[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, bu...
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Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of
reach?
This question's for all those cool projects or skills you're
secretly fascinated by, but haven't quite jumped into. Maybe you
feel like you just don't have the right "brain" for it, or you're
not smart enough to figure it out, or even worse, you simply have
no clue how or where to even start. The idea here is to shine a
light on these hidden interests and the little (or big!) mental
blocks that come with them. If you're already rocking in those
specific areas - or you've been there and figured out how to get
past similar hurdles - please chime in! Share some helpful
resources, dish out general advice, or just give a nudge of
encouragement on how to take that intimidating first step. Let's
help each other get unstuck!
Author : akktor
Score : 25 points
Date : 2025-06-09 12:41 UTC (1 days ago)
| akktor wrote:
| For me, it's gotta be Asahi Linux development. I've been
| following the work of Asahi Lina and the team for a long time,
| watching their progress in awe. It just seems incredibly cool to
| get macOS hardware running Linux so well. But every time I think
| about actually diving into it, my brain just screams "super
| complicated!" and I have no idea where I'd even begin to
| contribute or understand what's going on under the hood. It's
| definitely one of those things I admire from a distance because
| it feels so far beyond my current capabilities.
| inhumantsar wrote:
| CPU design
| incomingpain wrote:
| There's 2 big ones that I want to learn.
|
| Quantum computer programming. I've dived a couple times into
| Qiskit from IBM. Also tried to get into dwave and ocean sdk but
| they never got back to me.
|
| Qiskit tutorials are easy to blow through and i think even
| understand. But when trying to use it for my own purposes, just
| never get anywhere.
|
| The other one for me with no success. Training my own specialized
| predicting AI models. Tensorflow, pytorch, and another.
|
| I certainly prefer pytorch. Super simple to build models on
| simple stuff.
|
| I'm trying to do something that literally nobody else has ever
| done. My lack of success has probably a lot more to do with that
| it's not perhaps actually doable.
|
| Flipside, I might be re-approaching this now that i have the
| pycharm ai to help me in this progress.
|
| >you've been there and figured out how to get past similar
| hurdles - please chime in! Share some helpful resources, dish out
| general advice, or just give a nudge of encouragement on how to
| take that intimidating first step.
|
| Never be afraid to try. Always dare to fail; you only truly learn
| when failing. The easier you make it to fail, the quicker you
| learn.
| guywithahat wrote:
| My concern with quantum computing is there's already such an
| outrageous overabundance of quantum computing PhD's the marked
| will likely be saturated for decades to come. It would be a ton
| of fun to learn, but I can't justify the time because there's
| no career progression
| hbartab wrote:
| You might benefit from this overview:
| https://ianreppel.org/a-review-of-quantum-computing-courses/
| pajamasam wrote:
| Totally fair re: quantum computer programming. It's still an
| open question what exactly it can be useful for.
|
| Are you trying it for anything in particular?
|
| (I'm only getting started in it now in my Master's programme)
| swsieber wrote:
| Hobby electronics & robotics. I can make an LED blink on a
| ESP8266 (it's been a while), but that's it. I'd like to get more
| familiar with a multimeter, figuring out broken kids toys, etc.
| but it's a bit daunting. Maybe there's too many options and not
| enough constraints. I'm not sure.
| drabadur wrote:
| For robotics, I recently came across this course to learn the
| basics: https://github.com/henki-
| robotics/robotics_essentials_ros2. Haven't started it yet
| though.
| cgreerrun wrote:
| Highly recommend LeRobot.
| ge96 wrote:
| This gotta come up with a project you want for yourself and
| make it. I remember soldering one of those 2x16 LCD screens and
| it had a short so it would start smoking to designing/3D
| printing my own quadruped with an IMU/navigation. I did cheat
| and not use inverse kinematics, I watched videos on other
| insect-style quads walking and I programmed it manually.
|
| I think main gotcha is power distribution and shared ground eg.
| using a boost converter or regulator to boost/downgrade voltage
| and which servos/sensors uses what. Later have to be concerned
| with too much current being drawn but yeah.
|
| I used these green proto boards you can solder onto as a step
| up above breadboard but not my own PCB.
