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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?

#151

Post by gdhkgdhkvff »

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/

Sort of similarly (sorry I don’t have a link handy but could find one tomorrow if anyone is interested), there was an interesting program someone posted in an AskHN post a year or two ago where the program took an input image, started with a blank circle that was made up of a configurable number of “pins” evenly spaced apart around the perimeter, and then starting from one “pin” iteratively found the next pin that, when connected with a line from the current pin, most made the generating image look more like the input image compared to the other possible lines, and then onto the next pin and the next until you had an image that roughly looked like the input image. The point of that original program was to figure out the best way to connect pins inserted around a circular frame with a single long thread and then weave the image with it. The original post had pictures in it of the guy’s finished artwork and everything.

I don’t remember what language he wrote it in, but I converted it to a react app that handled everything client side using html canvas and bitmap images. Not to publish or anything, just for fun.

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

#152

Post by somat »

adityaathalye wrote: post #25

"The Matrix" raining characters, but really bad, and in Bash (: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/bad-matrix/

Oh man that brought back a memory.

I once had a job operating an ibm mainframe. it was the night shift of a low tier job mainly feeding tapes to the machine. I would spend the downtime reading the documentation for what was for me a foreign system. The mainframe.

This system was set up as vse(a batch processing operating system) over z/os, however the operators would login to cms(a more interactive operating system) on 3270 terminals.

If unfamiliar with 3270 terminals they are very different than the VT style terminals we tend to use. the main difference is VT terminals are in a sort of immediate mode(they print to the screen and read from the keyboard asynchronously) 3270 terminals are more like a html form, you fill out the form and send the whole thing to OS.

My great useless task was to build a matrix rain screensaver on the 3270, This is not trivial, the 3270 does not want to do this, I had to figure out how to spoof an immediate mode, I got it half working, I could print to the screen async like but I could never figure out how to read from the keyboard without blocking.

Once I had my async tty library, my next great useless task was to make an analog clock screen saver. This was it's own pile of worms as rexx(the cms scripting language) had no trig functions. I was smuggling in printouts from the nist library of functions on how to calculate sin, tan, pow... etc... and ended up writing some of the worlds slowest trig and exponential libs.

I think the nist library was this https://dlmf.nist.gov/ I have a great, perhaps unwarranted respect for nist to this day for providing this amazing resource.

Unfortunately I was not able to save any of my code from that job, I would love to look at it again.

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

#153

Post by rerdavies »

A DOS screensaver that would convert the current text buffer to EGA graphics equivalent, after which animated ants would crawl out from the edge of the screen and gradually eat the text. The ants were programmed to follow randomly generated paths, but would tend to follow tightly looped paths when they had recently fed, but follow paths with a longer loop when they were "hungry", in order to help them find the last fragments of text left on the screen - a very primitive and early form of Artificial Intelligence.

Regrettable written in the pre-internet age when there was no clear and obvious way to share such precious and beautiful things with millions of users.

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

#154

Post by jinay »

bambax wrote: post #149
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!

Thank you!

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

#155

Post by jinay »

nasseri wrote: post #139
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…

That is so frickin cool!

Thanks!

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

#156

Post by uranium »

I implemented pong as a cellular automaton [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19155205]. It was a fun synthesis of skills I'd built on a bunch of previous projects, some of them professional, many of them actually useful. It's basically the one hobby project that I've ever really completed; the others always seem to drag on, semi-finished.

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

#158

Post by et-al »

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…

Thanks for sharing these. It's really inspiring to see some fun antics like this to bring back the joy of frontend work.

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

#160

Post by socketcluster »

I wrote a no-code/low-code platform. https://saasufy.com/

The reason it's useless is that the learning curve is too steep for just about everyone. It's extremely useful for me though. I've put together complex applications with it in record time with very few lines of code.

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