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Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
51–60 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#52Way back in the 1990s when you could write directly to screen memory in Windows I wrote an Excel macro that made an animated dog run all over the screen -useless but fun.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#53I didn't write them, but I Totally useless and very fun!
although on multi-monitor setups, xeyes helps me quickly find my pointer location, if i’ve lost track, in an enjoyable way. almost anything can be useful to someone.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#54I wrote a clone of TECO[1] (Text Editor and COrrector) for MS-DOS back in the 1980s.
Teco was something the CS upper classmen were using to prove their hacker creds back at Rose-Hulman in 1981. It's a horrible editor, but it does macros, and was good enough to build the first version of EMACS.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#55I was learning how to work with Cloudflare Workers and implemented something called a Pixel Mosaic: https://rishikeshs.com/mosaic/.
It's a live pixel mosaic where anyone can change the color, with the color being chosen randomly, so the chances of two adjacent tiles having the same color are quite low. I also log the country to see where people who have clicked it are from.
I am currently working on a desktop 8x8 LED grid to sync the same pattern on my desk.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#56During my postdoc, I wrote some code running parameter optimisation on a large dynamical system. It wasn't clever code, it was closer to a grid search than anything else. I spun it up across 200 cores of the local supercomputer, I waited 72 hours... and then nothing. I had forgotten to write the results to disk.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#57I used to write very short programs for the Amiga that would scan through all the pixels on the screen and assign a color to them based on whatever math functions I felt like writing. They took hours, sometimes days to run, but the results were often interesting, sometimes radial gradients, sometimes random noise, sometimes things that looked like musical notes on a random background. Then I'd load a color table and color cycle the resulting image. Sometimes this created movement in the image, sometimes it animated the noise so it looked like old-fashioned TV static. Just did it for fun, only took a few minutes to write the code, and sometimes the results were great. It was often very difficult to predict what the final image would look like, unless I started with a program I'd run before.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#58A decade and a half ago, I came across this beautiful bar in Bahrain (online) that was visually appealing to the eye with contrasty colors. I was so fascinated by it that I started writing a simple algorithm to just extract out the dominant colors in the image, just for fun, but mostly because I was so lazy to open Photoshop and pick the colors out manually. Turns out, this is actually a real challenging task for com…
Hey this is pretty cool! Have you thought about putting it online? I've occasionally used tools like Adobe's color scheme finder, where you upload an image and it suggests a fitting colorscheme derived from the photo. Though honestly theirs doesn't perform too well.
Yours looks like a nice improvement.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#59I 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 have to agree, I really miss the 90's when websites had more of a fun artistic creative and personality feel than templated. I see the use for both, but I miss it :)