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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?

#291

Post by cornedor »

Back in the Flash days, I had a signature on a forum with a small (like 120x40) SWF file in it. It was a little "city builder" game where you could place different types of stores, and the goal was to earn as much money as possible. It would save the state to local storage, so you could continue in other comments I placed.

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

#293

Post by Netcob »

yurishimo wrote: post #240
Netcob wrote: post #231

I didn't expect it to be that useless. I like to experiment with home automation things, and recently I added a feature to my system where I could push notifications with images to my phone (pretty much everything I do is entirely self-hosted btw). Then a Valetudo update came out - Valetudo is a FOSS replacement for the cloud services usually required for supported robot vacuums. You root your robot, block it from ph…

Could you use this to build your own “poop detector” where an object is routed around until you confirm with the robot if it’s “safe” to proceed in that area? I love my robot vacuum but I dare never run it when I’m not at home for fear or smearing poop all over my floor on accident. Sadly I didn’t shell out enough money for a bot with superior object detection.

That's mainly what the built-in "AI camera" feature is for. Technically I don't need it - I don't have pets, I don't leave stuff lying around on the floor, and I usually make it to the toilet on time.

I am curious though if I can model a dog turd out of something and have the robot recognize it properly....

Now you could probably attach a raspberry pi with a camera and a coral tpu to a cheaper robot, spend a week trying to get the TPU to work with its dependency hell (or use one of those cameras with object detection built in), and then probably not have much more control other than to pause the robot just in time. That might end up costing more than just to upgrade to a robot with poop detection that can automatically circumnavigate them.

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

#294

Post by _benj »

I wrote a CHIP 8 emulator using C.

At the time I wanted to learn C but it led down a rabbit whole of algorithms and graphics programming (I used raylib and later SDL) and some immediate mode GUI (nuklear and another one I can’t remember) and it was TONS of fun and incredibly educational!

It kind of reminded me what was it that I actually liked about programming, that is, learning, applied said learning into solving problems and creating things!

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

#295

Post by kragen »

self_awareness wrote: post #208
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!

Oh, that's mostly in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/laserboot/.

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

#296

Post by greenie_beans »

- dead south - an text art project with llms, criticizing mass online media and the future of it with llms: https://archive.is/gy3rE

- writer - a CLI to write notes: https://github.com/smcalilly/writer

- added oblique strategies to the banglejs app store: https://github.com/smcalilly/oblique-strategies-bangle-js

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

#297

Post by Netcob »

hi_hi wrote: post #251
yurishimo wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you use this to build your own “poop detector” where an object is routed around until you confirm with the robot if it’s “safe” to proceed in that area? I love my robot vacuum but I dare never run it when I’m not at home for fear or smearing poop all over my floor on accident. Sadly I didn’t shell out enough money for a bot with superior object detection.

Put a diaper on it!

My vacuum has often lost various parts around the apartment whenever it got caught on something, but so far it has never shat on the floor. It is quite a fancy one so that's expected.

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

#299

Post by fullstackchris »

neya wrote: post #18

A decade and a half ago, I came across this beautiful bar in Bahrain (online) that was visually appealing to the eye with contrasty colors. I was so fascinated by it that I started writing a simple algorithm to just extract out the dominant colors in the image, just for fun, but mostly because I was so lazy to open Photoshop and pick the colors out manually. Turns out, this is actually a real challenging task for com…

Fantastic stuff, this would be very useful in print art work I do.

For those further interested you see the issue this resolves by converting an full color image to an indexed image (often key colors, but low in total pixel count are neglected)

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