Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 422 posts

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

#31

Post by rhyperior »

Twofer

I wrote a flame simulation in x86 assembly language. Total hoot.

I also wrote an Easter egg that shipped in a major software company’s software and is immortally burned onto thousands of DVDs slowly rotting in landfills. This one was fun and challenging because I had to mask the names of the product team from easy detection, I had to convert string text to my own custom 8x3 pixel font for rendering, I played with palette animation to create some fun raining effects, and I packed it into just a few Kb of the DOS end of a Windows executable (back in the day, 16-bit Windows apps could be linked with a custom DOS loader in case you tried to run the Windows app from the cmd line).

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

#32

Post by 0xf00ff00f »

tromp wrote: post #23
fanf2 wrote: post #12

A combinator reduction evaluator with a translator from lambda calculus to combinators. The creative part was getting a C compiler to parse combinator expressions with the traditional syntax, where function application does not have an operator and is left-associative, like S K K. http://www.ioccc.org/years.html#1998_fanf

Winning an IOCCC contest is far from being useless though:-)

Hey, I've seen some of your IOCCC entries. Even had some fun trying to understand them back in the day.

IOCCC gang rise up. This is mine: https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2005_persano

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

#34

Post by mysterydip »

rhyperior wrote: post #31

Twofer I wrote a flame simulation in x86 assembly language. Total hoot. I also wrote an Easter egg that shipped in a major software company’s software and is immortally burned onto thousands of DVDs slowly rotting in landfills. This one was fun and challenging because I had to mask the names of the product team from easy detection, I had to convert string text to my own custom 8x3 pixel font for rendering, I played w…

What kind of trigger did it have? some kind of key sequence or certain day of the year?

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

#35

Post by mysterydip »

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 did the same thing with a webchat I made for a bunch of my friends (back before discord was a thing)! Lots of fun.

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

#36

Post by mysterydip »

kragen wrote: post #26

Given that this site is called "Hacker News", it's worth mentioning that '"useless" programs - pieces of code that serve no practical purpose but are fun, creative, or challenging to write' is one of the central definitions of ”hack”. I've written some: a programming language interpreter based on Abadi and Cardelli's untyped ς-calculus; a two-kilobyte web server in assembly (which accidentally did turn out to be usef…

> which accidentally did turn out to be useful

I hate when I'm having fun and accidentally make something useful :)

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

#37

Post by quuxplusone »

chubot wrote: post #8

I learned in college Geometry class that you can transform a square to an equilateral triangle in 11 cuts or so So I wrote a matlab program to draw the shapes, and cut them out, and it works It’s mathematically exact, not just approximate Still surprises me after 20 years, so I want to find this old program again lol

The dissection of a square into an equilateral triangle (or vice versa) is sometimes known as the haberdasher's problem, and can be done in three straight-line cuts.

https://mathworld.wolfram.com/HaberdashersProblem.html

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

#38

Post by lormayna »

Around 10 years, in Italy a very populistic party was raising and he was leaded by a very stupid leader that used the social a lot. Then I wrote a Twitter bot (it was possible at that time) that looked like a militant of the party and that was trained over the leader's tweets (nothing fancy, just a big Markov chain). It was so funny when people, also high level of the party start liking and retweeting the bot posts, I ended having several thousands of followers just writing bullshits.

I would like to learn how GAN are working, then I scraped the official pictures of Italian politicians since 30 years and try to generate new faces with a GAN trained to this dataset. Unfortunately I need a lot of computing power to obtain an acceptable face, and I did not want to spend money for that.

Several years ago I wrote a Tinder bot to collect spam messages and malicious links. I stopped early because I got messages from several of people that I know personally in a relationship or even married

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

#39

Post by kragen »

mysterydip wrote: post #36
kragen wrote: post #26

Given that this site is called "Hacker News", it's worth mentioning that '"useless" programs - pieces of code that serve no practical purpose but are fun, creative, or challenging to write' is one of the central definitions of ”hack”. I've written some: a programming language interpreter based on Abadi and Cardelli's untyped ς-calculus; a two-kilobyte web server in assembly (which accidentally did turn out to be usef…

> which accidentally did turn out to be useful I hate when I'm having fun and accidentally make something useful :)

It was more that I thought the approach I was taking would doom it to being uselessly slow, but it turns out Linux is actually pretty fast at forking, especially when your process's entire memory map is 20K :-)
Post reply on HN