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| Check out the Arduino starter kit. This is how I started with
| electrics. It comes with everything you need including a great
| book which walks you through everything. Very much worth the
| money.
|
| https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-mu...
| i_don_t_know wrote:
| I have found the Make: Electronics series of books by Charles
| Platt to be a good mix of basics / fundamentals and fun
| projects.
| jesol wrote:
| I don't know anything about electronics design, but I'm really
| into backpacking so a high efficiency battery system with a solar
| panel is _really_ interesting to me. I came across this
| project[1], and wanted to improve upon it for my usecase. I want
| to add the ability to have multiple 21700 cells in a lightweight
| charger, instead of a single cell with a builtin USB charger. I
| want to learn more electronics, but it definitely feels like a
| multiyear process, and it 'd be nice to shortcut it for the
| projects I'm interested in.
|
| 1.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/myog/comments/1k3stln/ultralight_13...
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Learning just enough for your needs is a valid approach to
| learning electronics design, unless you're planning on becoming
| an actual EE.
|
| It provides a huge amount of self-motivation and as much as I
| hate to admit it (as a one-time electronics design engineer),
| you can skip a lot of the middle-layer concepts. Sure, you
| should understand Ohm's law and what basic components
| (resistors, capacitors, transistors) _do_ , but you can jump
| from that right into understanding how a battery charger works
| without having to understand how the components actually work.
|
| The hard part is finding good tutorial material that starts at
| the right level: most of the professionally written stuff
| presupposes that you're either already an EE, or have one at
| your disposal to translate things for you.
| techn00 wrote:
| Biotech, wearables
| AnnaMere wrote:
| wearables +1 and robotics
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| +1 biotech, biohacking
| joshdavham wrote:
| Are there any biohacking projects in particular that excite
| you?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Gene therapy.
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| digital signal processing for synths and audio stuff.
|
| maths :/ brain hurt.
|
| i did some digital signal processing in my phd but i need to go
| through and implement a bunch of things from scratch to
| learn/relearn and it'll just be a bit of a grind. i'm avoiding
| doing that by working on data file parsing / project management
| utils for the elektron octatrack instead, which is useful, but
| tangential to what i want to do.
|
| long term would be rad to build software for old synth hardware
| and the like. sort of like midiquest, but without the price tag.
| net_ wrote:
| I've heard The Audio Programmer discord is a great resource for
| this sort of thing. Worth checking out:
| https://www.theaudioprogrammer.com/
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| thanks, although i'm a member already. it's not really
| resources that's the issue. i've read Julius Smith's books in
| the past etc. in the rust audio discord etc.
|
| i just have a mental block similar to the one i had with
| rust. avoided learning it for a long while until i made a
| decision to finally to do it.
|
| i just keep avoiding making the same decision here for some
| reason. not sure why. probably the old "it's going to be
| really hard" thing i had with rust (which turned out to be
| rubbish, it just took time and repeating stuff over and over
| and learning from mistakes over and over).
| rented_mule wrote:
| Will Pirkle has a couple of books that go through this. I've
| found them quite helpful. https://www.willpirkle.com/
| screaminghawk wrote:
| Anything that involves time. Dance, music, gardening. I have too
| many existing commitments that when I actually have free time I
| have no energy left
| more_corn wrote:
| I saw an article recently on a shock absorbing material and a
| biohacking method of manufacturing it with a bioreactor. I'd love
| to pick up something like that. That and Effective 3D printing or
| hobby manufacturing.
| seanssel wrote:
| Game development.
|
| I'll admit that part of my problem is chronic depression over a
| decade+. The idea of gamedev excites me, but I have a hard time
| feeling passionate about anything these days. You definitely need
| that for games. Hell, I'm barely able to sit down and even enjoy
| games anymore.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| We're not depressed, the rest of the world is just stupidly
| optimistic.
| libertine wrote:
| Industrial design for a long time, and injection molding more
| recently.
| taylorius wrote:
| There's a certain change of perspective with modern AI (by
| "modern" I mean Resnet and beyond). When I was deep into neural
| nets in the 1990s, they weren't that large, and I would think of
| them in terms of the number of weights and nodes - but modern
| deep learning seems to have has moved up a few levels of
| abstraction. (I stepped away from the field for a while). And
| there's a certain understanding people seem to have now regarding
| the "gradient flow" through the net and why certain architectures
| work well (Resnet, Unets etc). I must say I'm finding it tricky
| to shift into this new level of thinking. Also Transformers -
| still looking for an intuitive sense of how they work, haha.
