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41 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | 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!
1. lormayna ◴[] No.41897684[source]
Around 10 years, in Italy a very populistic party was raising and he was leaded by a very stupid leader that used the social a lot. Then I wrote a Twitter bot (it was possible at that time) that looked like a militant of the party and that was trained over the leader's tweets (nothing fancy, just a big Markov chain). It was so funny when people, also high level of the party start liking and retweeting the bot posts, I ended having several thousands of followers just writing bullshits.

I would like to learn how GAN are working, then I scraped the official pictures of Italian politicians since 30 years and try to generate new faces with a GAN trained to this dataset. Unfortunately I need a lot of computing power to obtain an acceptable face, and I did not want to spend money for that.

Several years ago I wrote a Tinder bot to collect spam messages and malicious links. I stopped early because I got messages from several of people that I know personally in a relationship or even married