Ask HN: What are your Hobbies?

27 points by lainon ↗ HN

53 comments

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* Learning Finnish.

* Taking pictures.

* Spending time learning about hardware, via ESP8266 chips.

* Auditing software for security problems.

* Reading. Constantly.

* Indoor rock-climbing & general gym-going.

Cycling, mountain-biking, XC mostly. I just love being out in nature on a beautiful trail.

But if hobbies includes academic interests, then computer science, mathematics, (programming is a given in this community I suppose), rationality and many other fields of science. Also, competitive programming is something i do occasionally, the short feedback cycle gives makes it quite addictive.

Watches and watchmaking

Hiphop/R&B music

Baseball/Basketball statistics

Beer

Reading about Philosophy and Religion

Weightlifting

Can you give some more details on your watchmaking hobby? What's a good way to get started?
I wish I could, but I am practically brand new to it. The interest in watchmaking is coming second to an interest in watch collecting.

The advice I got was to get Watchmaking by George Daniels and read that to get a strong overview.

It's unfortunately currently sitting on my bookshelf, I am forcing myself to complete the GMAT before I dive into it.

I am very interested in watch making and saved these two [0][1] items to come back to when I have time. I would love to see what resources you have to share if any at all!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14610110

[1] http://watchesbysjx.com/2017/05/portrait-masahiro-kikuno-jap...

* Gardening (vegetables especially, with a slight eye on moving towards self-sufficiency over time -- although ideally we need a little more land)

* Cycling

* Brewing

The combination of parenthood and my current job seems to have cut into hobby programming a lot, but haven't given up completely.

Gaming. It’s by far my largest expenditure of time and discretionary income. Despite that I still have quite a backlog. I’m working my way through the original The Witcher right now.
Weightlifting, Dancing, Learning to DJ, Writing, Improv, Cooking,(Story|Poetry) Slams, Meditation, Video Game Modding, Wood work, Mixology, Programming, Pro Wrestling, Travel, Learning, etc.
Whitewater kayaking, climbing and walking in the countryside. Playing guitar and reading. Used to enjoy mountain biking but almost given up since having children.
lighting for bands
Meetup philosophy groups; gym yoga class; read; travel, history, science (space, biology, tec history) documentaries; politics stuff; Twit, hacker news, coursera; Machine learning tutorials;
Collecting and writing code for Apple II computers.

More recently: 3D printing, and I'm just starting my first robotics project.

Motocross, Street bike riding, Desert Racing, Riding in Baja, throwing a wrench on my bike/truck/RV.

Looking at starting a company motorcycle related...hope it doesn't kill my hobbies :-/

Guitar, singing, reading (science fiction + interesting non-fiction), running. The amount of time and effort it takes to become reasonably good enough to sound "talented" at the first two items alone is long enough to take a decade or so, maybe half that if you are good at practicing.
Music, photography, video games, coffee, hiking.

I spend ludicrous amounts of time reading wikipedia (technology, psychology, philosophy, science, design).

I wish there were more single player video games that I found interesting. The only stuff I can enjoy are competitive multiplayer games. Antichamber and Soma are the only two single player games that come to mind that were incredibly good experiences.

I think and read about software/computers about 12 hours a day too if that counts.

I've toyed with reading "A Wikipedia article a day" with the intent of broadening my knowledge. I'm just clicking articles (reading through the US Presidents right now) and gathering articles for later.

Do you use any tools to streamline reading Wikipedia or are you just using the site and following interesting links?

Thanks!

No tools, generally just starts off as a tangent on a particular topic and spirals out from there.

I always have a tab-backlog of wikipedia and HN articles.

