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296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | 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. habosa ◴[] No.41921298[source]
I bought the domain http://ftp.computer because it made me laugh.

I set up the site using an MS-DOS stysheet. It had a single button and it said “feed me”.

Clicking the button let you upload a file. It would spin for a while and then say “thank you, I am sated”.

In the background it would chop the file up into 140-character pieces of base64 and then tweet them out in order. There was also a Slack bot that would reassemble files for you by scraping the Twitter feed.

I did all of this because it was the dumbest thing I could think of that day.

I wish it was still up, but the domain was $65/year renewal and it wasn’t that funny to me.