| wjholden wrote:
| Cellular networks.
|
| I specialize in computer networking in my day job. Most of what I
| do is Cisco routers, Cisco switches, and Cisco firewalls. I would
| be interested in learning more about cellular networks. I haven't
| put any effort into exploring this for myself. If there is a
| track similar to CCNA - CCNP - CCIE then it isn't well-known
| (well, not known to me).
| iSloth wrote:
| Same background as me, however I moved into cellular/mobile -
| not really any official routes I know of in the industry,
| certainly not like a Cisco track.
|
| Typical route is work at a Telco or IoT company as Network Eng
| or Developer and naturally pivot into telco learning on the
| job.
|
| Vendors will run training courses when you buy their kit which
| helps a little, but it's mostly self learning or on the job.
| redog wrote:
| Making enough money to retire
| captain_coffee wrote:
| Any realistic strategies that you have considered in order to
| try achieving that? Genuine question.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Genuine answer: I buy a lotto ticket like once a week. ~100
| bucks/yr seems like a decent risk/reward tradeoff once over a
| certain tier of income.
| redog wrote:
| I may try Gambling at the end
| redog wrote:
| Working. In my 30 years employed I've managed to invest
| enough to make up a little. I've probably 24 years left. I
| think I can more than double my 401k in that time but that
| still won't be 1M
|
| If crypto keeps going up there's a chance my 3k investment in
| it eclipses my 40yr 401k so I'm hoping for that....
| 65 wrote:
| I've tried to make my own pair of shoes a few times now, never
| quite getting to the end. I even took a class but doing it on my
| own is so much harder.
|
| I'm a software developer with no real reason to be sewing and
| lasting my own shoes, but god damn it I'd love to wear my own
| handmade shoes.
| arzke wrote:
| Debugging electronics to fix stuff. Some people seem to be able
| to repair whatever broken electronic devices we give them, which
| I find fascinating.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Same! There is a huge knowledge and skill gap between knowing
| how resistors, capacitors, and transistors work to the point
| where you can build a little light blinker, which I can do, and
| actually troubleshooting a (even 1980s through-hole technology)
| device to find the component that is broken, which is way
| beyond me.
| marcusverus wrote:
| I recently built an optical encoder from scratch, and it was a
| ton of fun. More recently I've been looking into how force
| feedback works, and I'm currently gearing up to implement it
| using a motor/encoder/controller setup and ODrive.
| spiffytech wrote:
| I want to make my own music streaming app. Fix all the UI
| problems, improve discovery, remember all the musical phases I
| went through.
|
| Unfortunately, you can't just sign up for API access to millions
| of songs. And the streaming apps either don't provide a playback
| API, or their TOS limits what you can do with it.
| 65 wrote:
| I've looked into this before. You might be able to pull this
| off with the YouTube API and Stream Rip using Deezer. Would
| require a bit of hacking but it could work.
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| You don't need to do a monolithic design, and kludging things
| together is just fine. Start with local playback from the
| server or something equivalently small and work from there. If
| you need to background play a youtube video and forward the
| audio stream elsewhere, so be it haha
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Well, I'm have a little guilty bias towards spacetime non-
| substantivalism and I've always been interested in getting back
| to physics in this area. I've particularly found the Shape
| Dynamics program to be at least somewhat interesting and while I
| have a sort of ok grasp of the language and mathematics of GR
| translating that to the SD world has been a persistent challenge.
| If I had time I'd try to figure that out.
|
| Briefly, one usually formulates the theory of gravity in terms of
| a a 4d spacetime with curvature but you can also formulate it as
| a theory of curved 3d shapes if you allow the lagrangian to carry
| more structure. This is often performed in GR, in fact, by
| decomposing the metric into a "spatial" and "temporal" part but
| shape dynamics kind of runs with this idea in an attempt to
| formulate a totally relational version of the theory of gravity.
|
| Shape Dynamics apparently produces a reasonable theory of gravity
| which agrees with GR in many situations but forbids, I believe,
| closed timelike curves, and may be more amenable to quantization
| since it re-separates space and time.
