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296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | 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. kylehotchkiss ◴[] No.41919702[source]
Process a UPU PDF with all available airmail destinations into a map that could either show the routing a package will take or the availability for airmail for a given route.

Practically, airmail is just thrown in a sack under a plane by bored airport workers, it often ends up in the wrong country, where a bored airport worker will place it in another sack, and so on until it gets to its destination. There's little elegance to it. Nothing fancy enough to parse a 200 page PDF over.