hardly the most creative code i have written, but though not done yet (last commit 2y ago– if this even gives me the right to keep using that word)... i still enjoy the idea very much. less struggle & more time to wander off for me, and i will finish it. but till today, nobody has seen it anyway, and likely not many will. this rough & badly executed idea, might not die a lonely death.
Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
411–420 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#412In the end my "useless" program was curl or wget, executed by a cronjob to fetch that web-shop to render the front-page over and over again every few minutes to keep the caches of the application warm, resulting in "acceptable" load-times around 10s instead of 50 or more seconds.
Customer got a quick and rather cheap solution for his problem.
Fun fact: This cronjob was not just a hotfix for a few days but rather stayed in active duty for more than 5 years before the shop was finally replaced with a proper solution...
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#413A 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…
It's a cool problem. Did you ever see the pywal project? It has a few backends for generating palettes, I think the best is the imagemagick one in wal.py https://github.com/dylanaraps/pywal/tree/master/pywal/backen... Also, I guess dylanaraps has archived all his projects and taken up farming? Fair enough
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#414A 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…
Hey this is pretty cool! Have you thought about putting it online? I've occasionally used tools like Adobe's color scheme finder, where you upload an image and it suggests a fitting colorscheme derived from the photo. Though honestly theirs doesn't perform too well. Yours looks like a nice improvement.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#415A 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'm replying because it's the first mention of Bahrain I've come across on HN. I spent the first 30 years of my life there. Interestingly though, I've worked on similar algorithms before, some of which are in production.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#416A 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?
#417Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#418I was learning how to work with Cloudflare Workers and implemented something called a Pixel Mosaic: https://rishikeshs.com/mosaic/ . It's a live pixel mosaic where anyone can change the color, with the color being chosen randomly, so the chances of two adjacent tiles having the same color are quite low. I also log the country to see where people who have clicked it are from. I am currently working on a desktop 8x8 LE…
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#419I was learning how to work with Cloudflare Workers and implemented something called a Pixel Mosaic: https://rishikeshs.com/mosaic/ . It's a live pixel mosaic where anyone can change the color, with the color being chosen randomly, so the chances of two adjacent tiles having the same color are quite low. I also log the country to see where people who have clicked it are from. I am currently working on a desktop 8x8 LE…
Love this! I think I'm going to make something similar, I especially love the RL part. Thanks for sharing!