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Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

• balamatom 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
  You mention chess, Chessboxing is an interesting niche hobby where you play both chess and boxing. I play chess but not chessboxing but hey, you asked for some interesting niche hobbies! It seems that what you do is mostly related to computers within the niche hobbies but what if you can do something else too? > Right now I'm making a chess engine, but that's already a solved problem Not everything should be done for the end-result, sometimes its the process which matters, there was a great hackernews post about it (https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/ https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/) If you want something niche, perhaps make some portal-2 mods or make more efficient versions of using GlaDOS TTS within browser etc. (this is just something that I want to be honest, but I feel like it can be a niche hobby in its regards seeing your interests) Let me know if you want more ideas and have fun and have a nice day man!
  • e-topy 5mo ago
    I do boxing as a form of cardio so I'm not weightlifting all the time. So I've just invited a friend for a 1v1 and he accepted, time to start training both properly I guess. I do want something related to computers because that's where I'm skilled the most, but it being mixed with something else is fine (i.e., biohacking). But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel. Maybe the next frontier is becoming an electrician?
    • Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
      > But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel I feel like it depends, there are many sorts of projects which are still low hanging fruits. you might not get appreciated to do things anymore because of the amount of competition but you can feel proud of yourself. Breaking NATs without root permissions (try searching dropbear without root and building it and running it with something like pinggy to then make a minecraft server beneath a nat work), making a free crypto chain have data embedded within a loop of transactions to embed data on crypto for free, recently using single-file to somehow archive archive.is pages on archive.org* anonymously using piping-server. I have used AI/LLM assistance in most of these but I feel like aside from being frustrated at the code aspects, I had some good ideas and even with everyone else having AI, I didn't see anyone else doing these things (the reason I say this is because if they did, I would've just used their services :] ) Not sure if a lot of these things sound novel, programmatically not, but idea-wise I think* they might-be novel. A lot of my novel ideas come out of proving things. Can I prove that I can run minecraft on a free intel server that me and my friends can play on? Can I prove that I can save archive.is pages on archive.org anonymously-ish since the issue with archive.is So my point is, out of personal experience, there are so many novel-ideas within things which seem obvious but nobody has really implemented them and to be honest, everyone is just creating yet another chatgpt wrapper with AI. Much of these experiments are prototyping/proving these ideas and I believe that there are some low hanging fruits in such sense of these ideas which can be interesting to think about. So I don't suppose that you have to go bio-hacking to find things which pique your interest, there are some practical things too in my opinion which can pique your interest. Not sure if this might be the answer you are looking for, but I hope this helps within the context you asked it. Sometimes two normal things combined together can be the novel thing to do. My opinion is that people with money chase money oriented things, the people with passion/hobby-tinkering will do things that chase passion and so sometimes you have nothing to worry about :-) So are there any things that you feel is similar to this for you, perhaps?
• unsupp0rted 5mo ago
  My hobby is organizing in-person meetups for random people to get together, chat and make friends. Barely structured, if at all. I've found this rewarding and ended up making friends this way. You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos you probably don't want to be around. And another 10% at any given meetup are autistic or neuro-divergent but well-meaning, kind and full of interesting insights and hobbies, although perhaps difficult to socialize with, at least until they get to know you're well-meaning too. These challenges come with the territory. You end up talking to people you'd otherwise never meet in the normal course of your life, and it's neutral at worst and wonderful at best.
  • Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
    How do you do this? And do you find people within tech industry or just random-people, I am sort of curious to know!
    • unsupp0rted 5mo ago
      Just random people, but because of where I post my events I tend to get about 30% ~ 50% tech-adjacent people
  • e-topy 5mo ago
    This reminds me of [0], basically just inviting the most interesting people I know (also transitively the most interesting people they know), and just getting to meet people. I would really like to do this, but half the most interesting people I know are PhD professors I rant with because I'm next to them in a lab. Maybe once my network gets bigger. But I would still like to know more about how you do this, as other people doing this accidentally made me some good friendships, and I'd like to repay this favor to others [0] https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/this-might-be-oversharing https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/this-might-be-oversharing
    • unsupp0rted 5mo ago
      How I do it is context-specific. I used to live in a place where it's undoable and I was very lonely there. I moved to a place where people are much more open to it culturally and there's enough population to +/- bring in a constant flow of 4:1 regulars to newbies. I advertise on local meetup platforms and in local social media. And I go to so many meetups myself that when people ask me what my hobbies are and I tell them, they get curious and self-invite.
• powerbroker 5mo ago
  Hang gliding. It's good if you are in an area with some hills and consistent winds. There are maybe a dozen well-established launch sites around the U.S. Sadly, I broke down my glider around 2001 -- and did a post-mortem on it to discover it had a minor dent in it. Recommendation -- don't stall the glider at heights between 10 and 25 feet from the ground. Also, avoid barbed wire fences.
  • pavel_lishin 5mo ago
    My brother-in-law did a lot of hang gliding, and was part of a big community that did. That community had a tendency to walk around - if they could walk around - in casts for a large part of their life. He also ended up having a heart attack mid-glide, which was no fun at all. (He survived it, though!)
• DigitalArchivst 5mo ago
  If chess is a solved problem, think about skating to where the puck is going to be, an interest area a bit further away from relatively easier verifiability such as coding, math, and hard sciences. Do you have any interest in digital humanities? Knowledge work where verification is still important but not as black-and-white as does the math check out, does the code run. Do you have any interest in family history or genealogy? https://vibegenealogy.ai/p/the-genealogical-research-assistant-claude-code-cowork-skill-prompt https://vibegenealogy.ai/p/the-genealogical-research-assista...
  • solstice 5mo ago
    The use of AI assistants in genealogy is interesting. There seems to be a lot of activity in that area
• caprock 5mo ago
  You might look into applying RL in the domain of low cost robotics and drones. That would draw on some of your past experience but applied to a domain (robotics) which I perceive is seeing renewed interest.
• Blackstrat 5mo ago
  I view hobbies as something that I derive value or pleasure from. I do not approach them from the perspective of “meaningfully contributing”. IMO, that sounds more like compensation for career dissatisfaction. I’m not being critical. I just recommend choosing hobbies that you derive value and meaning from, regardless of what the world may think of it. For example, a friend of mine, with high pressure tech management job, quilts in the evening. He says it helps him relax. Doesn’t matter if anyone likes what he does or wants to buy it. As for myself, now that I’m retired I delve into a number of areas, just for me, and absolutely have no interest in sharing them or being recognized for what I do. Good luck on your quest.
• skyberrys 5mo ago
  I'm into innovation in HCI as a hobby, but it does get expensive so I would like to bring in some additional financial support for my unusual builds. I didn't really plan to build HCI as a hobby, but I have a strong interest in hardware engineering and eventually I wanted to switch back to building things that anyone can physically see. Years ago I built a hemisphere keyboard and now I've built an LED globe with a viewing portal. I started building visible things again because I had a vision and it's very satisfying to use the result. I spend more time using it now than I did originally building it, although it is definitely a work in progress. I want to build it again for a 2.0 version.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • ZTX 5mo ago
    HCI innovation is definitely an interesting hobby - anything you can share or point me towards?
• yodsanklai 5mo ago
  > that isn't absolutely crowded I'm sure there are field that should be absolutely crowded but where you can do something meaningful. If I had free time, I would write an app to learn foreign languages I'm interested in. I'm pretty sure that there are good apps, but I tried a few ones, and none really fit my needs. There are also software that I use a lot, like transcribe! which works well, but that I could see how to improve. So as others mentioned, do something that you would be interested in.
• ApolloRising 5mo ago
  After binging on youtube, I am working on learning to do leatherwork, small stuff at first like making your own wallet etc.
• mkbkn 5mo ago
  Postcrossing
  • xoxxala 5mo ago
    I had no idea such a thing existed until this post a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631515
• abadar 5mo ago
  I used to play Pokémon cards competitively. It was fun going to local tournaments and flying with friends for Regional tournaments. I stopped to focus on night school, and I want to pick it back up with the card legality change happening Friday. Pokémon Champions just came out, so I might give up cards for the video game. We'll see.
