Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#121

Post by HappMacDonald » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 1:44 AM UTC

text magiceye generator in JS (and another in Elm)

magiceye depth estimator in JS

FRACTRAN emulator in perl

Sigmar's Garden solitaire game solver in perl

Baba is you demake in JS

Racecar board game in Shoes (and later in awk.. though that one's not finished)

Bare-bones map editor for 4D Miner in perl (map format has probably changed since then)

Several dozen copies of "Bad Apple" rendered in TV static such that if you pause the video anywhere there is nothing to see there but static.

Minesweeper player/solver in JS (this is backwards: the program hunts for mines and asks you to give it numbers where it digs :P)

D&D dice calculator in JS

Shared/distributed D&D dice roller between untrusted parties also in JS

And on and on like that. :)

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#122

Post by pavel_lishin » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 1:47 AM UTC

eloisius wrote: post #7

About 10 or 11 years ago I wrote a bot that sat in our company Campfire chat training a Markov chain for each person. Then you could command it to imitate someone and it would spit out hilarious madlibs. This would likely not be amusing anymore, but back then it made people laugh.

I've done this as well, and I keep meaning to re-create it.

The only thing stopping me is that every time I over-engineer the hell out of it, then get annoyed and stop.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#123

Post by shkkmo » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 1:52 AM UTC

hu3 wrote: post #33

Writing programs that play games for me. I enjoy that more than playing the games.

Quite a fun hobby. What game you working on now?

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#124

Post by msephton » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 1:55 AM UTC

IAmGraydon wrote: post #106

IshKebab wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No.

I’m pretty sure it is, except instead of comparing the result to a source image, it is analyzed and scored by a model that was trained to recognize images.

It's kind of the opposite. Stable Diffusion starts with random noise, changes it, asks the model of it's representative of the goal, repeat. But there's much more to it.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#125

Post by arscan » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 1:57 AM UTC

Can’t believe it’s been a decade since I built this stuff… but I used to enjoy recreating futuristic UIs from movies. Tons of fun, wish I had time and energy for this type of play still.

E.g. https://github.com/arscan/encom-boardroom

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#126

Post by msephton » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:07 AM UTC

gabemart wrote: post #98

JS library to encode IP addresses as haiku https://github.com/gabemart/hipku demo is long since dead but the lib is just a file, should still work edit: demo - https://jsfiddle.net/wyf9zmk4/

Better than What Three Words!

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#127

Post by kmoser » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:09 AM UTC

Speaking of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" I wrote a version for Prodigy when I worked there in the 1990s, using their proprietary language named PAL: http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-PAL-528.html

It never appeared publicly on Prodigy, of course, but it was fun to run on my dev computer.

Also in the early 1990s I wrote a command-line program to generate anagrams. I spent a ton of time on it, adding all sorts of features and optimizations, and used it to find some really interesting anagrams of celebrities: https://www.kmoser.com/anagrams/

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#128

Post by msephton » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:11 AM UTC

dvrp wrote: post #118

i didn’t write this one but it’s a cool one: you know those typical day/night toggles to change dark mode that are either sun or moon? well, a friend of mine wrote a function such that the moon emoji matches the current lunar calendar and shows you a full moon or a crescent one and such.

Does it request your current location to do it? Phases are opposite in Northern and Southern hemisphere. http://www.primaryhomeworkhelp.co.uk/moon/hemispheres.html

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#129

Post by ajxs » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:12 AM UTC

nmax wrote: post #91

ajxs wrote: post #76

A long time ago I wrote a useless, but fun program that attempts to programmatically recreate a source image by randomly placing randomly sized, randomly coloured rectangles onto a canvas. If the result of this random application of colour is closer to the source image, it's kept, otherwise the changes are discarded. Over time, it gets reasonably close to the source image. https://ajxs.github.io/pbp/

This is awesome.

Thank you very much! The browser landscape was very different when the original code was written, around 10 years ago. Maybe I'll revisit it and see if it can be optimised!

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#130

Post by aimor » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:23 AM UTC

I wrote a kaleidoscope simulator. You know, a virtual tray filled with hundreds of little plastic beads of various shapes and colors that tumble around when you press the keys, with the camera displayed on a grid of triangles. I wrote it in Rust using Bevy, which was great, but it wouldn't work in WASM for some reason (simpler projects did just fine) and getting it running in the browser was the goal so I uh dropped the project.