[HN Gopher] Doom, Played over Curl
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       Doom, Played over Curl
        
       Author : creaktive
       Score  : 89 points
       Date   : 2026-04-12 10:01 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | fao_ wrote:
       | > The catch: the shell normally puts the terminal in *cooked
       | mode,*
       | 
       | Yeah, that's not the name of the mode. In this sense, it's
       | "canonical mode". Description reads like AI slop where technical
       | content was reformatted into marketing/PRspeak. It feels like a
       | 30 year old PR representative desperately trying to twist any
       | kind of technical language specifically to pander to the AAVE-
       | derived slang of the younger set of internet-addled minds.
       | 
       | As a result, this does not interest me.
       | 
       | For anyone who is interested in ANSI terminal stuff, or building
       | their own, Lexi Hale had a decent article on this: https://xn--
       | rpa.cc/irl/term.html which got discussion here about eight years
       | ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24436860
        
         | bevr1337 wrote:
         | Top comment on the previous thread was someone complaining
         | about the writing style of kids these days. Huh.
        
         | cmovq wrote:
         | Except it's actually called "cooked mode" [1] and predates the
         | use of the slang.
         | 
         | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_mode
         | https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/
        
           | fao_ wrote:
           | "cooked mode" refers to physical teletypes, though. In the
           | POSIX spec[1] it's called "canonical mode", same for the
           | other specifications (if they're mentioned at all, I don't
           | think the ANSI specification mentions either term).
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX_terminal_interface#Canon.
           | ..
        
       | thomasfl wrote:
       | This is a good template for making terminal based apps that run
       | on remote servers.
        
         | kaoD wrote:
         | Or just use SSH.
        
         | anthk wrote:
         | You are reinventing telnet.
        
         | stratos123 wrote:
         | This idea has the rather severe problem that it requires piping
         | an untrusted remote script directly into bash.
        
       | varun_ch wrote:
       | One interesting side effect of having a LLM write the thing
       | including the README, is that the models tend to leave little
       | hints of the authors intention or prompt as over-explained
       | passages that make it obvious that AI help was used.
       | 
       | https://github.com/xsawyerx/curl-doom?tab=readme-ov-file#how...
       | 
       | eg. > A browser hitting the same URL gets a tiny landing page
       | that just shows the one-liner
       | 
       | it's subtle but once you notice it, it's hard to miss.
       | 
       | As an aside, I feel like projects like this used to be really fun
       | and impressive (I guess due to the fact that you'd think "Wow a
       | human put their time into this wacky crazy thing"), whereas now
       | you can have Claude consistently crap out something like this in
       | 5 minutes, so it ruins the whole appeal to me...
        
         | z3c0 wrote:
         | Not to mention that the objectively bad practice of piping a
         | curl call to bash is nowhere close to "playing doom via curl".
         | It's almost as if they simply prompted "play doom with curl".
         | In my experience, almost any overly-ambitious prompt ends
         | similarly.
        
           | varun_ch wrote:
           | Oh wait I didn't even register that! yeah of course you can
           | do anything in a terminal using curl if you're piping to
           | bash!!!
        
       | Leomuck wrote:
       | What the hell. First, I thought this was crazy. How could you do
       | anything crazy with curl? But of course, curling a bash script
       | opens lots of opportunities. Given the right permissions, you
       | could run an enterprise Jira server via only a curl to a bash
       | script.
       | 
       | Still cool that people find more ways to play doom, but calling
       | it "via curl" seems a little missleading to me. "Playing doom via
       | a simple bash script" would have felt more appropriate.
        
         | anthk wrote:
         | Play nethack with a simple oneliner: nc nethack.alt.org 23
        
       | reactordev wrote:
       | oddly enough, this is how it looked when I ran it on my 486 when
       | I was a kid. Pretty accurate except this runs at a faster fps
       | than mine did... ;)
        
         | nurettin wrote:
         | I remember Liquid crystal displays having an unintended blur
         | effect when something animates or rotates, but it wasn't as bad
         | as ansi chars.
        
       | azalemeth wrote:
       | Reminds me of libcaca - http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca - which
       | can render many things natively in ascii, really incredibly
       | effectively.
        
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       (page generated 2026-04-12 23:01 UTC)