|
| Anyway, it all seems very beyond me, maybe even if I had the
| time, which I do not.
| ge96 wrote:
| Not out of reach but I have to put time into it, working with
| FPGAs and designing my own circuit boards.
| addaon wrote:
| I've wanted for years to take the research paper "Coq: The
| World's Best Macro Assembler" through several of its more and
| less obvious next steps, including re-implementing it on top of a
| formal specification of ARM (or RISC-V) machine code, and
| introducing a concept of virtual registers on top of a (light
| weight) register allocator. I really feel like there's a path
| here to a system in which low-level non-portable code can be
| written comfortably (if perhaps at a somewhat slower pace than
| C), with arbitrary correctness properties proven on it; but the
| learning curve to get there (through Coq, etc) has been a
| struggle. Every few years I set myself the goal of a proven-
| correct implementation of a min/max heap in assembly built on
| this approach, and every few years I give up.
| ecesena wrote:
| Not in Coq, but you might find this interesting from AWS:
| https://github.com/awslabs/s2n-bignum?tab=readme-ov-file#tes...
| pigcat wrote:
| Making electronic music. Any recommendations for where to start?
| Kon5ole wrote:
| https://learningmusic.ableton.com/
| clumpthump wrote:
| I've been having a lot of fun getting started with Max/MSP
| following Cipriani & Giri's "Electronic Music And Sound Design"
| books. Max is a paid program though; Pure Data is similar but
| open source.
| quintes wrote:
| Ah caught me! You need a Mac and GarageBand. I was always in
| the too expensive not gonna buy one but it changed my home use
| a lot.
|
| GarageBand is easy. I'm gonna upgrade to logic at some point
| but that's a start.
|
| And good studio monitors or studio headphones. Can't mix on
| regular headphones. I've got some m-audio pretty good.
|
| Then you play. I don't have many followers or fans but I'm
| doing it for me.
|
| Here's a track
| https://open.spotify.com/track/5o0xa7x1Q3bokEwFOEnXBQ?si=QZc...
|
| It's lofi/ electronica.
|
| Best of luck
| ofalkaed wrote:
| I would buy a synth and learn it as you would any other
| instrument, something on the simpler side and not a work
| station or the like so you can focus on it more as an
| instrument. Modern technology makes it all to easy to just have
| an entire electronic music studio which is a great deal to
| learn and few are going to ever learn any of it well if they
| start with a full studio. Build out from there, once you are
| getting the hang of the synth install a DAW or something to
| record with on your computer and start learning that, record an
| entire album worth of songs with just that one synth. I always
| liked using SoX as a multitrack recorder, ecasound was nice as
| well, kept things more about making music instead of being an
| engineer.
|
| Back when I was more active with electronic music I would do an
| entire album worth of tracks with each new synth I got,
| software or hardware, good way to learn a synth.
| fb03 wrote:
| My time to shine! I'm a computer programmer but I've been
| making music digitally for about 15 years now
|
| The software you want is called a DAW - Digital Audio
| Workstation. There are 300 DAWs, you need to find the one that
| fits your 'style' or 'workflow'. There are a multitude of
| paradigms, as making music is not a single technique.
|
| Once you find your DAW, my recommendation is to just make lots
| of music. Make the music you imagine in your head. Make the
| tracks that don't exist but you wish they did. Your first
| 100-200-300 tracks will all be extremely crappy _in hindsight_
| , but when you finish them you'll think they are, at the time,
| a magnum opus each. Keep iterating that process over and over
| and after many years, you'll start making something that you'll
| feel semi-proud enough to be able to show your friends!
|
| This is a track I've done 11 years ago:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlkoEI4Sq7w&list=PL2xsoYcYFo...
|
| and this is a newer track, released "only" _8_ years ago:
|
| https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/twothousandseventeen-feat-m...
|
| so you can definitely notice the difference of what 3 years of
| music making look like in terms of progress
|
| GOOD LUCK!
| joshdavham wrote:
| Python packages written in low-level languages like C/C++ and
| Rust.
|
| There are currently so many cool open source projects in the
| python ecosystem that involve writing python packages in low-
| level languages. But unfortunately, I've barely written any low-
| level code since university, so these projects are effectively
| out of reach for me at the moment.
