Ask HN: Weirdest programs you ever made?

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Posted by u/90s_dev 3 months ago

I made a few odd apps in my time:

* cli utility that shows a rainbow unicorn flying across your screen, useful to run when all tests passed

* irc client using only named file pipes, so that channels were files you could pipe to stdout and write to via stdin

(Can't remember any others.)

What about you?

vunderba · 3 months ago

Back when I got a copy of Charles Petzold's Win32 API guide, the first program I created was a Win9x system tray app that would let you grab a window by the title bar, shake it furiously and hurl it off the screen. Once it was completely off screen, the app would send the appropriate PostMessage call to kill it.

Assigning a touch of anthropomorphism to a stubborn program provided a satisfying outlet for user irritation.

poolnoodle · 3 months ago

Fun fact: You can hurl app icons off the homescreen on Android.

ChrisGermano · 3 months ago

Years back I wrote brainfuck in python to just use various A's and named it Screaming. It's dumb but fun. Hello World:

AAAAAAAAAAÁàAAAAAAAàAAAAAAAAAAàAAAàAááááaÀàAAâàAâAAAAAAAââAAAâàAAâááAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAâàâAAAâaaaaaaâaaaaaaaaâàAâàâ

dcminter · 3 months ago

You probably enjoyed this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3054/

ChrisGermano · 3 months ago

That's hilarious, I don't remember that one at all

willmeyers · 3 months ago

I made a random number generator API that used a shared caps lock key as entropy (https://eieio.games/blog/the-global-capslock-key/). It didn't really work because bots made everything kind of deterministic. But it's kind of weird.

Code’s here: https://github.com/willmeyers/global-caps-lock-rng

90s_dev · 3 months ago

Bots ruin everything.

gdhkgdhkvff · 3 months ago

Made a “machine learning movie recommendation” website. It went through some relevant questions and had you select some of your favorite movies to base the recommendation off of. Then it “calculated” and finally recommended Weekend at Bernie’s to everyone regardless of what you answered. Then gave you an option of another movie, which was always Weekend at Bernie’s 2.

I had no specific reason to build it other than I thought it would be funny.

90s_dev · 3 months ago

https://xkcd.com/221/

gcheong · 3 months ago

My first iOS app was a button that played a flushing sound. I was trying to replicate the device used by women in Japanese restrooms to mask their, um, noises. Apple rejected it as being too simple and I didn't care to expand it to make it past gatekeepers at that point so it never got to the App Store.

90s_dev · 3 months ago

Similarly I made the best bubble emulation app on iOS maybe 8 or 10 years ago. I was so happy with it, to some extent I wish I didn't delete the source code. But it only took me one inspired Saturday to make. Unfortunately it sold no copies because nobody needs a bubble emulator that emulates a Windows 95 era screensaver but with touch capabilities. They were such pretty bubbles though...

90s_dev · 3 months ago

I'll just make it with JS. Can't be that hard.

hiAndrewQuinn · 3 months ago

"Weird" might be overselling it, but I'm quite fond of the first nontrivial Go program I ever wrote, which SSHes into Debian machines and gives a JSON "status report" of everything you might need to know to determine whether a program running on Debian Machine A might run on Debian Machine B. https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/meikkalainen

I feel like this falls under a class of tools where the existing solutions are just far too complicated for me to wrap my head around, like many of my shell scripts are meant to help with.

I should really get around to writing the semantic JSON diff for this project at some point.

yen223 · 3 months ago

One of the first websites I ever built was a Lorem Ipsum-style placeholder text generator that uses quotes from the /r/nocontext subreddit

90s_dev · 3 months ago

That sounds legitimately interesting and fun to use. You should republish it!

mikewarot · 3 months ago

I was told to write a program that could erase the boot sector of a hard disk back in the MS-DOS days. I password protected it.

I thought it was a bad idea, so instead of just erasing the boot sector, I just flipped the bits so it could be undone by running it again.

nssnsjsjsjs · 3 months ago

Smart. You can charge a $100 to "recover" the boot sector.

mikewarot · 3 months ago

Actually, my motivation back then was much simpler... to be able recover from stupid decisions on anyone's part. That and "Don't be Evil", as much as I could.