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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?

#381

Post by Modified3019 »

QuercusMax wrote: post #364
tmoertel wrote: post #331

I once wrote an OS hack to drive a friend crazy. This was back in the early 1990s when we worked at a company making Macintosh utility software. My friend, another coder, liked to arrange his Finder windows so that they reflected the underlying folder hierarchy and were perfectly aligned. I mean pixel perfect. So one day I wrote an extension to patch the OS on his machine to randomly nudge a window by just a single p…

Such a fine line between helpful and malicious!

A phrase that sticks with me on describing an aspect of friendships is “insincere hostility”.

I think I originally encountered it from one of Andrew Hussie’s works.

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

#382

Post by eszed »

tetris11 wrote: post #242
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…

I love this. I'm in a somewhat home automation tinker place myself, and have made an open source doorbell camera (kinda) using an esp32 chip, since I didn't trust anything else to not spy. It sends me messages over element of any movement lasting longer than 5 seconds, which usually involves an old lady who walks slowly with her zimmer frame across the front of the house. Other than actual doorbell use, most of the i…

Have you got a write-up or GitHub for your camera? I'd kinda like to do the same, and wouldn't mind a starting point.

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

#383

Post by pschuegr »

tmoertel wrote: post #331

I once wrote an OS hack to drive a friend crazy. This was back in the early 1990s when we worked at a company making Macintosh utility software. My friend, another coder, liked to arrange his Finder windows so that they reflected the underlying folder hierarchy and were perfectly aligned. I mean pixel perfect. So one day I wrote an extension to patch the OS on his machine to randomly nudge a window by just a single p…

Oh boy, this reminded me of university days. I wrote a little servlet which would pop out the CD drive on my friends computer in the lab, and I would trigger it at tense moments in Starcraft games. Good times.

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

#384

Post by pschuegr »

Modified3019 wrote: post #381
QuercusMax wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a fine line between helpful and malicious!

A phrase that sticks with me on describing an aspect of friendships is “insincere hostility”. I think I originally encountered it from one of Andrew Hussie’s works.

Great turn of phrase

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

#385

Post by hi_hi »

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.

I love this idea. It makes me think of an alternative universe where urls and websites were never invented, and everyone has to interact via a dumb phones with a phone number and txt messages (maybe WAP exists...maybe).

I might try taking this further :-)

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

#386

Post by thallavajhula »

I love all of these projects mentioned here. A year ago, I wrote a Manifesto to attempt and write fun applications like these. This is such a good "Ask HN" post. I wish there's more of such posts here.

For those interested, here's the Manifesto: https://github.com/mohnish/mtcx

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

#387

Post by quiet35 »

A couple of years ago I've made a Python program for generating all possible solutions of this Crosswordle game: https://crosswordle.vercel.app The app shows the overall number of solutions and some stats, like how many solutions contain certain word at certain position. It was not completely useless: it was a big motivation factor for learning Python, because me and my friends were obsessed by the game. It took around a year and 3 algorithm redesigns till the program could find all solutions of a 6-word Crosswordle in a somewhat reasonable time - 2-3 hours.

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

#388

Post by kragen »

trealira wrote: post #308
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…

> 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.

Thanks! Two of them are there! Or, sort of, three of them.

The Space Invaders game is http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qvaders.html, built on the game engine in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qj2d.js. An earlier version without the engine, the explosions, or the Xbox support is at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/invaders.html.

The minimal roguelike is http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/wmaze.fs. It runs in a few different Forths (GForth is probably the easiest) but I haven't ported it to F83 yet. There's an asciicast at https://asciinema.org/a/672405. I'm kind of a novice at Forth, so I might not be doing things in the best way.

The ASCII-art rotating cube is http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/rotcube.p.... It's actually only 15 lines of Python. A longer wireframe Unicode braille version is at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/braillecube.py with an asciicast at https://asciinema.org/a/390271. There's also a 41-line C++ ASCII-art version at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/rotcube.cpp and a 42-line semi-wireframe C version using my graphics library Yeso at https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/cube.c.

The RPN calculator is at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/81hacks/autodiffgraph/.

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

#390

Post by p0d »

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…

this had also crossed my mind back a while back for reading home gas meters :-)
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