• duckkg5 5mo ago
  I was into woodworking, then I got into building fly fishing rods from bamboo. Fly fishing has been around for a long time. They used to build rods by hand out of bamboo - a specific species of bamboo native to southern China - before factories started making them out of graphite, fiberglass, etc. for cheap. Modern fly rods are a few hundred bucks. If you try to buy a bamboo rod in a store, they run $2K-$5K. They take a lot of time and meticulous work to build, and the result is a functional work of art. Woodworking is a ton of fun, and challenging. Bamboo rod making is a niche within a niche, and there are not a whole lot of people who still do it ... mostly retired guys with a lot of time. It's a great tradition, and it's about as far away from computers and technology as I can get. I didn't even know how to fly fish until I built my first bamboo rod. Here's a great video showing the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfTvRxcTuV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfTvRxcTuV0
  • getlawgdon 5mo ago
    This is very cool. Thank you. ...and that video is a pill-quality destressor. thanks again.
    • duckkg5 5mo ago
      I come back to the video every once in a while and it is total zen.
  • oddsockmachine 5mo ago
    That's a wonderful video, thanks for sharing
  • munificent 5mo ago
    I love how every hobby has its inner nested hobbies and you can seemingly go infinitely deep. I got back into making electronic music a while ago, and you can dig in deeper by getting into hardware synthesizers. And go deeper by getting into hardware modular synths. And go deeper by building modules from kits. And go deeper by learning electronics and designing your own modules. It's like a big branching tech tree or tech graph. With fishing, you can get into fly fishing. And when that's too easy, you start tying flies, or maybe tenkara, or, I guess in your case, making fly rods. I love it.
• shivekkhurana 5mo ago
  I started designing my own clothes. The insight was that I spend 80% money on suits that I wear 2 times a year, and the rest was low quality clothing I actually wore. I flipped it, and made suits and pants that I could wear everyday. The fast fashion stores were crap quality, my body is not a template size and I care about fabric and comfort. The process was to learn how to sketch, to determine fabrics, colors and fit. I made pants that stay comfortable even after I eat food, I made suits that I can wear casually. I don’t stitch myself, for that I worked with multiple workshops, until I found one that works for me. Took me about 3 years to reach a point where all my wardrobe is designed by and for me. There were multiple side effects on my confidence, my life, and the opportunities coming my way.
  • ribs 5mo ago
    I want to hear more
    • shivekkhurana 5mo ago
      Fast fashion forces you to dress for the masses. Loose shirts, baggy pants and shallow pockets is not fashion, its cost optimisation for brands. I didn't want to dress up like a boy. Me and my friend were in Paris when we got inspired by the floor(fashion_sense). I was already working on my clothing, but that day we promised each other that we will not be underdressed anymore. He opted for off-the-shelf formal clothing: high quality shirts, and pants. I went all in. First I found markets that sell cheap fabrics, so I can experiment. I travel a lot, so my clothing had to be designed for all weathers. I'm Indian (Bharat), but look racially ambiguous, so I also wanted my clothing to reflect my roots and culture, yet be modern enough for any room in the world. I run a company, and write code, so comfort was paramount. But I also had meetings or presentations so I wanted to be presentable. Started with pants, because I thought pants are easy to optimise, and I just need a black, gray and dark blue one. Over 5 iterations, I reached a design with elastic straps on the side (because when I eat food, my tummy bloats a little and its uncomfortable to sit down), and loose on the thighs. Imagine pyjamas, that look like pants. Then next step was to experiment with jackets and shirts. I played with fabric, patterns, and finish (zippers, titch buttons, different cuff lengths and styles, different collars). My friends started noticing, and I also consulted some clients. Then I gave a talk about it. This is one of my skills that I discovered by first principles. The best part is that I met my girlfriend because she noticed my aesthetics, and she told me that she makes her own clothes too.
• chad_strategic 5mo ago
  I decided to run for congressional representative.
  • forshaper 5mo ago
    How's it going?
    • chad_strategic 5mo ago
      I'm going to be respectful and not mention any political parties. However I'm not part of the big party. I'm not expected to win, but at least I'm going to put up a fight. I'm involved in some Zoom calls to learn about the process of campaigning. I have a creative background (mixed with punk rock) and intend to make this a creative process. Additional goals are to get away from the computer, meet new people, and have fun.
      • forshaper 5mo ago
        I would generally vote for whoever I have a beer with!
• xnorswap 5mo ago
  My strange hobby was going on what I called "leak walks". I lived in a town where on any sunny day I could go for a walk and be almost guaranteed to spot a water mains leak I hadn't seen before, which I'd then report and see how long it would be before it was fixed. The record was over a year for one of them. ( Yes, it was a Thames Water area. )
  • hermitcrab 5mo ago
    If it is a Thames Water area, you are lucky if the leak is only water...
    • xnorswap 5mo ago
      There was one I thought was maybe a waste-water leak from the smell, but generally wastewater leaks are much harder to spot, and it's generally CSOs (Combined Sewer Overflows) that are the main problem there, which happen in heavy rainfall and not so much in residential areas. Mains-water leaks however are easy to spot, because they're damp patches (or flowing/trickling water) in otherwise good weather.
• femto 5mo ago
  Railway preservation (full size, not model). It looks crowded when a steam train is running and the moths gather around. The reality, when the trains are not running, is typically quite different, with a small dedicated group. If a place looks too crowded, pick a smaller museum. Think of all the jobs that have to be done to run a railway and you will be able to find a museum that does it: heavy maintenance, boiler work, fitting and turning, blacksmithing, woodwork, upholstering, painting, catering, engine driving, fireman, signalling, customer service, ... It's a great way to meet people, learn new skills and work with physical things.
  • bluGill 5mo ago
    Only problem is this really depends on where you live. There is a nice museum 45 minutes from me - far enough that it is hard to get there for a quick evening after work...
• laydn 5mo ago
  Hydrophonic farming at home. You can play with sensors (acidity, humidity etc), LED lighting (frequencies, intensity, etc), vision processing (maybe throw in some AI buzzword here) to keep track of your plants and do some decision making. Bonus: You get to eat the stuff you grow :)
  • sscaryterry 5mo ago
    Or smoke it…
  • Taipan_Enigma 5mo ago
    The increased speed hydroponic plants grow at compared to plants in soil is what really makes it exciting for me. A plant in my basic countertop "indoor garden" unit is growing 10x as fast as a cutting of the same plant sitting in my windowsill.
  • exDM69 5mo ago
    > You can play with sensors (acidity, humidity etc) Can you share some useful sensors? Any good pH sensor that can work for some period of time without manual maintenance (cleaning the probes etc)?
• Tade0 5mo ago
  There's a surprisingly high number of people in my extended social circle who picked up archery as a sport. It's actually a complex discipline with a huge range of bows and projectiles to choose from, each having unique characteristics you have to train for. Training using VR equipment is picking up steam, as typically you need a sizeable amount of real estate to practice when the weather is bad.
  • peishang 5mo ago
    Archery is a lot of fun - I go to a monthly archery gathering where the host has a bunch of really nice recurves.
  • munificent 5mo ago
    Archery does seem like it's having a moment right now. I wonder if it's some combination of people wanting a more tactile hobby plus some vague apocalyptic undercurrents in society today.
    • Tade0 5mo ago
      Over here it's a combination of having a tradition of historical reconstruction and fairly strict gun laws, that don't extend to other weapons. Case in point: you can open-carry a sword, unless you're displaying violent intent. Concealed carry of any obviously dangerous blade is prohibited, which spurred speculation on what to do with, e.g. a bread knife. Consensus in the community is that you need to hold a loaf of bread in the other hand.
  • bwv848 5mo ago
    I always shoot 12 grains per pound, it usually gets me around 150-160fps, marginal weather is where the fun begins.
  • dmoy 5mo ago
    > Training using VR equipment is picking up steam, as typically you need a sizeable amount of real estate to practice when the weather is bad. I always wondered, how does that work? Over in bullseye rifle we live and breathe dryfire (no ammo), but I understand the equivalent (no arrow) with a bow is a recipe for breaking the bow. Like my brain just cannot comprehend how to get enough reps to get good enough at a thing without being able to do dryfire at the volume we do for rifle.
