I had a script that would rotate my profile picture in Slack by one degree everyday. It take a surprisingly long time for people to notice.
Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
181–190 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#182I'm building a mosaic design tool so that people can easily create unique backsplashes for their kitchen or other tile art: https://www.taptaptiles.com
Check it out, I'd love to get feedback!
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#183I 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…
Beautiful personal site!
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#184I made an AI Art clock, using Stable Diffusion to render a 24-hour clock face into a landscape: https://leebutterman.com/diffusion-local-time/
This looked incredibly non-obvious until I looked at the page in a much smaller window and the numbers became very easy to spot. Cool idea. Not how I imagined it from the description.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#185I 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…
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Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#186I 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.
It's just as easy to win.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#187[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#188A 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, w…
Please find! I’m looking for this now too
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#189Back when the web was more open, I built a small page which displayed beautiful watercolor maps from Stamen and started listening for location based updates on Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, instagram and possibly more. Every time an update came in, a small icon would drop like a raindrop onto the map. Hovering it would show you the contents.
I thought it was very pretty, and I remember keeping it open throughout the day, watching how instagram photos from POIs gave way to photos from food and eventually party pics as the day ended, and how foursquare checkins in pubs and clubs increased as it got late.
It’s sad that building something like this is no longer possible.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#190Here's my Mandelbrot set generator written in the table language Ada Lovelace wrote her 1843 program for Babbage's Analytical Engine:
https://pairdebuggingwithlovelace.hashnode.dev/
The trickiest part was figuring out how to exploit fixed-point underflow to do the equivalent of if(a>4.0) when the only conditional I could use was if(a==0), using arithmetic operations to force underflow for all a>4.0