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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: 0.244s | 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. RajT88 ◴[23 Oct 24 12:56 UTC] No.41924607[source]▶
I once worked in a fun office, where there was a prank war.

One lady was particularly prolific. My coworkers, to try and get revenge, said they enabled the Windows Messenger service on her machine when she left it unlocked once (the one you send a network message, and it shows a popup dialog). She wasn't particularly technical, so this was going to be a good thing to exploit.

I wrote a VBScript which did a GET on the (seemingly now defunct) BOFH excuse server: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/

And it parsed the page, and sent the message to her computer. It didn't just do it at some interval, though. It would only do it during her normal working hours, and it would use rand() to pop one up at different intervals, no more than 3 an hour, and no less than one an hour.

Drove her crazy for a day.