• cmdrk 5mo ago
  Bellringing, specifically change ringing. It’s a type of church bell ringing that is rather algorithmic in nature. Tends to attract mathy types. Religion not required or expected! If you have English-style tower bells near you, it's worth checking out, even if only to listen.
  • mastermedo 5mo ago
    Rest assured, my mind is blown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lyDCUKsWZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lyDCUKsWZs
• davenporten 5mo ago
  Animal tracking. I picked it up in college and it has been a real source of joy and a true challenge. It's also something you can do almost anywhere: urban, suburban, rural, out in "the wild." A lot of people think of it as looking for paw/hoof marks in the mud, but tracking can actually be quite involved, requiring you to understand the environment and ecology as a whole. For example, tracking birds is outrageously difficult and when I first started out I didn't think it was possible. But the more I learned about birds, their habits (per species), their environment, I started to see signs everywhere. It really got my eyes open and I started seeing the same old places in completely new ways! And in terms of contributing something, there are all sorts of apps/organization that can help you identify different species and in turn you give them data in the form of pictures, location, etc. I use iNaturalist myself, but there are others.
  • JimBlackwood 5mo ago
    Sounds fun! Do you have resources to get started? I do gundog work, it would be fun to do the tracking together with the dog. (I don’t hunt, it would just be to make some walks more interesting)
    • andrewrn 5mo ago
      This is a great book regarding animal tracking and other interesting clues in the outdoors. It’s very British-centric sadly though. https://www.amazon.com/Walkers-Guide-Outdoor-Clues-Signs-ebook/dp/B00H4EPBWM?dplnkId=98ac08eb-1395-43fd-a1b5-76b09113396e&nodl=1 https://www.amazon.com/Walkers-Guide-Outdoor-Clues-Signs-ebo...
    • davenporten 5mo ago
      I got started by just going out and actively looking for indications of any sort of life. I mentioned tracking is more than looking for paw/hoof marks in the mud, but that's exactly what I start with: I would track herds of mule deer (which is not difficult to do). From there I would just notice other sorts of signs: broken branches, scratchings, scat. Most of my research went into identifying what I was looking at rather than how to track, if that makes sense. Honestly, most animals are pretty easy to track (not to say you'll always catch up to the animal, that can be difficult depending on what it is you're after) a lot of it is just being intentional when you go out and keeping your eyes open. You can challenge yourself by going out and looking for specific animals. I did this with a falcon that I had heard lived somewhere in a forest near me. I did a fair bit of research into how falcons behave, when they're active, etc. But there are some things I did not find anywhere online. In particular, when you get into a falcon's territory the woods become silent! No bird songs, no skittering of squirrels, just silence. I didn't realize this at first, but after a few attempts I found that whenever I got into a particular area all the nature sounds went on mute, haha. I didn't know this signaled the falcon, but it made me hone in (I thought maybe I'd find something else). There are people who are way better trackers than me, I'm sure there are a lot of really valuable books/videos you could watch, but it's really something you can go out and do right now. Again, you need to manage your expectations, the fun is in the tracking, it's a special treat to actually find the animal, though of course that does happen. It can also be a really valuable skill: I once was out tracking deer and came across fairly fresh bear prints; I immediately turned around and headed home, haha. And yes, I did eventually sight the falcon, her babies gave her away, and she was magnificent!
• patapong 5mo ago
  Synthesizers! I like it because it's tactile and immediate, and you're not glued to a screen, but can create fun-sounding beats. Nowadays there are nice, cheapish groove boxes that are perfect for noodling on the couch. I started with the Novation Circuit Tracks, and also really enjoy the Teenage Engineering EP-133. Not to say that I am any good at this, but it's an enjoyable hobby! Bonus if you are friends who are also into it and you can jam together :)
  • vectordust 5mo ago
    > Bonus if you are friends who are also into it and you can jam together :) How does one find these people? Asking for a friend! :D I've also gone down the synthesizer rabbit hole: prophet-6, full modular setup (rip bank account), subsequent 37. It's great fun!
    • rumori 5mo ago
      Go to modular meets, music instrument expos like Superbooth, dj sets and live concerts. I met all my best friends this way, everybody is a record collector, beat maker or techno producer. Record conventions are also fun, after couple of occasions you will realize how small the scene is.
  • elric 5mo ago
    Deep in the Eurorack rabbit hole myself. Trying to avoid anything that has a screen and anything that requires a computer to interact with. Patching cables and twiddling knobs is great fun. Sometimes it even sounds good xD
    • jerrysievert 5mo ago
      another eurorack rabbit hole is patch.init() - prototyping module. I have 4 and have built: - an amazing crazy chorus module based on one I built for vcvrack - a pad synth using the PADSynth algorithm - a pulsar module - a fun pitch shifting heavy reverb endless hours of fun!
    • timc3 5mo ago
• joshuakcockrell 5mo ago
  Someone needs to solve barbecue. The entire industry is based on feel and experience. Why can't a beginner replicate Franklin's brisket by following a recipe online? It's probably because the main measuring instrument (a probe thermometer) doesn't provide any feedback about fat rendering, moisture, etc. Plus, every brisket cut has different fat ratios and thickness, which means a recipe can't guarantee identical inputs like bread baking. I'd love for someone to throw some over the top engineering & experimentation at this.
  • nschampions2004 5mo ago
    The hobbyist cannot replicate Franklin’s brisket because Franklin’s knowledge, ingredients, tools, and their corresponding interactions are largely not attainable to the hobbyist. Franklin has better smokers than the hobbyist and knows how to use them better. Franklin also has dibs on the premier runs of Creekstone Farms briskets that the hobbyist can hardly come by. The hobbyist can approximate that brisket to a reasonable degree. However, that involves smoking a, hopefully not literal, ton of brisket. Given the cost of beef, time to smoke, and effort it takes to meal-plan brisket throughout the week, attaining Franklin-level quality consistently is a tough row to hoe.
  • jolt42 5mo ago
    [dead]
• SunshineTheCat 5mo ago
  Traditional archery. I started a few years back and have been doing it off and on since. It's challenging but a lot of fun. I shoot a lot of older style "recurve" bows, but the main style I shoot are horsebows, that is, bows that were historically shot from horseback. They're very lightweight and you can shoot much more rapidly than you can with a more modern/mechanical recurve or compound. Right now I shoot around 20-25 arrows a minute. Not amazing compared to experienced archers, but a lot of fun. I have a number of bows, but here are my favorites: Assyrian: https://www.bogararchery.sk/image/cache/catalog/product/bogar-assyrian-bow-1000x1000.jpg https://www.bogararchery.sk/image/cache/catalog/product/boga... Buryat: (No longer available) I also shoot an English longbow from time to time. The horsebows use a technique called "thumb draw" which is very different from the way most bows are shot in the west. Here's a great YouTube channel if you want to explore getting into it: https://www.youtube.com/@ArminHirmer https://www.youtube.com/@ArminHirmer
  • bwv848 5mo ago
    Try instinctive aerial shooting with spiral flu-flus.
    • AbraKdabra 5mo ago
      Yeah, too easy.
  • silisili 5mo ago
    Interesting, how does the draw weight compare? I have to give up shooting bigger compounds because my shoulder couldn't take it anymore unfortunately.
  • qup 5mo ago
    I sometimes shoot a couple of bows I made myself. It's a fairly easy woodworking project, and you can get a beautiful result.
• ribs 5mo ago
  I had a route around San Francisco that I would visit, and all the places on the route were where there were good blackberry bushes. I’d take a bucket. Around Golden Gate Park and the Inner Sunset mostly, heading down into the Forest Hills area as well. I did that for a few years. Would pick up some plums along the way as well. Now on the other side of the Bay I have a couple spots, not as dense a network. About an hour away there are masses.
• Findeton 5mo ago
  Nowadays, apart from stockpicking as a value investor, I use LLMs to develop AIs that don’t use backpropagation and that support continuous learning.
