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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: 0s | 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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andrewgleave ◴[23 Oct 24 08:35 UTC] No.41923054[source]▶
This is very similar to when I used OpenCV to read the angle of a cardboard knob I pinned on the wall in my office to change the volume on Spotify!
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yurishimo ◴[23 Oct 24 09:44 UTC] No.41923427[source]▶
That is a super cool idea! Kinda sad that it doesn’t make much sense outside of a very particular use case scenario. Much more practical to mount a potentiometer to the wall for any sort of fixed installation.

It might be cool adapt for a mobile office setup where you’re only present in one location for a few days but still want some automated creature comforts.

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1. carapace ◴[23 Oct 24 14:24 UTC] No.41925334{3}[source]▶
Cf. https://dynamicland.org/

> Dynamicland is a nonprofit research lab creating a humane dynamic medium.

> What that means is a way for real people in the real world to explore ideas together, not just with words and pictures, but with computation.

They're doing stuff like that.