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

41 points reverseCh | 2 comments | 20 Oct 24 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.417s | source

I recently came across the concept of "useless" programs - pieces of code that serve no practical purpose but are fun, creative, or challenging to write. These could be anything from elaborate ASCII art generators to programs that solve imaginary problems. I'm curious to hear about the most interesting or creative "useless" programs the HN community has written. What was your motivation? What unexpected challenges did you face? Did you learn anything valuable from the experience? Some examples to get the ball rolling: 1. A program that prints the lyrics of "99 Bottles of Beer" in binary. A text-based game where you play as a semicolon trying to find its way to the end of a line of code. A script that translates English text into Shakespearean insults. Share your creations, no matter how quirky or impractical. Let's celebrate the joy of coding for coding's sake!
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rhyperior ◴[20 Oct 24 17:54 UTC] No.41897173[source]▶
Twofer

I wrote a flame simulation in x86 assembly language. Total hoot.

I also wrote an Easter egg that shipped in a major software company’s software and is immortally burned onto thousands of DVDs slowly rotting in landfills. This one was fun and challenging because I had to mask the names of the product team from easy detection, I had to convert string text to my own custom 8x3 pixel font for rendering, I played with palette animation to create some fun raining effects, and I packed it into just a few Kb of the DOS end of a Windows executable (back in the day, 16-bit Windows apps could be linked with a custom DOS loader in case you tried to run the Windows app from the cmd line).

replies(1): >>41897430 #
1. mysterydip ◴[20 Oct 24 18:27 UTC] No.41897430[source]▶
What kind of trigger did it have? some kind of key sequence or certain day of the year?
replies(1): >>41900394 #
2. rhyperior ◴[21 Oct 24 03:18 UTC] No.41900394[source]▶
You passed a phrase on the command line. Honestly I made it all too hard to find, but Easter eggs were a bit dangerous for one’s career :)