• vectordust 5mo ago
  Despite AI starting to crowd this space, I've been spending all of my free time learning music production (doing it the old fashion way without AI). It's a great mix of technical and creative problem solving. Mostly focusing on dark ambient/cinematic composition, playing around hardware synths (Prophet 6, Subsequent 37, modular / eurorack, Digitone II). If anyone is curious, I put out a single recently (remaster from last year): https://soundcloud.com/vectordust/ion-dunes-1 https://soundcloud.com/vectordust/ion-dunes-1 My main personal goal right now is to release a full length album this year.
  • genewitch 5mo ago
    you know the OP has "ion" and "dust" in the middle so this was hard to find. I normally can't stand ambient, but you went a different direction in the middle there. You should put out an album, that probably no one will buy, but maybe eventually you get asked to do soundtracks for things. anyhow, i used to write music. a lot. sometimes you just have to get it out of your skull... https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/valley-boulevard-0237 https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/valley-boulevard-0237
  • gglitch 5mo ago
    Ion Dunes is outstanding. Very nice work. I would be happy to hear more, and would very much enjoy a writeup too.
    • vectordust 5mo ago
      Thank you so much for that! I've actually been debating starting a self hosted blog (or maybe a Substack...) to capture and document my process and provide more context around the music I'm producing, maybe I'll spend some time working on that this weekend! Edit: for anyone who may be interested, I've created a Substack for this: https://substack.com/@vectordust https://substack.com/@vectordust I'll likely setup a self hosted blog on vectordust.com to mirror any Substack posts I make as well, so I truly own those posts.
  • evancarter 5mo ago
    Very nice listen. Perfect sort of song to have on while working. It reminds me of an album called Obsidian by Jónsi. It had a special exhibit at the museum of old and new art in Tasmania that was stupendous. (https://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/exhibitions/741-jonsi-hrafntinna-obsidian-museum-of-old-and-new-art-hobart-tasmania/ https://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/exhibitions/741-jonsi-h...)
• sm001 5mo ago
  Design whistle sequences to get dolphins to respond in ways that will help you figure out their meaning. A few multi-million $ projects could use that, such as Google, Baidu, and SDRP.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• thom 5mo ago
  I don't think chess engines are a solved problem for some use cases. Yes you can make something strong, maybe even the strongest, but can you create a chess engine perfectly tuned to actually teaching a player? Instead of superhuman perfect lines and inscrutable long-horizon strategy, can you teach nearly optimal human play in a way that's actionable, modular and memorable? Can you improve on tournament prep for players against particular opponents or within a particular metagame? Also, obviously it's your life, and we're here on Earth to fart around, but I have spent a good portion of my life dipping into one hobby after another, as my dad did before me, so I'm half speaking to myself when I ask this: why do you think you can't meaningfully contribute to any of these realms, even now? To me that sounds like some deep seated fear or doubt, some aversion to competition, some overriding bitterness. I'm slightly worried you'll just be back here in another couple of years trying to find another new hobby, unsullied by the efforts and achievements of others. You won't find that! I would actually suggest a particularly expensive hobby: going to therapy. Try that, and learn that you're already enough, and if your contributions are meaningful to you, that's all that matters. Happy to be way off the mark here though.
  • elcapitan 5mo ago
    This. For those more into reading instead of straight to therapy, Barbara Sher's "Refuse to Choose!" book about living with a multitude of interests can be a good starting point. Also, making (or maybe tuning) a chess engine to teaching sounds like an interesting challenge, actually.
• mleroy 5mo ago
  Since you mentioned biohacking but are wary of "wetware" risks, consider Personal Bioinformatics via 30x Whole Genome Sequencing. Now that sequencing costs have dropped significantly, you can use AI to take a deep dive into the latest research surrounding your own genomic data. While severall open medical databases and open-source tools exist, they are often fragmented or built for academia. There is significant room to contribute by hacking together better toolsets, localized databases, or AI-driven interfaces to make this data truly accessible.
• warpech 5mo ago
  I got into improv theatre. There are groups in every city, at least here in the EU. It is both fun and developing creativity, alertness, etc.
• Ancalagon 5mo ago
  I’m obsessed with powerlifting. Not only because big numbers get bigger but also the physical changes that occur with a healthy dose of lifting each week. It’s also easy to track lifting stats and there are tons of analysis tools out there if data analysis is something you enjoy. Also, I’m trying to learn guitar - right now following the Justinguitar.com lessons
  • rahulgoel 5mo ago
    +1 on this - powerlifting is great due to 1) Rapid, specific initial progress, 2) Highly structured programming (e.g., RPE based), 3) Focus on strength vs. aesthetics is a great way to be more holistic about health & performance, 4) Forcing function on all downstream decisions (diet, sleep, alcohol). Adding +15 lbs on your deadlift can become strong motivation to drive discipline, 5) Drives the importance of recovery/rest on long term progress
  • boogieknite 5mo ago
    one of my favorite parts of powerlifting, opposed to hiit or other fitness lifting, is the lack in physical change. i feel like i look the same but can point to numbers that show im much stronger
    • Ancalagon 5mo ago
      True - I guess I am more of a power-builder. Which for those that don't know is powerlifting but also incorporates a lot of bodybuilding-type rep work for aesthetics. You lose some specificity doing this arguably so you're expending energy that would be better spent powerlifting if that was your true goal but this trade off is worth it to me.
    • avianbc 5mo ago
      When I started stronglifts, I didn't tell anyone and people noticed just from my physique after like ~5 weeks of training. Noob gains are insane and definitely cause physical change.
    • xarope 5mo ago
      my clothes haven't changed in size, but I fill them out better, is probably best to describe it!
• jcims 5mo ago
  Put it down over winter but just picking it back up. Bat detection/identification with ultrasonic recordings. It's been fun building the data pipeline to manage the ~30GB+ of WAV files generated every night, run through some identification processes (currently using https://github.com/rdz-oss/BattyBirdNET-Analyzer https://github.com/rdz-oss/BattyBirdNET-Analyzer) and build a UI (mostly vibe coded lol) to help with replay, cataloging, etc. I'm using an AudioMoth currently (https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth), am thinking about extending it to do some of the preprocessing in the field to scale things up a bit.
  • functional_dev 5mo ago
    really cool, data pipeline alone sounds like fun challenge
    • jcims 5mo ago
      Yeah there's quite a bit of opportunity to reduce processing time along the way. Couple cool things I've learned about bats. - They are *extremely* loud in the ultrasound range, 130db echolocation calls from something the size of a mouse. - On an average recording, the ultrasonic range is almost exclusively filled with sound from wildlife (bugs, birds, etc). I'd expected to see lots of harmonics and whatnot from human-generated sounds but there just aren't that many. It's quiet up there. - You can leverage these two in combination for sampling by just strapping the recording device to the roof of your car and driving around. The wind and road noise is basically absent and the echolocation calls come through loud and clear. The AudioMoth can be fitted with a GPS receiver to correlate the calls to location (and time ofc) - There are three primary types of echolocation calls: Search - Semiregular calls just to see what's out there. Approach - Faster rate of calls once prey has been identified. Terminal - Aka feeding buzz, very high rate (200hz) of echolocation calls in the last meter or so of approach. Most of the recordings of bat calls you see on YouTube are slowed down 10x to bring the audio into listening range, but this also slows the call tempo by just as much. They make lots of calls. - Most bat calls use frequency sweeps rather than continuous tones to pick up both distance and relative velocity of the target (akin to FMCW radar). - There are more bats around than I realized. I started off by looking for 'good spots', but now I just set the device out on a porch. Many times you'll hear me walking up to the recording device at the end of a recording and there will be 2-3 bats overhead that I was perfectly unaware of. - Some moths have developed jamming calls that confuse the standard echolocation calls of most bats - https://www.illinoisbats.org/echolocation-jamming-moths/ https://www.illinoisbats.org/echolocation-jamming-moths/ Some species of bats have developed countermeasures to that.
