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!
280 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadQuantum 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.
Now whether it's worth learning? Eh, maybe it's good to exercise some math skills that have been atrophying.
Are you trying it for anything in particular?
(I'm only getting started in it now in my Master's programme)
cracking crypto. forcing netadmins and sysadmins to update crypto to quantum resistant crypto. Might as well make it a real threat :)
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.
https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-mu...
The way I got proficient is with hobbyist PCB design. What helped me is starting with schematics and datasheets and planning to finish with an assembled board. I started designing PCB's and having them assembled with JLCPCB (quite cheap: $20 or so for a run of 5 boards; $120-$150 fully assembled). I fried 2 boards before the 3rd rev booted up, then from there it's optimization. I consider the $200/mo or so in PCBA, whether boards work or not, to be my "EE education" -- cost efficient compared to university fees! And $200 is sort of like the "exam," it's costly enough to make me really think twice about component selection/placement/etc.
Not saying that's the approach you want to take because that might be hardcore / not someplace you want to get to. But I spent a long long time really wondering how electricity really works and like why you need capacitors, inductors, op-amps, etc. It never made sense to me until I created my own schematic, chose my own parts, and understood why I chose the parts I did and connected them the way I did.
Burning a part is incredibly rare with this kind of stuff, if you're willing to put in the time to learn about it before actually building it.
I highly recommend downloading Understanding Signals with the Propscope from Parallax (available for free online) and following the tutorials from it with an Arduino+Analog Discovery 2/3 device. You can use the Digilent "Real Analog" learning course along with it - https://digilent.com/reference/learn/courses/real-analog/sta...
The real motivation in Electronics comes from understanding in visual form (using a Oscilloscope/Multimeter etc.) how things work in a circuit and how your calculations match up to what you see on the screen. Even as simple as the beginner LED circuit can teach you a lot when you use a potentiometer and see how voltage/current graphs change.
Would you recommend the Real Analog course independently?
What does the Propscope one offer that Real Analog doesn’t? The Propscope one looks kinda old so I was wondering what I’d miss if I only used Real Analog.
Also not sure if there’s a parts kit for the Propscope one that I can buy.
I was referring to the tutorial pdf of Understanding Signals with Propscope containing very nice step-by-step lessons in using a USB Oscilloscope for measuring various circuit parameters. The Propscope itself is very old/underpowered (not being sold anymore) and not needed. You just use AD2/AD3 with its Waveforms software to do the same experiments with any board.
Note that if you use a AVR-based Arduino you can learn to program at the higher Arduino API/library level and then at the lower direct AVR level both with the same board. For learning Arduino Programming see Exploring Arduino by Jeremy Blum and for direct AVR programming see Make: AVR Programming by Elliot Williams.
I placed an order for the AD3+Parts Kit and excited to dive in!
AD3 resources (docs/tutorials/accessories/books etc.) - https://digilent.com/reference/test-and-measurement/analog-d...
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/myog/comments/1k3stln/ultralight_13...
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.
Edit: And EE is genuinely involved.
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.
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).
also we don't choose all our commitments. family, work, friends, etc are commitments we can't just give up. it comes down to choice and priorities, and the problem is that we have more things we find interesting than we can focus on.
but i consider that a good thing. i know that whenever i retire or am unable to continue some of my interests there will be others that i can pick up instead. i know that i won't be bored...
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.
I think there is a group that is nihilistic and follows that with a defeatist view
There is also a group that is nihilistic and extremely content with the state of the world and molding it to their liking. Which is very useful
and then there is everyone else with the optimism
also this is not depression
Like half my graduating class ended up in a real estate company making directx based 3d walkthroughs for minimum wage.
Even if you are successful, the crunch is oppressive. The bigger firms will make you labor hard for your art, take all the cream off the top and then terminate your contract.
And yet heaps of people, even me when I am bored, want to do it.
I’m interested in traditional roguelikes these days (Tales of Maj’Eyal, Qud, Brogue). Ofc the dream is to make something with wider appeal, like Balatro, and get out of the rat race all together.
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).
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.
If crypto keeps going up there's a chance my 3k investment in it eclipses my 40yr 401k so I'm hoping for that....
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.
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.
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.
With all this said, I think this could be a good inspiration and look forward to seeing advancements!
That's okay, I haven't worked on code bases with dynamic allocation professionally in years, and even my hobby projects usually avoid it.
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
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.
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!
Just put some notes down and hit the play button. That's the whole feedback loop. Everything else is just honing your skill and repeating this feedback loop 80 thousand times until you start getting stuff out that you semi-like :)
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!
https://beej.us/guide/bgc/
I did do some C in uni and I remember not finding it too terrible and actually pretty fun, but yeah, it does feel intimidating to come back to.