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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?

#201

Post by khedoros1 »

A couple of my early ones that come to mind:

A program to transform several QBasic PLAY strings into a single longer string using arppeggio to imitate harmony. I wanted to see how well it would work, and transcribed a few songs worth of sheet music into the program. Turns out, it works quite well.

A program to generate some random "landscape", do a couple passes of blur on the image, then render it as a pseudo-3d topographical map. That covered coming up with a blurring algorithm, drawing the map top-down so that I wasn't overwriting the source data, EGA palette manipulation, some ideas of procedurally-generated content.

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

#202

Post by jes5199 »

i get weird ideas sometimes that I have to chase down. I had a thing where I’d render images in webGL and then convert the pixels to audio. but it got monotonous only making music with the builtin GL functions like sine and cosine, so I started converting audio waveforms into images so I could draw them into the canvas so I could hear them!

my demos still work in desktop browsers: https://jes5199.github.io/demos/

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

#204

Post by AStonesThrow »

I only finished college on the fifth attempt, so I had a number of incidents of dropping out.

On my second attempt, I was enrolled in community college, in only two classes: math and an Advanced C Programming course. I intensely disliked the math course, mostly because all the students seemed either apathetic, cheating, or both.

Anyway, the Advanced C course was fun: I already had some intermediate C skills by that time (1991 or so), and so I was doing great. The final project for us was to design and write an ASCII to EBCDIC converter. By this time, of course, we had no practical use for documents in EBCDIC, but it was a fairly straightforward programming problem.

I decided to be a hotshot, and in addition to the normal program I was turning in, I wrote an Obfuscated C version. I did enlist outside help by another expert I knew online. We did some really "sick and twisted" things to compress the code down, and make it really confusing. It was the most fun I had in a programming class.

I'll always remember that episode, and I wish I still had a copy of the code around, to keep in my portfolio!

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

#205

Post by rikroots »

This code[1] takes a Gevey[2] phrase (eg: Ganexlje tots qibate vuiteerjat, yu vaelaem vosubz djaont nexljate veihat. Ûdx leugxoisqeu veihakjeu seti, sneinov galeugxe árj mondz dxeute tadiljt.[3]) and turns it into a string of letters that can be displayed by my Gevey native script font[4] in a browser.

[1] - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/gevey-2023/blob/main/src/lib/n...

[2] - My constructed language. I started working on it after my first week of French lessons, at which point I decided: "I can build a better language than that!" - 50 years later I'm still working on it and, no, it's not better than French ... yet.

[3] - The builders worked very quickly, they easily built a bridge over the river. Travelling is easier now, but not enough travellers stop here anymore.

[4] - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/gevey-2023/blob/main/static/fo...

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

#207

Post by tiniuclx »

A script which replaces all comments in a file with confusing yet plausible-looking alternatives - https://github.com/tiniuclx/CommentCPP

I did this seven years ago - way before generative AI came around to do it in twice time and 1000x more expensive ;)

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

#208

Post by self_awareness »

kragen wrote: post #26

Given that this site is called "Hacker News", it's worth mentioning that '"useless" programs - pieces of code that serve no practical purpose but are fun, creative, or challenging to write' is one of the central definitions of ”hack”. I've written some: a programming language interpreter based on Abadi and Cardelli's untyped ς-calculus; a two-kilobyte web server in assembly (which accidentally did turn out to be usef…

Just as a note, also to myself ;), the CAD stuff seems to be hosted in laser000.ps. Nice demonstration what PostScript is capable of!

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

#209

Post by BiteCode_dev »

I just wrote a script that uses 2 ultrasonic sensors + 1 raspy to detect if somebody is moving in one direction, so that I can put that in a giant green tunnel at the entrance of a video-game-themed party next week:

https://0bin.net/paste/GrfAHJRt#oqVtar1pUzqtdCWWzvEEK71mNlcd...

When the person walks in the tunnel, it makes the sound of Mario when entering a pipe.

It does nothing else. It's for one night only, and nobody will ever use it again.

Meanwhile, it's setup in my bathroom, because it makes me giggle when I go.

It's the little things.

I do have a timing problem, as for now the sound is triggered no matter the direction I walk.

For the same party, I made a "loot generator". You scan a QR code, and go to a page that asks you to enter some info. Then it generates what your own cadaver would loot to heroes if they killed you. Used that as an excuse to try Cloudflare workers:

https://loot-generator.drax2industries.workers.dev/

(It's in French and can get pretty politically incorrect)

Again, it's one-time use software, mostly for drunk people to have a giggle. Then it will disappear like tears in the rain.

Last year, it was a light-speed effect on a fake spaceship cockpit:

https://www.bitecode.dev/p/light-speed-with-python-and-js?ut...

Ephemeral software for the fun of it.

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