• ffsoftboiled 5mo ago
  Fishing. But not just regular fishing, life listing. I catalogue and detail ever fish I catch; the conditions, the type of lure or bait, the rod etc. From there you can get into microfishing with tanago rods, surf fishing etc. It's can get quite deep and a good additional hobby for people who love to travel.
  • lurkingllama 5mo ago
    You have an app for this? Been wanting to do something similar
    • ffsoftboiled 5mo ago
      Warning I am not a developer. It could be better. https://github.com/MichaelAPerry/FishDex https://github.com/MichaelAPerry/FishDex
  • munificent 5mo ago
    I also take notes when I fish. It's less about recording a life list, and more about trying to collate what is otherwise very thing spotty data enough to get better at fishing. As someone who has learned a lot of skills and hobbies online and likes sharing info, fishing has been a really interesting different world. Because anglers are effectively competing for a scarce resource, specific information about good fishing spots is understandably not shared widely. So you have to put in the time yourself to try spots and see what produces. But in order to catch fish, you need to be at the right place, at the right time of year, at the right time of day, with the right lure, and the right technique. Get any one of those wrong and the only signal you get is "no bites". That makes it really tough to learn and improve. I've found that taking detailed notes helps me see patterns in what works that would otherwise be hard to see.
  • jimnotgym 5mo ago
    I fish for salmon. In my part of the UK it has become very niche due to the scarcity. I joined clubs and never went, but now I'm in a syndicate where I fish one Saturday per month for the season, and never miss it. I'm years in and still never got one into the net! Fishing for migratory fish that don't feed once they are in the river is mad. On my fishing days I don't think of anything else
• gritspants 5mo ago
  I'm big into anti tech/work related activities. It reminds me that no matter how much I know, or think I know, that I have so much more to learn. I got into scuba diving while living in NC, and it just happens that there's a lot of it off the coast! The other problem is that it's deep. Diving down to 130 feet sounds cool until you experience hours on a boat only to get a few minutes at the bottom. Eventually I got bothered to learn more about diving. I headed down to northern Florida to dive with GUE. My instructor was a person who regularly got hit up to dive to exotic places all over the world. Missions like collecting/deploying samples, archaeology, recovery. Here were people meaningfully impacting the environment, science, and keeping technical know-how alive. I don't know how to convey a the wonder I feel in text. Check it out maybe.
  • swalberg 5mo ago
    GUE Fundies is on my bucket list. I don't think I'd be interested in cave diving or deep stuff where I need helium, but the level of skill that tech divers show is something I want to be able to do.
    • gritspants 5mo ago
      Do fundies! We all failed, initially. We had a blast bunking up and spending days in the water though.
    • chrishawes 5mo ago
      I've done Fundies, of all my diving qualifications, this one had the biggest impact on my diving. Some instructors have a saying: "Students pay for the training; the certification must be earned."
• eranation 5mo ago
  Not a new hobby per se, but the combination of - a good audio book - a massage chair - a mindless idle game that you don't need to think of while listening to a good book and getting a massage Priceless.
  • kacesensitive 5mo ago
    massage chair recc?
• koeng 5mo ago
  I do some synthetic biology as a hobby - genetically engineered a baker’s yeast to produce grape aroma and then baked bread with it, and gave it to like 100 people at an event I was at. Also do a few others - learned Esperanto (exclusively through listening and speaking with people), beekeeping, woodworking, etc.
  • marshymarsh 5mo ago
    do you have any writeups or resources on that yeast?
  • vonneumannstan 5mo ago
    Perhaps feeding strangers homemade GMOs isn't the best idea...
  • l4yao 5mo ago
    wow I didn't realize this was hobby territory. How accessible is it to a layperson?
• serf 5mo ago
  FDM 3d printing is still a wild-west and there are plenty of avenues to explore. Not sure what else to say about that other than as someone with daily and close personal proximity to the 'industry' that cropped up I am well aware that there is plenty of work to be done by enthusiasts and niche-people. Engineering and machinery is still a place full of exploration if you have the chops. If you don't have them yet then there is plenty of topics within that domain to explore; you'll never run out of things to learn there. My 0.02c : learn to disregard the crowds and focus on your own work. Just because people are doing something you used to do doesn't mean they have anywhere near the depth of understanding and 'freedom of movement' as you do as a 'resident expert'. also : the fact that no one is doing something may be a signal; crowds form for a reason. Very few hobbyist bomb-squad folk and rabid-racoon-caregivers, get what I mean? the GPT3 models didn't keep you from learning about ML. The industry didn't push you from keyboard and printers. You did these things. If you're trying to lead an entirely one-off human life with total uniqueness from other people then all I could suggest is hallucinogens , but personally I think that the goal of just being unique for the sake of being unique is ludicrous. Just find enjoyment, that's the goal for me at least.
  • switchbak 5mo ago
    I knew a guy who found an interesting 3d printing niche: 2 way radios for professionals (mainly SAR crews) are always getting fetched up on clothing, and you're often finding the radio turned off because the knobs got moved. Dumb problem, should have been solved by fundamental engineering years ago - but whatever. He built a 3d printed shroud for a variety of popular radios, and now makes a living selling these. He's a tech guy, but no engineer. He saw the need (he works on a SAR team), saw the solution and made it happen. Inspiring, really. I do a bit of 3d printing stuff myself. Personally, I'm attracted that it's getting more professional. I can use it as the impetus to learn real engineering/CAD, etc. Not in an "I'm an engineer" way, but still using real principles to make better things. You don't have to be intimidated if you keep your identity small and let it inspire you instead.
• giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  There's a lot of legacy / retro coding out there that despite the output being used by anywhere from hundreds, to thousands to even millions of end-users, it still involves small tight night communities per project, sometimes they overlap somewhat. I've mentioned it before, if you follow people reverse engineering Shockwave, you will note that they are all on the same communities to capture as much wisdom from others as possible. In niche reverse engineering communities, the smallest thing can be a life changer.
• embwbam 5mo ago
  Not sure if you were looking only for indoor hobbies, but I picked up Kiteboarding recently, and it is the most outrageously fun thing I've ever done. It's like being a kid and jumping off the house with a bedsheet, except it works. Most mistakes are laughed off by splashing in the water. I'm 3 years in and I can jump 7-10m then fly like a bird for 5-10 seconds without consequences. Even as a beginner, sailing around or just feeling a kite pull you around is such a blast. Keep in mind it's really difficult and pretty much requires 10-20 hours of private lessons.
  • JimBlackwood 5mo ago
    Really fun! I used to do it too, and I miss it. How do you combine it with work? Where I live in NL, there are few days where I’m able to go kiteboarding and I probably won’t know until the day off if it’s possible or not. Very hard to schedule!
    • embwbam 5mo ago
      I work remotely, and my schedule is flexible. I live in Squamish BC all summer which is great for wind. In the winter we are in UT but my friends take lots of kiting destination vacations. I’m fairly late in my career though (44yo), so I’ve opted for a lower salary, low stress and flexible job.
      • jakeydus 5mo ago
        I'll take whatever lower salary is allowing you to snowbird in squamish!
  • ddorian43 5mo ago
    Kitesurfing is insane yes! I can jump up to ~6m in 1 year. Really efficient adrenaline with relatively very low risk.
  • microscoper 5mo ago
    I always thought that looked fun but I would worry about being blown away up too high or into some obstacle like rocks Is that something that happens to people? Also how dependent is it on weather? Do you have to monitor the wind to know if its worth going out?
• vishkk 5mo ago
  Not sure if it is niche, but focused on one South Asian music genre -- been working on this personal project to compile, and collect resources from reliable sources along with mapping lineages of people. Also, I archive a lot of music for this genre from different sources before it vanishes from internet! https://www.qavvali.com/ https://www.qavvali.com/ EDIT: I have one more page but that is not in navigation yet for people not familiar with the genre. The site is still work in progress -- if you have any feedback, please do leave it here, on the website if you can. The content curation is the most tedious part! https://www.qavvali.com/tradition/ https://www.qavvali.com/tradition/
  • dyauspitr 5mo ago
    Qawali is some of the best music in the world, but I think it’s a little hard for a western audience to digest, especially without someone providing a running translation and context behind a lot of the things being said. That being said, your website is wonderful! Nice work.
