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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?

#401

Post by eszed »

tetris11 wrote: post #398
eszed wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't without doxxing myself sadly. I really should make a public HN account

Please do!

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

#402

Post by trealira »

kragen wrote: post #388
trealira wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .…

Thanks! I upvoted you but forgot to reply. Those are as interesting as I thought they'd be.

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

#403

Post by kragen »

trealira wrote: post #402
kragen wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .…

Thanks! I upvoted you but forgot to reply. Those are as interesting as I thought they'd be.

Awesome, I'm glad you liked them!

I probably should have said in my original comment that the 3-D rotation itself was only 3 of the 15 lines:

  s = 0.1                                 # sine
  c = (1 - s**2)**0.5                     # cosine
  ...
  cube = [(c*x + s*z, y, -s*x + c*z) for x, y, z in cube] # Rotate by theta.
The rest was ASCII art, animation, perspective projection, and geometry generation.

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

#404

Post by andai »

a12k wrote: post #265
andai wrote: post #264

Someone made an ASCII art bonsai generator in bash, so I ported it to a few lines of JS. Then I made it animate the growth :) http://web.archive.org/web/20200512153032id_/https://andai.t... There's no "restart" button, but each refresh produces a unique tree.

Just a caution for future clickers: This caused my mobile browser to spawn a bunch of print windows and was pretty annoying to exit.

Here, I renamed the print function, that should fix the bug.

https://jsbin.com/seraputuve/edit?output

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

#405

Post by prometheus76 »

kmoser wrote: post #338
prometheus76 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What anagrams does it produce for "Jeremy Irons"?

You can download the binary and run it in a DOS emulator to find out! Or compile from the source linked to on the page.

I will check it out, but it was a reference to an old Simpsons joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhmtXpWsAdU

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

#406

Post by pj1115 »

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.

I found this just yesterday! I'm sure one could build something better with recent models, but I think the approach is solid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWZu3rnj-kQ

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

#407

Post by Libcat99 »

hi_hi wrote: post #385
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 :-)

Love this concept :)

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

#409

Post by masahito »

Actually most of my code serves no practical purpose, like this hamster: https://codepen.io/Ma5a/pen/ExqWGGM or these pandas bumping into each other: https://codepen.io/Ma5a/pen/WNEBqPO

But I learn a lot from it, and it indirectly feeds into my day job.

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