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

296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.394s | 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. pflenker ◴[23 Oct 24 06:59 UTC] No.41922555[source]▶
Back when the web was more open, I built a small page which displayed beautiful watercolor maps from Stamen and started listening for location based updates on Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, instagram and possibly more. Every time an update came in, a small icon would drop like a raindrop onto the map. Hovering it would show you the contents.

I thought it was very pretty, and I remember keeping it open throughout the day, watching how instagram photos from POIs gave way to photos from food and eventually party pics as the day ended, and how foursquare checkins in pubs and clubs increased as it got late.

It’s sad that building something like this is no longer possible.