    • vishkk 5mo ago
      Thank you, and absolutely! I have been trying to get more people to try — my friend and i host a Zoom listening session every 3 months or so where he curates a playlist to introduce new artists.
      • dyauspitr 5mo ago
        I would love a link if you’re willing to publicly share it!
        • vishkk 5mo ago
          sure thing —- feel free to share with anyone else interested. It starts at 1PM EST, and goes on for roughly 8 hours so drop by/tune in anytime you want: https://luma.com/823kzuci?tk=IiDKu2 https://luma.com/823kzuci?tk=IiDKu2
    • deleted 5mo ago
• system2 5mo ago
  I am trying to build microphone capsules in my garage. Trying to go below 14dB (Primo EM272 level), under 1". It is difficult but rewarding. I do not expect any financial benefits from it, even if I make it under 10mm, because it is very time-consuming. Big players already have massive factories doing 10,000x of what I am doing. This is the most niche tech-related hobby I have currently.
  • cadr 5mo ago
    Ooh! What kind of capsules?
    • system2 5mo ago
      I am trying to dial down K67. I am thinking about gold plating myself for the diaphragm in the future, but I am not ready for the expense. It is the hardest part of the project because the sound quality mostly depends on the diaphragm quality, and the rest of the capsule is literally a container. I started the hobby a while back when I tried to create an ESP32 field recorder, but the sound quality was terrible with the MEMS style micropones. I ordered the Japanese Primo mics (14db for 10mm is crazy), and said if Japanese dudes can do it, I can do it too. I was trying to create a visualizer tool for my steps in the backyard with ESP32 microphones, which sync perfectly and analyze the sound locations with Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) methods. I got close, but mic sensitivity, even at 14db is not 100% unless I place the mics 30-40 inches apart. I am still working on that project, but that also got expensive because $28 for ESP32-S3 POE and $25 primo mic per node got very expensive quickly as I wanted to cover more areas. I hope to share it soon with HN.
      • cadr 5mo ago
        I hope I don’t miss it when you post! I’ve wanted to make a ribbon mic but haven’t gotten around to it. I’ve seen where people use Mylar emergency blankets as the membrane for condenser mics. The closest I’ve gotten is accidentally having a capacitor in a radio act as a microphone where it shouldn’t :)
• rahulgoel 5mo ago
  If you like music and technology - there's a massive world of possibilities out there (e.g., software based music production, tone.js, music programming with Strudel). If you have more money - 1) DJing/mixing on vinyl + record digging, 2) Modular synthesis (your wallet will hate you your soul will love you)
• dr_robert 5mo ago
  I’m a paraglider pilot and powered paraglider recently. Totally recommended, you get to connect with nature in a meaningful way. Also people who practice this kind of sports are nice. From a tech perspective there are a lot of data generated on each flight you can create your own way to capture that data or use already existing apps.
  • Deanallen 5mo ago
    i've always been interested in para-motoring. how safe or unsafe is paragliding? do you think about that aspect before going out for a flight?
    • dr_robert 5mo ago
      I’ve been flying since 2012 and I always think about safety. Safety is relative but if you do the things the right way you will be ok. A good common sense is super important, and then keep on your progression, there’s no need to skip steps. Knowing the air is a lifetime journey so there is no rush. Also I feel paramotor is kind of safer because you get to fly with light wind or not wind at all, mostly early in the morning or near sunset. In my personal experience this sport change my life.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • hermitcrab 5mo ago
      I've known 3 people that were into paragliding. 2 of them had near misses from chute collapses and the other flew into a stationery car (he was saved from more serious injury by wearing a full face helmet). So definitely not risk free, based on that sample.
      • contingencies 5mo ago
        I did it once with an experienced pilot, tandem. An awesome experience. He explained the most dangerous time is when you get slightly confident. That's when most accidents occur, at the intermediate stage. He said you have to be religiously careful at all times, and stay paranoid.
• PaulHoule 5mo ago
  I've been doing photography for a long time but over the last few years had phases where I got bored of it and tried something new. I had a long time when I was bored and carried the camera in my pack but never took any pictures, then one day I looked out at the sports center out my window and decided to start shooting sports. Posting photos to socials I found flower photographs were popular so I take a lot of them and find ways to not get bored. (Maybe I will start focus stacking one of these days) Since the beginning of the year I have been "going out" as a character who is a bit like a Disney cast member who gets photos like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116326541009492328 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116326541009492328 from people who recognize my character. Like the Disney cast member it works better when people have seen the movie so i hand out these tokens https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840 which spread virally around a university campus, particularly among Chinese students who recognize the huli jing and all the time I have experiences "that could only happen in a manga" when, for instance, somebody who's heard the rumors is waiting at the bus stop for me. Laugh but all my marketing KPIs have an extra zero on the right!
  • eitally 5mo ago
    Same, but not the same. I've also been doing photography for a long time and when I had kids I added some gear & skills to shoot them playing sports. After a few years of this I realized since I was already there I might as well shoot the whole team, or both/all teams, since everyone's families would value the photos. When I was laid off at the end of last year I decided to formalize this and now have a side gig (real, insured business) where I shoot local youth & high school sports for free, but make a few bucks (to cover my equipment costs plus spending money) doing portraits, headshots and team media days. It's proven fulfilling, mostly because since I do the events for free I tend to receive a lot of goodwill and word-of-mouth referrals. Far more than I can handle given my day job.
    • EvanAnderson 5mo ago
      That gig is something I tried to do w/ my daughter's sports for the past 5-ish years. I loved shooting her games and distributing the photos both teams. It was so much fun. I had a nasty altercation with a parent last fall and now I can't pick up the camera w/o getting PTSD-like symptoms. I'd love to know how "pros" handle dealing with that kind of thing. I had a similar situation years ago w/ a guy who got in my face for shooting on the street at a festival. My solution there was to just stop doing it.
• garrickvanburen 5mo ago
  https://dejabru.org https://dejabru.org - The Homebrew Competition Remembering Historic and Long-Forgotten Beer Styles
• evklein 5mo ago
  Not sure if this is an established hobby or something I've just come up with myself, but I've been "dashboarding." Essentially I have a Blazor webapp that integrates lots of data sources (some manual, some automatic) from areas of my life and I use that to visualize and analyze goals and habits. The main page consists of rolling-weekly stats that deliver "integration scores." Each score contributes to an overall score that gives me a general idea of how I'm doing on all my habits and goals. So for instance, I use YNAB for our family budgeting, and I have it setup so that if I go a whole week without performing reconciliations, I get dinged -1. Otherwise this sits at 1.0. Then I have a score for journaling - my goal is to journal 4-5 times per week, so each time I journal it resets the score to 1, and then slowly ticks down to 0 over time. Then I have a number of Apple health scores that get imported automatically via REST API. This part compiles all the data on calories, relevant macronutrients (I mostly track protein and fiber currently), steps, workouts, etc. and builds a nice visualization. I consider a total integration score of 0.8 to be pretty good - keeping at that level is actually better than seeking for a perfect 1.0 all the time as my theory is that it will prevent burnout and allow for some forgiveness, because I can't be perfect. It's been a fun project, and one that I generally try to avoid any AI use. Fun to just build and because the stakes are so low I just chip away at one feature at a time, carving out 15 minutes here or there.
  • THansenite 5mo ago
    Do you have more details on this project anywhere? I've been working on habit-building and tracking in my journal for the past year and a half or so, but I'm looking to amp it up a bit more. Your project appeals to my software developer and hobby collector mindset and would love to learn more about it.
