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?

#131

Post by marc_abonce » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:24 AM UTC

react-lang-selecta: https://github.com/MarcAbonce/react-lang-selecta

A language selector component that shows random (but still accurate) flags for each given language.

So if you give it, for example: English, Portuguese and Chinese it might render the flags of South Sudan, Macau, and Macau.

I always noticed how websites sometimes pick arbitrary flags in their language dropdowns even when they're not even trying to represent those specific regions. Wikipedia even has an article describing this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_icons_for_languages

So I thought about making a React component lib just to make fun of that idea. It's not that creative nor good but I had fun writing it.

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

#132

Post by prashantsengar » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:32 AM UTC

I had created a program that would listen to my keystrokes and then draw a different shape on each keypress in a canvas, some keys would fill colours, others would change size of an existing shape. It could also insert images from a defined folder.

I could "start" and "stop" by pressing a hotkey. At the end of it, I would have a random art generated.

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

#133

Post by msephton » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:35 AM UTC

Little projects like this are what keep me going. These days this sort of creative effort goes into the games I make, but in years gone by:

favemoji (2017) - a Safari extension to add emoji to the site title because Safari didn't (doesn't? I forget) show favicons in tabs.

Inbox Zero Fanfare (2013) - played the Macintosh trumpet sound effect when you reached inbox zero in Gmail. I was as much proud of the icon as the code: https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/177626190098190342...

Bender (2012) - a game made using only CSS transitions (and a tiny bit of JavaScript to manage game state). I recently released a remake for Playdate handheld, both here: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/10/08/bender-2-bend-har...

Speak Lolcat (2007) - English to Lolcat translator, based on fairly simple heuristics, took me 30 minutes and made some nice Google ad revenue. It's still up! https://speaklolcat.com

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

#134

Post by nodoodles » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:37 AM UTC

A little page that tries to keep up with Flickr uploads in real time.. built ca 13 years ago, amazingly still running. http://ekke.si/flickr/?render=random

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

#135

Post by callc » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:42 AM UTC

swsieber wrote: post #64

Do ligatures in fonts count? I once modified a monospace font with a ligature that squished 4 spaces down into 3. It was purely for a technical argument of spaces vs tabs to demonstrate that you could indeed have adjustable indent even when using spaces. The fun part was seeing IntelliJ place 4 dots representing spaces even spread over the three space gap :)

Totally counts. Although the only acceptable setup is one tab followed by 2 spaces per indent :P

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

#136

Post by semiinfinitely » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:46 AM UTC

One of my first programs was a number puzzle. It would present the player a string of random numbers. To solve the puzzle you have to write a math equation that uses all the numbers in order. For example, for the numbers

97424

One solution is

log(9)/log(7-4)=-2+4

I wrote the program because i used to play the game in my head with the number on clocks and other things.

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

#137

Post by wkyleg » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:48 AM UTC

https://brutalisthackernews.com/

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

#138

Post by iblaine » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:48 AM UTC

An IRC bot that would kindly insult project managers should they join our engineering chat channel while doing a deployment.

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

#139

Post by nasseri » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:50 AM UTC

jinay wrote: post #96

When I was first learning computer vision, I wrote a program that could tell the time from an image of a clock [1]. I had no purpose for it besides the fact that it seemed like a cool problem to try and solve. Years later, I get an email from a stranger in Korea, asking me how to run my program. Why would he want to use my silly program? Turns out you can adapt the code to read analog pressure gauges which is really…

That is so frickin cool!

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

#140

Post by Diti » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 2:53 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.

Diffusion models are trained to denoise.