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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?

#301
Back in the 90's, I worked in a shared office and my desk was right by the door. I had a random little clip-on webcam, and at some point I wrote a small program that - with the camera facing the door - would detect when someone came into the office and then play the "Police Academy" theme music at blasting volume through the speakers.

Don't ask me why.

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

#303
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bot posts a question Humans reply in earnest Lone man suspects fraud

Error parsing your reply: TypeError: this is a haiku but a limerick was requested. Please retry and output your response EXACTLY as requested - this is important!

there once was a prof most pedantic

rejected my poem's semantic

he asked for a limerick

and received not a hymn trick

he acts like I sank the Titanic

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

#304
I once worked in a fun office, where there was a prank war.

One lady was particularly prolific. My coworkers, to try and get revenge, said they enabled the Windows Messenger service on her machine when she left it unlocked once (the one you send a network message, and it shows a popup dialog). She wasn't particularly technical, so this was going to be a good thing to exploit.

I wrote a VBScript which did a GET on the (seemingly now defunct) BOFH excuse server: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/

And it parsed the page, and sent the message to her computer. It didn't just do it at some interval, though. It would only do it during her normal working hours, and it would use rand() to pop one up at different intervals, no more than 3 an hour, and no less than one an hour.

Drove her crazy for a day.

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

#305
Using a a Ruby script called blinken I plugged to my makefile to blink specific patterns ont keyboard's led's to indicate that the build was "busy" led's running from left to right. Broken build: "the 3 led's scroll-lock, num-lock, caps loc flashing slowly" Build ready "the 3 led's moving to-and-fro like a Cylon" I was working on firmware for KVM's to support key-codes for all many languages. The test team was not happy with me. :( Quit messing around! They said.

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

#306
Remember the DVD decoding legal battles? I wrote a Perl parser (using RecDescent before GCC decided to use it, making my script extra-useless) that translated C code to an English quasi equivalent, and back. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ Voila.

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

#307
post #96

When 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…

I used to work for a company that makes smart watches with real (software-driven) mechanical hands, and had to write a very similar computer vision program to read the time from those watches and automatically calibrate the position of the minute and hour hands. So yes it has real purpose ;)

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

#308
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…

> a Space Invaders game

> a minimal roguelike in Forth

> 3-D rotating objects in ASCII art in 20 lines of Python

> an RPN calculator with forward-mode automatic differentiation

Those all sound pretty cool. Are those in the link you provided? I'd be interested in seeing how you did the 3-D rotations in only 20 lines, or what a minimal roguelike in Forth would look like.

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

#309
Many years ago, I wondered how Ken Thompson's 1968 ACM article on implementing regexes in IBM 7040 would look in x86. Ken uses two lists for current and next backtracking and I replaced one of them by the call stack (interleaving call and ret in weird order). I remember struggling with some assembly syntax (AXC **,7 as it were) so I emailed Mr. Thompson! And Ken, ever the gentleman, took ample time to reply to a no-name n00b! Several years later, Russ Cox of Go fame somehow heard about my silly hack, reached out, and included it on his page about "Implementing Regular Expressions" (https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/).
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