    • evklein 5mo ago
      Not really, but I'm happy to share more here :) In all honesty, under the hood it's a bit of a mess. I may have eschewed some of the software engineering best practices in lieu of building something quickly that I wanted. I'll get around to going back through and retrofitting the app with some cleaner code, but for now I couldn't even open-source it without a self-perceived hit to my portfolio. The project largely started out as something else. I initially wanted a combined TO-DO list and journal. Rather than checking things off I would run the journal content through a local LLM and have it check things off for me based on what I wrote each day. That's yet to be implemented. Then I moved on to an "ordering" system - I was inspired by the way that medical practitioners put in orders once they determined a course of treatment, and thought that might be a useful model to help motivate me to get things on my list done more effectively. I built this, but have utilized it less than I thought. Since then it's mostly been focus on the integrations and scoring system. The whole thing is highly modular, so for each integration I grab a template for the visualization I want to build and then need to reason out how to get the data into the system, which usually involves an API integration, scraping from some online data source, and/or data engineering. It's very fun, because each integration module has its own challenges. I built the app using a standard stack of .NET core, Blazor server, and the data is stored in SQL server and data operations are handled with EF core. I use the Radzen component library, which I like a lot from a developer perspective but it's challenging to retheme and I'm largely unhappy with the look/feel of the app. This is something I plan on getting to eventually. Happy to answer any/all questions. It's such a personal, homebrewed app that I can't imagine anyone else would get as much use out of, but it's very powerful and I think the hobby aspect of it could translate to pretty much any other developer.
• jakescustomshop 5mo ago
  Somebody already mentioned "Modular Synths". There's incredible resources for building your own synth modules for everything from circuit design to simple kits. Check out LMNC on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCTLeNxge54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCTLeNxge54
• rbanffy 5mo ago
  How niche is retrocomputing? I absolutely love my ancient machines, and I use them to explore period applications, much more than games. I also love to restore and preserve them. There’s something magical about a Sun workstation Solaris 2 a Frog Design Trinitron monitor. or a Microvax running VMS and DECWindows. Or a multi-user Altair Z80. I think it’s sad a lot of software was lost and some platforms were denied the documentation that’d enable their preservation (looking at you, IBM - document the AS/400 and release old OS to hobbyists).
  • jakerubo 5mo ago
    I have a working Apple II with some of the original games, manuals, etc. Let me know if there's a way to contact you. Happy to send it your way if you cover shipping or something along those lines.
    • rbanffy 5mo ago
      I’m easy to find. There are very few Bánffys named Ricardo.
  • dare944 5mo ago
    I have a lot of fun with my old PDP-11s. Being able to run an original version of Unix on a machine with actual core memory (that I restored to working order) is a real kick for me. Gives a sense of depth to the software I run on my modern Linux laptop.
  • eru 5mo ago
    You call that retro? ;) I have a Curta sitting on my desk. Not as fun to toy around with as the electronic computers from a few decades later, though.
    • rbanffy 5mo ago
      I only learned to use slide rules, and already forgot everything about them.
• hiAndrewQuinn 5mo ago
  Recreational mapmaking. Every couple of months the family and I will book out some long weekend to just go to an Airbnb in some random town with some copy paper and just go around trying to draw what we think is around us. Inevitably the lines collide and we have to ask some local passerby for help, and if they know any interesting places nearby, and before you know it they're following along with a colored pencil and some copy paper against a hardcover book too.
  • rkhassen9 5mo ago
    This is awesome. I think there is something about making your own sense of things, your own order that brings an aliveness and a freshness to an experience. I will try this.
  • rationalist 5mo ago
    Now that's a niche hobby that sounds interesting.
  • helterskelter 5mo ago
    You could get a sextant and become an amateur surveyor :)
  • subdomain 5mo ago
    Wow, that's really cool -- what places have you done so far?
  • krottler 5mo ago
    This sounded very interesting. Can you share some map that you created?
• auditnews 5mo ago
  [dead]
• ggregoire 5mo ago
  I've been playing exclusively CRPGs for the last 12 months or so, which was kinda a niche genre before the success of BG3. There are tons of way to beat those games and optimizing how you build your party and characters (what players call "min-maxing") while following a highly narrative story is a lot of fun. Most of them are quite old and often on sales for like 5 bucks on Steam, for which you get hundreds of hours of gameplay. A few recommendations: Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Owlcat's Pathfinders & W40K Rogue Trader, Larian's Divinity 1, 2 & BG3, Bioware's BG1 & BG2, etc…
  • drchickensalad 5mo ago
    Check out the Epic Encounters 2 mod for D:OS2. Best tactics experience I've ever had. Runners up are LWOTC for XCOM3 and Homebrew for BG3.
  • g00z 5mo ago
    These are a blast. I went through a phase in highschool where I exclusively played 90's CRPGs. There are some real gems that find a unique playstyle with tons of freedom due to how low fidelity the games are, while still being visually engaging and beautiful. Definitely check out fallout 2 if you haven't tried it yet, it's one of my favorites!
  • RajT88 5mo ago
    I always meant to go back to Wizardry 7 I think it is. (Or 5, I forget) I was convinced that a party of all Ninjas and Samurai would be unstoppable, but I never could make it work. I recall leveling up to a point where a high enough character would get 3 attacks per turn, and then when hit counterattack twice. Multiply this by the whole party. But realistically, at some point this flurry of attacks every round just fell over because you need better magic users for enemies with certain weaknesses. My memory is fuzzy, but it also may have related to the increasingly large hordes of enemies which would dilute the effects of so many attacks.
    • trick-or-treat 5mo ago
      Fight Fight Fight, Parry Parry Parry.
• xpe 5mo ago
  Invasive species removal, bird identification, trail running, mountain biking, audiobook listening while walking. All are best done out of doors. :P Most are teh opposite of the posture and brain patterns that intensive computer usage encourages.
• jeremymcanally 5mo ago
  I got into HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) fencing last year through a club in my little town. Olympic/sport fencing is fun, but imagine (safely) swinging a 4lbs. steel longsword with two hands at your opponent instead. It's a ton of fun, a great workout (I burn ~1500 calories per class), and competitive so it keeps my interest. Then there's the whole nerd layer of reading all the original sources from the 15th century, attempting to retain the historical character of the techniques while engaging in real combat, etc. It's both intellectually and physically stimulating.
  • elric 5mo ago
    +1 for martial arts in general. Depending on the art it might not be niche (I'm sure karate and taekwondo are too big for that). But things like HEMA, iaido, eskrima, all kinds of archery, ... are great fun and typically come with smallish & fun communities. Edit: before you think these arts are immune to tech, I once had a student who built a (truly awful) sword fighting "robot" to help train deflecting strikes. Not quite up to par with Dune's robot swordmasters.
    • tmtvl 5mo ago
      Seconding or thirding martial arts (MA). I do Kung Fu, but I'd bet all the internet cookies there's at least one Brazilian Jujutsu practitioner on HN. On the point of tech in MA, I recall seeing a documentary where some people got a Xing Yi Quan master to perform a form in mocap gear so they could analyse his movements. I think there's still a lot that kinesiology could learn from the way different people move (especially from Inclusive Karate practitioners).
  • hermitcrab 5mo ago
    HEMA looks much more interesting than olympic style fencing.
    • dmoy 5mo ago
      Olympic style fencing is pretty interesting too, to be fair. Physical Chess Also it's less... scary? At least you'll get less scary-looking bruises (though probably more total number of bruises)
• rdanieli 5mo ago
  very cool post
• anon291 5mo ago
  I'm learning to play the accordion
  • hermitcrab 5mo ago
    "A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't" ;0)
  • nathan_douglas 5mo ago
    I ended up giving up on it because my right shoulder is damaged from rheumatoid arthritis. Go where I could not, anon291. May your reeds be clean and your bellows free of mildew.
• alexpotato 5mo ago
  Using crooked knives [0] for woodcarving. They're essentially a combination of a plane, spoke-shave, draw-knife and gouge but all in a one handed tool. They were primarily used by Native Americans to build things like canoes, snowshoes, baskets etc. I first found about them from reading John McPhee's Survival of the Bark Canoe [1] but there are lots of uses of them on video on the website below (which I created). If you want to get into woodworking but want only a few tools and/or a very portable tool, highly recommend. e.g. in theory you could build an entire canoe with an axe, crooked knife and 3 or 4 sided awl (and a lot of time, patience and materials) 0 - https://crookedknives.com/ https://crookedknives.com/ 1 - https://amzn.to/3NSj4T3 https://amzn.to/3NSj4T3
  • JKCalhoun 5mo ago
    That's pretty niche!
