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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?

#311

Post by gdhkgdhkvff »

jimhi wrote: post #188
gdhkgdhkvff wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of similarly (sorry I don’t have a link handy but could find one tomorrow if anyone is interested), there was an interesting program someone posted in an AskHN post a year or two ago where the program took an input image, started with a blank circle that was made up of a configurable number of “pins” evenly spaced apart around the perimeter, and then starting from one “pin” iteratively found the next pin that, w…

Please find! I’m looking for this now too

After much sleuthing, I finally found the original comment. It has a link to images of the built out project which is nice and in the replies the OP posts links to the GitHub gist. If any interest in my react version I can make that public too, just know it was quick and dirty but does work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=37036108

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

#313

Post by gdhkgdhkvff »

kuu wrote: post #258
gdhkgdhkvff wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of similarly (sorry I don’t have a link handy but could find one tomorrow if anyone is interested), there was an interesting program someone posted in an AskHN post a year or two ago where the program took an input image, started with a blank circle that was made up of a configurable number of “pins” evenly spaced apart around the perimeter, and then starting from one “pin” iteratively found the next pin that, w…

With your description, ChatGPT tells me it may be this one: https://github.com/callummcdougall/computational-thread-art Is it? :)

It wasn’t but that is VERY similar haha. Wonder if this person had the same idea as I did. Namely “hey this idea is cool! I MUST build it myself to tinker with.” Lmao

After much sleuthing, I finally found the original comment. It has a link to images of the built out project which is nice and in the replies the OP posts links to the GitHub gist. If any interest in my react version I can make that public too, just know it was quick and dirty but does work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=37036108

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

#314

Post by mandmandam »

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…

I'll add to the chorus of how cool and interesting this is, and how potentially useful. Got a newsletter?

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

#315

Post by lifthrasiir »

0xf00ff00f wrote: post #32
tromp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winning an IOCCC contest is far from being useless though:-)

Hey, I've seen some of your IOCCC entries. Even had some fun trying to understand them back in the day. IOCCC gang rise up. This is mine: https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2005_persano

Somehow, I have a rather small one: https://www.ioccc.org/2012/kang/kang.c

I think I have submitted once or twice before that got won, and all other entries were excessively long to be honest. Guess a conciseness is a virtue.

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

#317

Post by kekeblom »

jinay wrote: 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…

At ETH we worked on an analog pressure gauge reading project. In the larger project, we wanted to read analog pressure gauges in oil refineries. https://github.com/ethz-asl/analog_gauge_reader

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

#318

Post by Mr_Bees69 »

Libcat99 wrote: post #302

A Ai bot that lives on a phone number. You can call the number to talk to it and ask it questions, however all of it's answers are sandwich related and it attempts to solve any problem presented using sandwiches.

github?

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

#319

Post by blacklion »

jinay wrote: 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…

long-long time ago (think end of last century) friend of mine take contract to automatize gas-pump stations on long gas pipe. Stations were here, with analog gauges and valves.

Offer from some "big" business with digital / connected gauges and motorized valves were too much for customer. He wanted much, much cheaper.

There were special modems, which use pipe as data line (think something like 150 baud shared between all stations).

So, solution implemented by my friend was like:

1) Electric motor with gearbox to motorize valves, it was cheap, as standard electric motors are cheap and customer has its own mechanical shop, so everything was cobbled in-house from standard of-the-shelf components.

2) Modem for each station (it was inevitable)

3) Laptop with B/W web cam on each station.

4) Software which can read gauges from webcam shots.

5) Software which transmit values from all stations to central station and allows to manipulate valves from central station (no automation here, 24/7 human operators)

Laptops and cameras were not cheap from personal point of view, but like x100 cheaper than special gauges and valves offered by gas-pipe equipment manufacturer.

It was not called "computer vision" at this time.

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

#320

Post by lifthrasiir »

It is very easy to make a Brotli file that would give the entire Brotli built-in dictionary when extracted, just call this JS function to get the base64-encoded file:

    function makeBrotliPreset_COMPACT() {
        let r=0,b=0,n=0,z=0,w,d,e,f=i=>{for(n+=i;n>7;n-=8)r.push(b&255),b>>=8};
        [40,152,97,209,26,138,12,124,68,179,18,73,128,184,45,100,156,211,1,28,56].map((v,i)=>{
            for(w=0;w>e+2;d-=2>e+1)
Don't ask me why.
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