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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?

#221

Post by some1else »

https://weirdnet.xyz - hexagonal lattice mesh

https://undesign.systems - shadow study

https://spamoji.com/ - emoji collaging

https://srdjan.pro - ascii perlin noise

https://qwerkey.xyz - keyboard tonnetz

https://ljubljana-shelters.netlify.app/ - shelter map

https://floating-weights.netlify.app/ - generative vector piece

https://randomle.netlify.app/ - random fake wordle result

https://ancient-scroll.netlify.app/ - it is what it is

https://sandstorm.netlify.app/ - app that always shazams to darude - sandstorm

https://uploadimg.netlify.app/ - fake image upload app

https://pietgrid.netlify.app/ - interactive mondrian

https://pixelbuddy.netlify.app/ - click to spawn randomly walking dead pixel

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

#222

Post by gershy »

tiniuclx wrote: post #207

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 ;)

Hahahaha amazing!!!

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

#223

Post by Aachen »

martinrue wrote: post #145

I have a funny story about this. I wrote a tool to create a situation that allowed me to kill VNC server when the college admin used to spy on me years back: https://martinrue.com/coding-stories-me-vs-vnc/

Stopping spy software does not sound useless. Am I understanding it right?

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

#225

Post by symmetricsaurus »

gazook89 wrote: post #117
Loughla wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will admit that I clicked the one square in the mine sweeper. Not sure what I expected.

Seems to me it would already be solved by Minesweepers rules, the clock should be stopped.

Also first click is never a mine (if there's one where you click it's moved to the top left corner).

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

#226

Post by AlexDragusin »

okaleniuk wrote: post #197

I once wrote a game with no graphics or sound. It was a maze game: you were supposed to lead a mouse cursor through an invisible maze by touch. If you drive your cursor into a wall, it stops. You start at the bottom, and if you manage all the way to the top - you win. Well, it's not completely useless. If you're extremely bored at work and don't want to draw attention, this could be your time waster of choice.

Explore this idea further, it would make a good tool for mental visualization and memorization as one would have to memorize and construct a mental image of the maze in order to speed up the solving, neat idea!

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

#228

Post by msephton »

rapjr9 wrote: post #57

I used to write very short programs for the Amiga that would scan through all the pixels on the screen and assign a color to them based on whatever math functions I felt like writing. They took hours, sometimes days to run, but the results were often interesting, sometimes radial gradients, sometimes random noise, sometimes things that looked like musical notes on a random background. Then I'd load a color table and…

Reminds me of this old thread of algorithmic logic art I have bookmarked https://twitter.com/aemkei/status/1378106731386040322

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

#229

Post by BearGrass »

simonsarris wrote: post #22

I 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 website is very cute. I live on a certain floor of a building, and although the content of the site has no meaning to me, I kept looking at it for a long time, as if I were reading a novel.

Thank you for sharing.

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

#230

Post by Timwi »

I invented a programming language where you use Unicode box-drawing characters to draw a structure of boxes and lines:

                    ╓───╖
                    ║ ! ║
                    ╙─┬─╜   ┌───╖  ╔═══╗
                ┌─────┴─────┤ > ╟──╢ 2 ║
                │           ╘═╤═╝  ╚═══╝
  ╔════╗  ┌───╖ │             │
  ║ −1 ╟──┤ + ╟─┴─┐           │
  ╚════╝  ╘═╤═╝   │           │
          ┌─┴─╖   │    ╔═══╗  │
          │ ! ║   │    ║ 1 ║  │
          ╘═╤═╝   │    ╚═╤═╝  │
            │   ┌─┴─╖  ┌─┴─╖  │
            │   │ × ╟──┤ ? ╟──┘
            │   ╘═╤═╝  ╘═╤═╝
            └─────┘      │
The language is called Funciton (pronounced: /ˈfʌŋkɪtɒn/) and the above example demonstrates the factorial function.

YouTube playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkG32PHxWoJaetjKUMVRONWLg...

Language specification: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Funciton

Interpreter: https://codeberg.org/Timwi/Funciton

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