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

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

#251

Post by hi_hi »

yurishimo wrote: post #240
Netcob wrote: post #231

I didn't expect it to be that useless. I like to experiment with home automation things, and recently I added a feature to my system where I could push notifications with images to my phone (pretty much everything I do is entirely self-hosted btw). Then a Valetudo update came out - Valetudo is a FOSS replacement for the cloud services usually required for supported robot vacuums. You root your robot, block it from ph…

Could you use this to build your own “poop detector” where an object is routed around until you confirm with the robot if it’s “safe” to proceed in that area? I love my robot vacuum but I dare never run it when I’m not at home for fear or smearing poop all over my floor on accident. Sadly I didn’t shell out enough money for a bot with superior object detection.

Put a diaper on it!

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

#252

Post by bigpeopleareold »

I haven't lately been writing 'useless' stuff, but have done some things a few months ago.

I never finished it, but this got me thinking again. I wanted to try PyGame, never doing any game programming before. However, I started on a lot of the logic around a game where a bunch of introverted employees in a company are forced to participate in some sport, specifically a football game, with robots 'encouraging' game play. The purpose is to stay far away from the ball while all other players chaotically run away from it too.

Last year, I spent an inordinate amount of time writing a Makefile and scripts to prevent re-runs when distributing files and configs to various VMs. I used it a little but there was a problem with it that I couldn't solve, so I gave up (and funny enough, I just wrote a tiny bash function to do all what I did before with that :D )

I wrote a tiny 'time-series' database in bash. It only supported two fields - probably something to fix. But, I wrote enough to query it and aggregate results into time ranges. I never used it for anything, but I was thinking of writing an nginx handler to call it to see page hits on my blog (the site generator which I also wrote myself, which is probably less useless, but not that useful with things like jekyll :)) I also wanted to play with C and what came out of it was something of a unit test tool that I based off of the Mac OS X version of assert() that prints out in a semi-TAP format. Useless because I don't usually write C code :D

I recently wrote a web scraper for a site with stuff I wanted to download and parse into some structure, but have no clue what to do with the data now that I have it :) So, it's in the status of useless at the moment.

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

#255

Post by Halfwhit »

gazook89 wrote: post #112
sshine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like having this kind of animation on my homepage, too. Currently I just have an animated GIF background, but I've had some animated ASCII art in the past. I'm currently working on animating a fractal drawn with HTML Canvas. Your houses and pencil style are very cute, I feel inspired to make something similar. I'd like if clicking in the same place would grow whatever's there.

For graphics, check out KM Alexander

I really went down the rabbit hole reading the history of the map brushes, thanks for sharing!

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

#258

Post by kuu »

gdhkgdhkvff wrote: post #151
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/

Sort of similarly (sorry I don’t have a link handy but could find one tomorrow if anyone is interested), there was an interesting program someone posted in an AskHN post a year or two ago where the program took an input image, started with a blank circle that was made up of a configurable number of “pins” evenly spaced apart around the perimeter, and then starting from one “pin” iteratively found the next pin that, w…

With your description, ChatGPT tells me it may be this one:

https://github.com/callummcdougall/computational-thread-art

Is it? :)

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

#259

Post by Uptrenda »

simonsarris wrote: post #22

I like inserting art, like the header to https://simonsarris.com A village pops up. There is no point to it. You can click to make more houses. You can right-click to drag things around. When I touch it again I think I'll add a sun and moon that track the time of day for wherever the user is located. Actually the footer has art too, each page has a semi-randomly assigned illustration from public-domain (old) art that…

I like this a lot. Beautiful, creative, really quite charming.
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