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

296 points reverseCh | 2 comments | 20 Oct 24 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.53s | 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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jinay ◴[23 Oct 24 00:31 UTC] No.41920264[source]▶
When I was first learning computer vision, I wrote a program that could tell the time from an image of a clock [1]. I had no purpose for it besides the fact that it seemed like a cool problem to try and solve.

Years later, I get an email from a stranger in Korea, asking me how to run my program. Why would he want to use my silly program? Turns out you can adapt the code to read analog pressure gauges which is really useful for chemical plants. Goes to show that there's often a use for most things.

[1] https://github.com/jinayjain/timekeeper

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1. j_bum ◴[23 Oct 24 03:17 UTC] No.41921434[source]▶
Thanks for sharing this. The blog article on building your pipeline was a fun read! Your solution has a nice blend of heuristics and DL.

If you’re ever interested in revisiting this click project, you could check out DeepLabCut [0]. A blogpost highlighted a toy example of training a DLC model to recognize clock arms [1], which may or may not be more consistent than your Canny approach :)

[0] https://github.com/DeepLabCut/DeepLabCut

[1] https://guillermohidalgogadea.com/openlabnotebook/training-y...

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2. jinay ◴[23 Oct 24 03:26 UTC] No.41921485[source]▶
Woah generalized pose estimation seems really useful and it's cool that the example is for reading a clock. Thanks for sharing!