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?

#171

Post by Traubenfuchs » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 5:34 AM UTC

I have written a comfort and ux feature rich winforms application that is a completely borderless image viewer named ComfyViewer. You can move the images you opened around as you desire, ignoring any bounds of the screen and without resize limits. The window is also borderless! I reimplemented the whole resize logic from scratch with the windows api. Additionally it puts the image in its window thumbnail. It really was my winforms mastery project.

The thing is I really like to goon, especially to still images of a certain topic, like bearded, muscular red haired men. That‘s why I need a „collage“ of still images, maximising window flexibility and minimising waste of screen space to enhance the pleasure.

It has a „close all“ button, so you don‘t need to go hunt down the 4, 6, 8, 10? windows of images you finished with.

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

#172

Post by useless_code » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 5:41 AM UTC

I wanted to learn metamorphic coding.

I end up writing a program which creates a copy of itself which is different to the previous copy, but still functions the same.

https://github.com/jwbensley/metamorphic_polymorphic/tree/ma...

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

#173

Post by FarhadG » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 5:46 AM UTC

Useless but fun way to send messages to friends (e.g. during the holidays): https://github.com/webgl/fireworks-text

Demo: https://webgl.github.io/fireworks-text/#%7B%22name%22%3A%22F...

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

#174

Post by WeaselNo7 » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 5:57 AM UTC

A year or so ago, my son needed a tool for making really simple minecraft plans. All the drawing tools out there he could find were overly complex or weren't 'quite right' for him, so I took the opportunity to learn some web and javascript stuff and made this: https://draw.pixelweasel.com/

One outstanding 'todo' was textures!

Then I wanted to make ASCII art automatically from any picture, so I played around and made this: http://ascii.pixelweasel.com/ (again, playing with javascript)

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

#175

Post by hyperific » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 5:59 AM UTC

I was interested in recreating the NPC generation system used in the Watchdogs games so I coded up my own in Python. It procedurally generated first and last name, birthdate, city of residence, phone number with area and exchange codes appropriate for city of residence, social security number appropriate for birthdate, occupation and salary appropriate for that job, hobbies, and Myers Briggs personality type. It was a fun exercise but ultimately a useless project.

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

#176

Post by ycodecaffeine » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 6:04 AM UTC

I made a calendar website where Jake Baldino (from Gameranx, a gaming YouTube channel) tells you today's date - https://whats-the-date-jake-website.pages.dev/

(It doesn't have all the dates yet, since YouTube doesn't allow uploading more than 10 videos a day if your account isn't verified)

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

#177

Post by andrei_says_ » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 6:07 AM UTC

A web app that took an uploaded image and converted it into an excel file displaying a pixelated version of the image as colored spreadsheet cells.

With a holiday greeting on top :)

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

#178

Post by 0x38B » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 6:10 AM UTC

darepublic wrote: post #87

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…

Is it too much to ask that the back to top elevator animate an actual elevator travelling up the side of the web page. The elevator music is good but I need it to sound like it would in an actual elevator too. Thanks for these links, they gave me a chuckle.

The Factorio (1) website has something like that - scroll down to the bottom and click on the rocket ship.

1: https://factorio.com/

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

#179

Post by blendo » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 6:10 AM UTC

In 1985 I had fun implementing Tower of Hanoi on a Tektronix 4115 using Fortran. With recursion, even!

What a wonderful waste of government hardware.

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

#180

Post by yigithan » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 6:19 AM UTC

Facebook once allowed users to draw directly on a friend’s wall. For a friend’s birthday, I developed a tool that recreated an image pixel by pixel on the canvas. The entire process took about an hour to complete. I doubt anyone realized the effort behind the post, as to most, it probably just looked like a regular image upload.