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Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

238 points by RetroTechie ↗ HN
You get nerd-sniped. Assigned a bug to squash. Some new tech or gadget arrived, to familiarize yourself with.

While researching / reading up / debugging, you stumble upon something interesting. Upon looking into that, yet another subject catches your attention.

You know how this goes. So... (see title). Bonus questions: what intermediate steps did you pass along the way? What stuck in your mind the most?

442 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] thread
imzadi
Local brewery is doing a cinco de mayo event and we started talking about pre-gaming with margaritas:

Margaritas -> Jello Shots -> Chimoy/Tajin rim/topper -> Pop Rocks -> History of Pop Rocks

sunir
I switched to Neovim from Sublime Text after trying copilot in Sublime, feeling sad, and then watching The Primeagen and his glorious mustache for too long.

Ostensibly I wanted to be able to code on the production server like a miscreant with the same tools as my laptop.

However I just wanted to regain command of my dev environment after years not coding.

I also reorganized the furniture in my office and got weirder lighting to make it hacker friendly. I bought a new desk to solder electronics.

Most people know me as a partnerships marketer or product manager but I am a compsci at heart. This made me happy.

contact9879
i've been attempting to switch to neovim off and on for about a year now. VS Code is so much much easier to get started with though. And adding support for a new language is just an extension-install away.
sunir
That’s fair. I can’t use vs code on the server was my logic. But also it was a hacking challenge.
SonOfLilit
Why not really? Remote editing through ssh is vscode's superpower!
sunir
There’s no reason. I just wanted to be cool and use neovim! Lol :)
fransje26
So, how was the switch to Neovim? Which plugins did you settle on?
sunir
I used nvchad and I am configuring it from there. Here’s my fork.

https://github.com/sunir/NvChad

Overall I still think I am faster in sublime text. I get stuck in the different modes. I find shift select and grep to be pretty frustrating.

However I will muscle through this. Every challenge is another set of vim stuff to learn. I have faith I will love it later.

akdor1154
Neovim — as good for a mid-life crisis as a Porsche, and a fair bit cheaper.
sunir
True. My friend is selling electrified retromodded Porsches. I want one but I am poor.

However I can salve my ego spending a day flipping through neovim colour themes.

rapfaria
"What if I were to gather these 5 five recipes that really worked in a future... book?."

Bookbinding has fascinating details.

d4mi3n
I've been making milk punch for friends as a gift for years now. On a lark I wanted to figure out how to produce it in larger batches with less manual labor and discovered the tip of the iceberg of what is the field of beverage filtration and food chemistry.

Turns out getting particulates out of a solution is a massive, massive industry with a large body of science, literature, and engineering practice behind it.

EDIT: Here's a few wiki entries I found as OK overviews. ChatGPT was handy for figuring out what relevant literature in the field was and terminology I could use to find more pertinent resources:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_engineering

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrafiltration

3. Food Chemistry: https://www.amazon.com/Fennemas-Food-Chemistry-Srinivasan-Da...

4. Introduction to Food Engineering: https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123985309/introductio...

5. Handbook of Food Engineering Practice: https://www.routledge.com/Handbook-of-Food-Engineering-Pract...

cjohnson318
What's your milk punch recipe?
d4mi3n
I got my first intro to milk punch from How To Drink: https://youtu.be/zr8dtT9siq4?si=akpHbgmLrtIcgXJk

I originally used their spec, but have since learned milk punch is pretty forgiving. It works really well for complex flavors that have a lot of tannins or volatile constituents (tea, wine, citrus, etc). I’ve found good black tea and a deep, sweet port tends to be a winning combination.

Done correctly, the resulting punch is shelf stable. That said, it has a neat trick: since no filtration is perfect, you end up with trace amounts of milk fats in the solution that continue to react with any left over volatiles. This leads to a smoother, rounder flavor over time. The last batch I made with a bergamot tea and port ended up tasting like a fruity, complex boba tea after a couple months of rest.

ghost-towels
I’d never heard of milk punch, had to look that up. And now I have my own new rabbit hole! Much thanks!
d4mi3n
Be warned that getting good clarity takes time and persistence if you’re going the coffee filter method. You’ll also get better flavor if you let the solution sit for up to a day before filtering. Enjoy!
iamhamm
Visiting and documenting abandoned mine sites across the U.S. desert southwest.
keyle
+1 for literally rabbit hole'ing :)
sandspar
How dangerous is that on a scale from 1 to 10?
drivers99
Different table top roll playing game systems
hoten
I've been doing some modernization on an old scripting language used by the game engine I work on [1]. Added a garbage collector, simplified how internal symbols are defined, added a VS code extension with some niceties like syntax highlighting, "Go to Definition", and doc tooltips. Also recently added support for websockets and plan to tackle JSON soon. Oh, and so much refactoring.

https://github.com/ZQuestClassic/ZQuestClassic

busterarm
Been nerdsnipped and diving down the rabbit hole on a few topics in the past few months:

Some history podcasts had me digging into the Napoleonic Wars and Israel/Palestine.

Also a recent interest in human health and diseases has basically sent me down the path of self-study equivalent to a Kinesiology/Exercise Science/Sports Physiology degree.

2rsf
> Israel/Palestine

This is more than a rabbit hole, it's a fractal that changes as you zoom in and out

Yenrabbit
Fun exercise to try and list them out! My last couple of weeks:

- 3D-printable parts storage solutions (via: I found some part storage bins in the discard pile at a local hackerspace)

- MITM proxy to snoop on Github Copilot API requests (via: we're building an jupyter AI assistant thing and got curious how other players do it).

