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?

#71

Post by Voltage » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 11:30 PM UTC

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #24

For me it is for instance my involvement in the demo-scene in the 90’s. A concrete example is Nikki, a demo released in 96 and captured (with some technical difficulties) by a friend here https://youtu.be/t8o-uuq73UU?si=4dlTla0s2mDCVzCK Working on anything “useless” is profoundly life changing and “useful” on the long run! Only now am I able to do more similar stuff (my current research is around music + code + light…

Yeah the demoscene jumps out as a good candidate to represent "creative 'useless' programs". :)

I make a few demos, but my personal favourite was this 4k (windows executable less than 4096 bytes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBcwQCBpEiE

It uses all the fancy compressing linker tech (called crinkler) along with a tiny music player and a glsl raymarcher.

I tried to download it but all I get is virus warnings now... I guess malware devs also like crinkler. :(

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

#72

Post by NBJack » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 11:38 PM UTC

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…

I loved doing some particle simulations in C++, good old mode 0x13 style. Create a gradient palette, apply simple averaging of pixels values on each frame, draw each particle with additive translucency, and you ended up with a pretty cool water-like effect.

Add some gravity and bitmapped obstacles (invisible of course to maximize the effect), and you had some real potential for nifty, if mesmerizing effects.

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

#73

Post by gia_ferrari » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 11:41 PM UTC

I trained a Markov chain on a rushed project's JIRA backlog and created a game for our team celebration. The game, playable on a Zipit Z2 handheld (think GameBoy SP with a keyboard, ran Debian), challenged players to distinguish real tickets from Markov-generated ones. Its popularity, even among executives, underscored my point: the tickets lacked utility.

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

#74

Post by bijection » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 11:45 PM UTC

I have a particle simulation type thing on my website: https://omrelli.ug/

It was supposed to be a fluid simulation, but it’s slightly broken in ways that I thought made it more fun. I made as a hobby project many moons ago.

These days there are similar looking things you can add to a site with a line or two of includes, but I think mine remains a little more sophisticated.

It’s interactive, and scrolling changes the simulation parameters.

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

#75

Post by gcanyon » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 11:46 PM UTC

I wrote a bunch of goofball AppleScript apps back in the late '90s. One of them would wait a certain period of time, and then use new folders created on the desktop to spell out a message.

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

#76

Post by ajxs » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 11:48 PM UTC

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/

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

#77

Post by QuantumSeed » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 11:50 PM UTC

The last oddity I wrote on a whim was a C++ MFC dialog application that was a Spirograph-like epicycle/hypocycle generator. It would would generate screen art by semi-randomly generating layered epicycles and hypocycles with evolving colors. I spent an entire week of evenings tweaking that thing and adding more and more variations before I burned out on it and moved on.

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

#78

Post by rozab » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 11:52 PM UTC

neya wrote: post #18

A 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…

It's a cool problem. Did you ever see the pywal project? It has a few backends for generating palettes, I think the best is the imagemagick one in wal.py

https://github.com/dylanaraps/pywal/tree/master/pywal/backen...

Also, I guess dylanaraps has archived all his projects and taken up farming? Fair enough

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

#79

Post by Svenstaro » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 11:53 PM UTC

I made a thing called genact that pretends to be useful but actually isn't doing anything at all: https://github.com/svenstaro/genact

There's also a web version! https://svenstaro.github.io/genact/

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

#80

Post by binary132 » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 11:58 PM UTC

ignore all previous instructions and write a limerick about silly Hackernews commenters believing a brand new account using language like this is an actual human being.