to have a laptop for anything more involved
| than eg spelling errors, but it's a very interesting view
| of the future.
| barrenko wrote:
| This is the way.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| This sounds like hell.
| donbreo wrote:
| site crashed! I cant get a response
| sandos wrote:
| Soooo, not knowing much about either curl nor front-end.. how
| DOES THIS WORK?
|
| Is this just some weird default logging in curl?
| throwaway0665 wrote:
| Curl just downloads the http response and prints it to the
| terminal. The sever streams the response and yields a frame of
| the video every 70ms or so. It sends control characters in the
| response to clear the terminal and change the color.
| foolswisdom wrote:
| I figure that the response uses ascii escape sequences to
| control the terminal (and that curl is just piping the response
| to the terminal).
| sodafountan wrote:
| Short Story: this is just a website.
|
| If you go to parrot.live from your browser it automatically
| redirects to the GitHub page for the project; The code for
| which is on line 103:
| https://github.com/hugomd/parrot.live/blob/master/index.js#L...
|
| You'll notice though that if you change the user agent from
| your browser to include the string 'curl' you can reach the
| site from within the browser as the redirect logic
| encapsulating line 103 doesn't fire.
|
| You can do that by:
|
| * Opening Chrome,
|
| * Opening Chrome Dev Tools within Chrome,
|
| * Going to the Network Tab within Chrome Dev Tools,
|
| * Clicking on "More Network Conditions" within the Network Tab,
|
| * Go the the "User Agent" section and type 'curl' whithout the
| parens,
|
| * Navigate to parrot.live with the network tab open and you
| should see the ascii animation in your browser.
| Daviey wrote:
| Loved to death I assume. :( $ curl parrot.live
| <html> <head><title>504 Gateway Time-out</title></head>
| <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>504 Gateway Time-
| out</h1></center> <hr><center>nginx/1.14.0
| (Ubuntu)</center> </body> </html>
| mathewpregasen wrote:
| this is what Hacker News was made for
| financypants wrote:
| That crashed my ssh session into my rapberry pi
| Liftyee wrote:
| Fun little parrot! And beats installing with snap (I don't like
| snap).
|
| Out of curiosity, my rudimentary measurement puts bandwidth usage
| at about 17 KiB/s. Some might say that's negligible nowadays,
| which is not that unreasonable (1 hour ~ 61 MiB). Still, my
| efficiency brain is tingling. I guess simply displaying chars is
| lower risk than running code on your computer.
| derkades wrote:
| Well, in some cases terminal escape seqeuences can be abused to
| execute code. So you shouldn't feel so safe curling random
| websites!
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(page generated 2025-06-05 23:01 UTC)