- DIY robot arms (via: I'm making several for a nested 'you pass butter' joke, via a casual conversation about robotics being accessible now. YouTube is amazing at surfacing smaller makers once you start watching a few videos on a given topic)

- Learning about Oauth and JWT (via: 'why is auth still a pain?')

- Invertebrate UV fluorescence (via: that millipede is glowing under my UV torch!)

(a small subset of these end up documented https://johnowhitaker.dev/all.html eventually if you're curious to see a longer historical list)

I like rabbit holes where following the curiosity gradient to a satisfying conclusion is possible. "How does X work" leads eventually to code that does X. I'm less happy when they lead into a tangle of complexity, like digging into a library only to find weird abstractions 6 layers deep or trying to compare 18 different alternatives in a field I don't know very well.

OP I'd also like to hear yours!

RetroTechie
> OP I'd also like to hear yours!

Today I gave some thought to what would be a fitting name for my boat (if I were to rename it).

One option: the glider pattern from Conway's Game of Life. Instantly recognizable by true hackers, just a weird symbol to others.

Of course a quick check on Wikipedia. Know that I'm always interested in things small / simple / computing, so... cellular atomata. Which led me to varieties used to simulate or help understand biological systems ("systems biology" - if only that field had even existed back when I left high school).

From there on: artificial life, Core Wars & co, self-replicating machinery, and... Astro-chicken (deserves a HN post of its own, imho).

Btw. it's amazing to see how many big, open questions there still are, related to the origins of (biological) life, and evolution. Eg. full simulation of a single cell organism: never been done (too complex).

Next up: a cup of hot chocolate.

niccl
Trying to _really_ understand the postgres query planner's `EXPLAIN` output. We have long-running embarrassingly parallel processes where the throughput will sometimes completely tank. Got worse when we upgraded to PG16.

Trying to compare good query plans with bad ones, and then work out what changes we need to make to the slow queries is ... interesting.

frakt0x90
I watched Lex Fridman interview Richard Wolff and have spent 2 weeks going hard into marxist and anarchist theories and practice. Working through 2 books, a dozen browser tabs, interviews, etc. It's rare something catches my interest like this (especially non-technical). But I'm really enjoying all the different perspectives and formulating my own fantasy scenarios.
cameron4
If it hasn't made it onto your list yet, Ursula K. Le Guin's book titled "The Dispossessed" is a great exploration of anarchism in practice through a sci-fi lens
hangonhn
Do you have any recommendations on books that talks about Leninism like it's foundational ideas, etc. and how it departs from Marxism?

Thanks in advance.

Sugimot0
Leninism doesn't quite depart from Marxism really, Lenin expanded upon Marx's ideas and applied them to the evolving material conditions of Tsarist Russia. In a manner of speaking he departed with Marx in the way that Marx thought revolution would occur in developed industrialized nations like Germany and France and not rural agrarian societies like Tsarist Russia. Another thing to note is a lot of what Lenin wrote was scathing and sort of exaggerated polemics against others who he often worked alongside strategically, but argued with for the purpose of directing the course of action correctly. His ideas, the conditions and people he was responding to, evolved over time as well, so it's very important to understand those contexts going in, and this book does an excellent job of synthesizing and condensing some of that well: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26268757-revolution-mani...

I think this does a good job too: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50284837

I would also recommend The People's Forum / The Socialist Program's recent class on Lenin: https://m.soundcloud.com/thesocialistprogram/sets/lenin-and-...

0xWTF
Started on the Nagoya Protocol, then PCR of wastewater on airplanes, mechanical engineering of lavatory fittings, then metagenomic shotgun sequencing, and now Bloom filters.
kevindamm
It is such a good feeling to deploy a bloom filter in production. There aren't many times it will help but when it helps it helps a TON.
gnarcoregrizz
Metal-air batteries/fuel cells. Made a mini aluminum air battery (you can easily DIY one with household items). It seems that most people consider metal-air batteries to be a dead-end, since they aren't green and are generally non-rechargeable, and air cathodes are tricky (sluggish, exotic materials, expensive catalysts). I dove into "alternative" battery and fuel cell research after looking into how to extend the range of my electric motorcycle. I love the electric drivetrain, especially on motorcycles, but lithium ion isn't up to the task as far as capacity for anything beyond an hour or two of high performance fun. If I could get a compact metal air battery or hydrogen fuel cell to output just 1kw for a hybrid drivetrain, range issues could be solved.
jpt4
I would be interested in discussing your project further, for use on my e-bike.
gnarcoregrizz
It's still more of an idea/crude experiment than a project right now. There are some neat videos of DIYers with similar projects though - small homemade metal air batteries and materials experimentation. Aluminum air seems to attract the most attention. There is also a lot of available research.
friggeri
Two very very deep rabbit holes in the last 6 months:

- Designed/built a small USB controlled pan/tilt camera head to control the mirrorless I use as a webcam (couple of servos, gears, belts), and then designed/built a custom ortholinear keyboard with a joystick to control the camera (custom PCB, CNC'd aluminum case, etc)

- I'm a pretty big runner, built my own web based calendar UI that integrates with Google Calendar where I can type in workouts like "1 mile warmup @z2 + 5x(30 seconds @ 6:00/mile + 0.5 miles recovery) + 1 mile cooldown" and this gets parsed/total weekly mileage gets tallied. The next step down this rabbit hole is building a small iOS app to automatically generate Apple Watch Workouts using WorkoutKit.

hurtuvac78
Very interested in your first rabbit hole. Which servos did you use? Which gears? For me, it would be to use with an action camera. How many hours did you spend on it before you were satisfied? I've seen some arduino-based projects to do that, but servos look quite bulky... and with the right gears, very little torque / power should be necessary. But i have not spent the time yet.
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