DIY Electronics, mostly in shortwave radio listening (amps, antennas, and the like). And video games (perhaps too much even).
Family, Flying and Fixing things around the house

and gardening

* Skyrim modding * Cyclocross * Music production * Player Unknown's Battlegrounds * Developing a drag & drop CMS * Smoking Weed * Boxing * Texas Hold'em * CrunchyRoll (anime) * Aggressive Inline Rollerblading * Mobile app development using React Native * .NET Core
It varies from time to time and I haven't been spending a lot of time on hobby stuff lately, but some things I drift in and out of time permitting:

Bicycle riding: Road, MTB and BMX

Powerlifting

Trail running

Brazilian Jiu-jitsu / submission wrestling

Tinkering with old cars.

Hobby electronics / hanging out at the hackerspace messing with random projects. I started an effort to build a Z80 based 8-bit "retrocomputer" a while back.

Lately I've been picking at learning to play keyboard / piano.

I've also been dabbling in trying to learn to draw.

I also like to read a lot, both fiction and non-fiction.

And last but not least, going to heavy-metal concerts.

Interesting combination. You have hobbies for physical health, creativity, technical knowledge, and mental health. Do you combine them in any specific way when you have time for your hobbies?
Do you combine them in any specific way when you have time for your hobbies?

Not really. Mostly I just have too many interests and not enough time to pursue them all. And I try not to over-think this stuff, but I did make kind of a pointed effort to take up some more artistic / creative things with the interests in drawing and playing keyboard. For most of my life I had no hobbies that really had that artistic aspect to them, so that was something of a conscious decision. That said, I love music and learning to play an instrument was always one of those "I'll get around to it one day" things, and I just finally bit the bullet.

What's your flavour of cars?

Personally I'm into older japanese makes, currently playing with circuit racing in an early model mx5 (miata).. But also a big fan of Australian and American muscle.

I find it really good having a physical/mechanical hobby outside of the on-screen work I do during the day. It's like sorbet for your brain.

What's your flavour of cars?

American muscle-cars from the 60's / 70's mainly. I own a 1968 Camaro that was my first car (a gift from my dad) but it's been parked for a while with a blown engine. Lately I've been thinking a lot about trying to find a cheap 1970's era pickup, maybe a Chevy C-10 or something, to play with. I get tired of newer cars and how complicated it is to work on them. Take my RX-8 for example: you have to jack the car up and crawl underneath just to change spark-plugs. Uuugh. OTOH, take something like a 1975 C-10 and you can almost get inside the engine compartment and stand on the ground with the engine in place. You also don't need a lot of special tools, secret manufacturer codes, etc. to work on something like that.

Honestly, I spend enough time during my day job doing "computer stuff". I'd rather have a car to mess with that's old enough to be pre ECM era. No fuel-injection, just a plain old Holley 650 or something. :-)

I totally get the idea of avoiding computers in the car side of things. My Dad and I used to work on old Holdens (GM) when I was a kid, and I ended up with carburetted Datsuns for a long time.

I wish we got some of the cool 70's American products down here in Australia, though we get some equally neat imports to make up for it I suppose. But it's certainly a good hobby to have outside of work I reckon.

And haha, yeah the rx-8 probably isn't the best example of a newer car in terms of maintenance or reliability :) But I do love rotors!

Woodworking, electronics, 3D printing
Reading, gaming, performance art, comedy, seeing movies.
theology, monofin swimming in open water, board gaming, reading sf books
Cycling, change ringing, gardening, music.
Killer Queen, the world's only 10 player 5 vs 5 arcade game! I travel the United States and play this stupid bee game.
Posting in a Raspberry Pi Facebook group. Mostly information on how things work, some Linux education, etc.

Reading (mostly SF)

I've been teaching myself reverse-engineering of DOS games, and I've had one project in particular going on for a couple years, with numerous branchings, experiments, side-investigations, etc.

Learning languages, on and off. German, Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic, in rough order of how much time/work I've put into each.

Collecting (computer and video) games. I only play a couple hours a week these days, but I can still rarely resist if something interesting-looking comes up for a nice price on GoG, or somewhere. Or a sudden yen for a childhood console game.

I suppose I've made a hobby or a game of coming up with novel ways of making my son laugh, and to (mildly) embarrass his mother.