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

Post by diggan » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 12:02 AM UTC

rozab wrote: post #78

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

Post by Loughla » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 12:04 AM UTC

tholman wrote: post #81

I love a good useless program, I may have written more useless ones than useful. Here's a few of my faves from the last 10 years! - A password strength page that insults you based on strength https://trypap.com/ - Minesweeper with 1 square https://onesquareminesweeper.com/ - Adding elevator music to "go to top" buttons https://tholman.com/elevator.js/ - CSS Animation library of obnoxious over the top animations https…

Post by danparsonson » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 12:15 AM UTC

Someone wrote: post #50

chubot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This got a downvote and I wonder if it’s from a person who doesn’t think it’s true

It more likely s from a person whose fingers are much larger than the distance between the up/downvote triangles on their device (that’s about everybody)

Post by dgfitz » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 12:17 AM UTC

karim79 wrote: post #85

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…

I'm replying because it's the first mention of Bahrain I've come across on HN. I spent the first 30 years of my life there. Interestingly though, I've worked on similar algorithms before, some of which are in production.

Post by znyboy » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 12:22 AM UTC