←back to thread

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: 0.344s | 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. oo0shiny ◴[23 Oct 24 15:57 UTC] No.41926349[source]▶
A group of coworker friends and I used to find the most creative ways to mess with each others' computers if they were left unattended. Some of the ones I can remember off the top of my head:

1. A Chrome extension that slowly rotated every <div> on the page (think 1 degree every 10 minutes). Would be hard to notice unless a page had been left open for a while. 2. Another Chrome extension that would redirect to a full-screen gif of John Cena that would only load after a random number of page loads. 3. A horn sound that would play after every successful git commit, regardless of computer volume. 4. A Slack bot that would scrape another coworker's insufferable Reddit comments, store them in a database, and then use ML to interject the comments into our conversations based on some basic NLP. This one was my favorite.