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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: 0.223s | 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. m3047 ◴[23 Oct 24 18:32 UTC] No.41927961[source]▶
This is something I did as an add-on to an obscure but useful data analysis. The notion is that people are most easily influenced by people who are "like" them. So, let's say you want to talk about politics; you don't necessarily want them to agree with you, but you want to find people to have engaging conversations with. Where do you go? Who do you talk to?

What we've got (hammer... nail...) is a precinct canvass (tells us how, at a level of hundreds of voters in a geographic area, people voted in an election). Can we do similarity matching and find geographic clusters which voted similarly? Yes, yes I think so. Before you scoff, this was tested at a larger level and met with great derision and paranoia before the principles underlying it were subsequently adapted as an organizing principle by a political organization whose turf was covered by the dataset.

So the notion here was: Plug in your precinct. Find other precincts which voted most like your precinct. Go to one of them, knock on some doors and see if you can find some like-minded people to agree / disagree with in a civil and engaging fashion.

I already walked my own precinct and was willing to do it... because I liked meeting people and found it entertaining. I thought this was a problem that people had: they didn't know where to go to meet people who they could actually engage with meaningfully about issues of the day. There's a caveat here: it's a two way street, and you might talk to people who change your mind about something or have some information that's not in your particular "bubble". Turns out that that is emphatically not what organized politics wants to do when they knock on doors.

http://elections.m3047.net/elections/perl/cluster-correlate....

For the record, I did walk some other precincts identified by this tool... just to see who lived there. It was eery, I felt like I could live in any one of those places much more strongly than just some random place in the city; the openness to conversation was similar to knocking on doors in my own precinct and much better outcomes from a standpoint of personal fulfillment.