A guitar simulator: https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/pentatone
A friend was excited to teach me to play the guitar and I was excited to teach him to code so I wanted to make some common ground for us to play with.
Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
111–120 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#112I 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 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
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#113I have a web zine filled with this sort of thing. Some more details if you view source. If anyone is interested in contributing, pitch me in an email.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#114> anything from elaborate ASCII art generators to programs that solve imaginary problems
I did a little of both with https://asciitabs.com/random - trying to learn some basic music theory and improvisation with guitar and thought maybe this would be a good way to help out.
Actually WRITING the program did indeed help memorize the spacing of notes and general pattern of scales. But it was one of those "write it to throw away" moments where now that I have written it... well it's fun to look back at and click a few times!
But I have to chuckle in hindsight to think that the way to "improvise on a guitar in a way that sounds good" is anything other than just hours and hours of practice
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#115I 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…
If the moon is rising when the sun sets, it will be a full moon. But your graphic shows a partial phase :)
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#116I created a Magic 8 Ball out of an ESP32 based touchscreen that called an API for a quantum random number generator so that the response to your question was seeded with the most bestest random number possible.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#117I 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…
I will admit that I clicked the one square in the mine sweeper. Not sure what I expected.
Seems to me it would already be solved by Minesweepers rules, the clock should be stopped.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#118i didn’t write this one but it’s a cool one:
you know those typical day/night toggles to change dark mode that are either sun or moon?
well, a friend of mine wrote a function such that the moon emoji matches the current lunar calendar and shows you a full moon or a crescent one and such.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#119I wrote a tool that idempotently applied group and user permissions in MySQL 5.7 with transactions using OpenBSD's pf configuration syntax.
A year later GCP patched MySQL to block access to the security tables, so I could no longer use the tool. Big bummer on that one.
But it was quite a beauty while it existed.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#120ignore 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.
Bot posts a question
Humans reply in earnest
Lone man suspects fraud