|
| However, I do plan on learning Rust sometime later this year and
| there are number of smaller projects that I plan on working on!
| tuveson wrote:
| C is not as hard to get into as you might think, and probably
| necessary to be at least a little bit comfortable with if you
| want to write Python libraries or understand Python internals.
| I would suggest Beej's guide, if you're looking for a place to
| start!
|
| https://beej.us/guide/bgc/
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Do you have examples of such projects? I have some low-level
| language knowledge and might be interested in giving it a shot.
| haolez wrote:
| Astronomy and quantum physics :)
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Manufacturing. I have no idea where one would start with learning
| it that doesn't begin with having at least $100,000 in machinery
| and industry knowledge.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Start by asking yourself "manufacturing what?" and go from
| there. I've worked at companies that did some form of
| manufacturing my entire career. "Manufacturing" covers even
| more ground than "software" does. e.g., textile manufacturing
| has a completely different set of concerns than manufacturing
| airplane parts does.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Building a web browser.
|
| I once took a stab at Ladybird browser but had to back out due to
| the complexity of its build chain. I couldn't get it run on
| Xcode/CLion on macOS but would love to give it a try once again.
|
| Does anyone have any tips on getting started again?
| rickydroll wrote:
| 1) Revisiting one of my past projects, using Hashcash as a rate
| limiter. The original one I worked with was Camram/2 Penny Blue,
| which embedded proof-of-work tokens in an email message as an
| anti-spam method. It was the wrong solution, and proof-of-work
| tokens should be embedded in the protocol itself, which would
| enable dynamic pricing based on reputation.
|
| Why I'm not doing it: I'm not sure it would be accepted. I took a
| lot of lumps for trying to use Hashcash in email, and I'm not
| sure I want to go through that again, but it does have value.
| Embedding proof-of-work puzzles in a protocol is a great way to
| limit abusive requests and patterns. SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS are easy
| to modify and probably could be done via a proxy. I'm not sure
| how easy it is to change the SSH protocol, but that would be
| useful as well.
|
| 2) Low-income living space electrification.
|
| I tested this idea out on a friend who works for a Housing
| Authority, and their eyes lit up. However, they warned me that it
| would take a few years for everyone to sign off on it.
|
| The original idea was to provide a kit, a bag of parts, that an
| affordable housing authority could use to improve living quarters
| and housing for low-income people, and eliminate/reduce the use
| of gas.
|
| a) Replacing gas stoves with a set of three induction plates. The
| significant challenges are filling the void created by the
| original stove, ensuring sufficient power to operate the
| induction plates, and addressing how to handle the absence of an
| oven.
|
| b) Filling the hole is easy. This is something a halfway decent
| carpenter could do, or we could provide an adjustable-size box
| that fits in such a space, not quite an IKEA flat-pack but
| roughly similar.
|
| c) Power is a little more difficult. One company is solving this
| problem by putting in a battery to handle the load. This is
| possible, but the baseline cost would now be approximately
| $2,000, just for the parts.
|
| d) window mount heat pump. New York City has funded in-window
| heat pumps as part of a design project. The problem is they run
| around $4,000 to $6,000, but an ordinary handyman could install
| them.
|
| 3) Recycling car batteries from crashed vehicles into home power
| banks.
|
| This project is a bit of a stretch for me. I know people are
| doing this, but not in the States as far as I can tell. The off-
| grid solar community has a variety of inverters and solar
| chargers that may be suitable for this kind of situation, but I
| don't have enough knowledge.
|
| 4) Ad hoc virtual power plants
|
| Many people have rooftop solar. The grid gets overfull on bright
| sunny days. People who can't have solar often have space for
| batteries. Work out the instrumentation and accounting so that
| solar producers can charge batteries, and everybody gets
| compensated when the grid demands the battery's power.
|
| It seems to me that this would be a great application of
| distributed system concepts, providing a win for the local
| community and grid resiliency.
|
| I need a second life to make progress on these ideas
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Music theory and desktop app development. Mostly because lack of
| time.
| mmarian wrote:
| My own rap music. And trading, I find it hard to believe in it
| given empirical research about well diversified passive funds
| over performing.
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