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

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

#141

Post by habosa »

I bought the domain http://ftp.computer because it made me laugh.

I set up the site using an MS-DOS stysheet. It had a single button and it said “feed me”.

Clicking the button let you upload a file. It would spin for a while and then say “thank you, I am sated”.

In the background it would chop the file up into 140-character pieces of base64 and then tweet them out in order. There was also a Slack bot that would reassemble files for you by scraping the Twitter feed.

I did all of this because it was the dumbest thing I could think of that day.

I wish it was still up, but the domain was $65/year renewal and it wasn’t that funny to me.

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

#142

Post by spike021 »

Years ago now iTunes didn't have any feature to use notifications to display the currently playing song. So I wrote a simple AppleScript to use what was already available and do it. Not a big deal but shared with a couple friends and coworkers who found use for it. Later on apple implemented it themselves.

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

#143

Post by jmhobbs »

I wrote a script to monitor the process monitor God [1]. which I called Margaret [2], playing off the famous Judy Blume book, "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret". [3]. Silly, but I enjoyed the low effort joke.

1. http://godrb.com/

2. https://github.com/jmhobbs/Margaret

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_There_God%3F_It%27s_Me....

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

#144

Post by ZachSaucier »

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…

I can't believe you didn't even mention your website dedicated to this, Tim! https://theuselessweb.com/

Longer list here: https://tholman.com/

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

#146

Post by kristianp »

ajxs wrote: post #76

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/

I like how the code is just plain javascript, and less than 114 lines of code.

https://ajxs.github.io/pbp/main.js

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

#147

Post by NotAnOtter »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #102
ajxs wrote: post #76

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/

Isn’t this basically how stable diffusion works?

This is like the tech reporter's version of stable diffusion.

Does it have some similarities? sure. Is it easier to understand than actual stable diffusion? yes.

Is this basically how stable diffusion works? Not even close.

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

#148

Post by j_bum »

jinay wrote: post #96

When I was first learning computer vision, I wrote a program that could tell the time from an image of a clock [1]. I had no purpose for it besides the fact that it seemed like a cool problem to try and solve. Years later, I get an email from a stranger in Korea, asking me how to run my program. Why would he want to use my silly program? Turns out you can adapt the code to read analog pressure gauges which is really…

Thanks for sharing this. The blog article on building your pipeline was a fun read! Your solution has a nice blend of heuristics and DL.

If you’re ever interested in revisiting this click project, you could check out DeepLabCut [0]. A blogpost highlighted a toy example of training a DLC model to recognize clock arms [1], which may or may not be more consistent than your Canny approach :)

[0] https://github.com/DeepLabCut/DeepLabCut

[1] https://guillermohidalgogadea.com/openlabnotebook/training-y...

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

#149

Post by bambax »

jinay wrote: post #96

When I was first learning computer vision, I wrote a program that could tell the time from an image of a clock [1]. I had no purpose for it besides the fact that it seemed like a cool problem to try and solve. Years later, I get an email from a stranger in Korea, asking me how to run my program. Why would he want to use my silly program? Turns out you can adapt the code to read analog pressure gauges which is really…

Cool anecdote!

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

#150

Post by jinay »

j_bum wrote: post #148
jinay wrote: post #96

When I was first learning computer vision, I wrote a program that could tell the time from an image of a clock [1]. I had no purpose for it besides the fact that it seemed like a cool problem to try and solve. Years later, I get an email from a stranger in Korea, asking me how to run my program. Why would he want to use my silly program? Turns out you can adapt the code to read analog pressure gauges which is really…

Thanks for sharing this. The blog article on building your pipeline was a fun read! Your solution has a nice blend of heuristics and DL. If you’re ever interested in revisiting this click project, you could check out DeepLabCut [0]. A blogpost highlighted a toy example of training a DLC model to recognize clock arms [1], which may or may not be more consistent than your Canny approach :) [0] https://github.com/DeepLa…

Woah generalized pose estimation seems really useful and it's cool that the example is for reading a clock. Thanks for sharing!
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