Only thing I have posted online currently: a Photoshop script to radially-repeat the current layer, making for interesting graphics! Assign it to a key-command, draw some stuff and press the key-command each time to progressively refine your artwork! Fun stuff. https://github.com/amatecha/radialRepeat
Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
211–220 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#212A college friend wrote a C program with:
while (true) fork();
It crashed the university supercomputer. This was in the year 2000.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#213I 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…
Your webpage is gorgeous, congrats!
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#214https://github.com/bobjansen/patchy-py
Patchy.py allows you to keep define a Python function as the result of another function and a diff.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#215I wrote a program in C++ that used a function pointer to a function within the program, mem-copied the function to another location in memory and executed the replica. I had placed a breakpoint in the original function before copying, and the breakpoint got copied over too. The debugger encountered the breakpoint in the replica function, did not know where it came from and thereby acted. It was fun.
Alright, this wasn't exactly useless as I was trying to learn how debuggers work.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#216I once spent a load of time making a "galactic civilization simulator" (in C!).
First it spawned a galaxy of stars using RNG.
Then it seeded civilizations at different home stars throughout the galaxy.
Then it iterated an algorithm to show how they spread, settling more and more solar systems, expanding outwards. After a certain number of centuries, solar systems became "decadent" and stopped seeding other solar systems (I showed this by rendering them a darker shade of color). Systems that bordered those of another civilization had to reach a certain high population threshold then they were able to "take over" neighbors, but IIRC I coded it so that didn't happen very often. There wasn't any real diplomacy or war system like in real video games.
I would make some tweaks to the algo, then rerun the sim, and watch the civs spread out slowly in real time. It was pretty.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#217Who made superbad.com back in the late 90s?
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#218A program that samples image using blue noise.
Horribly inefficient, horribly slow.. but it let me learn a bit about blue noise, and frankly - seeing images having just 10% of pixels and have all the shapes be distinctively recognizable with naked eye was just fun.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#219When 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…
This is very similar to when I used OpenCV to read the angle of a cardboard knob I pinned on the wall in my office to change the volume on Spotify!
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#220I 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.
This is where you tell us how many degrees or days right? Right?? We need to be able to repeat the experiment, for science!