    • araes 5mo ago
      Almost a literal "niche" hobby. Canoe - something that resembles a recess in a wall.
    • alexpotato 5mo ago
      I try to give the people what they ask for.
  • avipars 5mo ago
    also an amazon affiliate? aphackernews-20
• guardian5x 5mo ago
  I wouldn't say that chess is a solved problem. Just a hard problem to make a better chess engine than current Stockfish.
• teeray 5mo ago
  I’ve been learning Gregg Shorthand (Anniversary) since the start of the year. It’s a fun challenge even if it feels fantastically obsolete at this point with transcription models getting better and better every day. I’ve always liked paper-and-pen notes, so the idea of basically learning analog Vim was appealing :)
• guywithahat 5mo ago
  I've been making a seabed simulation of the seabed for interacting with polymetallic nodules. The idea is these nodules contain a lot of cobalt, but due to their location on the seafloor they're had to access, making mining difficult. It took me a while but I finally got my hands on some polymetallic nodules (basically the rocks you find on the seabed that contain cobalt) which I'm scanning and will hopefully have uploaded soon. Tragically the nodules were damaged through shipping but it's all I have, especially since the first shipment was stolen off my porch lol. It's build with Project Chrono using C++ https://github.com/thansen0/seabed-sim-chrono https://github.com/thansen0/seabed-sim-chrono
• JanMa 5mo ago
  I don't think it's a niche hobby, but I really enjoy cooking. Trying out new techniques and receipts, cooking dinner for friends and family or just preparing a delicious meal in advance.
  • trick-or-treat 5mo ago
    Cooking is possibly the least niche hobby ever, but it sounds like you're elevating it. Maybe call it "gastronomy", lol.
• derekered 5mo ago
  Holograms! It's fascinating how they are made and how they can serve as a metaphor for how the universe might work.
  • laxpri 5mo ago
    interesting
• specproc 5mo ago
  I've designed jewellery for my wife's last few birthdays. Nothing fancy, geometries, square kufic and such. Very crude approach: I've been doing it in Blender, if you've 3D skills should be easy. I've got a friend who does the printing and casting, so there's more I could explore there later. I also do dioramas, which grew out of 40K. Got bored with hench guys with guns and moved to 6mm, it's been great fun focusing on buildings.
• bulte-rs 5mo ago
  I'm a football/soccer coach (youth, U12 and U19). Got started as a "temp" for my sons mini-team (back when he was 5). Temporary turns into UEFA certified youth trainer/coach real fast. It's no longer just about the kids (sorry guys), but a really awesome hobby with lots of personal development paths.
  • jolt42 5mo ago
    I've been meaning to get back into that, but now I'm curious about lots of personal development paths?
• kylehotchkiss 5mo ago
  Not niche, but photography has a way of opening doors because you push yourself to get to places you might not otherwise. Maybe learn a new language that isn't European or Japanese. If "niche" matters to you, anything currently receiving any type of investing (ML etc) is probably not gonna work.
• tverbeure 5mo ago
  Is buying hopefully broken electronic test equipment at the flea market, fixing it and then blogging about it a niche hobby?
  • xfce4 5mo ago
    of course
• Theodores 5mo ago
  Baking bread, albeit with a (Panasonic) bread making machine. Might not be niche, however, traditions of giving bread to guests runs deep and people are always delighted if you give them a loaf of extremely fresh bread. There are different directions that bread making can go. During the pandemic there was a rash of people making rock hard sourdough, and sourdough is still the magic word for 'higher status' bread, even though almost every commercially available sourdough loaf is faked with enzymes added to a regular 'Chorleywood' loaf. I gave sourdough a go but I prefer my bread making machines creations that are definitely not sourdough. I like to fortify my bread in two different ways, either with fruits and nuts to make a 'fruit loaf' of sorts, or with seeds and wholemeal flour to have bread that covers many a niche nutrient. Commercial bread in the UK comes with government issued fortifications of folates, B vitamins and whatnot. This might be fine for pregnant mums that can't cook, but I am not one of them! So the challenge is to do a better job of the fortifications, mostly with seeds and choice of flour. Commercial bread is also not very real, with lots of additives that I don't seem to need in my own creations. Emulsifiers, preservatives and everything else are needed for commercial bread, if it is to have shelf life and appeal, but my intestines are not crying out for these sorts of additives and I seem to still be alive without them, with improved digestive tract functionality. Although we have more interesting things to eat than bread, our history in the West is the history of bread, we would not be here without it. Once you start baking your own, albeit with a machine, history becomes so much more interesting. The other optimisation I try is cost. It is easy to produce a decent loaf with very expensive ingredients, however, on a budget it gets to have a different challenge to it. I introduced my uncle to the hobby and he is a meticulous record keeper, so I wrote a simple app for him to record his bakes and ratings. This enables him to make fine adjustments to quantities so as to improve on his creations. I did look for an app before I wrote my own, and the app was called 'Microsoft Excel'. I am sure that could be customised with recipes and whatnot, but I wanted to reinvent the wheel, hence my own app, just for myself and my uncle. With some hobbies that is all you do and an obsession. Bread making is not like that, you can have plenty of more strings to your bow. As mentioned, people are always impressed if you give them a loaf, or if they learn that your sandwiches are made with your own bread. You can insist that it took three minutes with the machine, to downplay everything, however people stay impressed.
• deviation 5mo ago
  I've been pretty obsessed with FSRS in general (tldr: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/awesome-fsrs/wiki/ABC-of-FSRS https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/awesome-fsrs/wiki/...) It's a fantastic new-ish scheduler for spaced repetition - basically a machine learning model which adapts to you, and schedules flash (or anything, really, it's an algorithm) cards according to how well you are personally performing - surfacing data like retention, stability, recall, etc. It's a massive jump over previous "learning algorithms" like For the past 60d I've been using Anki (a flash card program) and it's FSRS setting to learn my French deck (5000 most common French words) and I'm absolutely zooming. I can already follow a fair chunk of conversational French. I've also been using the same system to learn Chess more deeply (endgames, tactics, openings) through Chessable and a few other websites that offer FSRS. It's levelled up my chess game a lot Basically - the thing that hooked me was the data. Being able to see how many cards I've reviewed, how many cards are at 90/80% retention, the stability of every piece of that knowledge, the decay rate, etc... It's really cool.
  • nathan_douglas 5mo ago
    FSRS is really cool. I'm trying to use it and a modified flashcard system to learn more abstract computer science and higher math. I hadn't considered it as a way of learning Chess - that's really interesting. I'm thinking about expanding my system to cover ear-training, birdsong recognition, a few other things like that.
    • deviation 5mo ago
      I never thought about ear-training! My listening comprehension for Piano has always been lacking. A deck of piano sounds that map to actual notes (or even chords) might do wonders for it... My current decks are as follows - I spend about an hour in total reviewing/learning them all, daily: - 5000 most common French words - 5000 most common French sentences (following the Alex Crompton method: https://www.alexcrompton.com/blog/how-to-learn-a-language https://www.alexcrompton.com/blog/how-to-learn-a-language) - English GMAT Vocabulary List (to keep my English sharp) - Unscrambling 5000 English Anagrams (to practice unscrambling for Scrabble or other similar board games) - Some machine learning concepts & algorithms relevant to my day job - Some distributed systems concepts & algorithms relevant to my day job
• ggambetta 5mo ago
  I'm into book restoration, here's a gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/1oNxCfKJp4k6yjoZ9 https://photos.app.goo.gl/1oNxCfKJp4k6yjoZ9 Much less niche, but I'm also really into acting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=do5PicgU0Jw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=do5PicgU0Jw
  • riffraff 5mo ago
    That's impressive work! But how come the books are in mixed languages? Are they your books? Do you fix books for random people?
    • ggambetta 5mo ago
      Hahaha, good observation :) I ran out of my childhood books (in Spanish) to fix, then I ran out of my GFs childhood books (in Latvian), so at that point I offered my services to anyone in the Google Zürich office. I got books in all kinds of languages I couldn't read, and a few chocolates and bottles of wine for my troubles :) Some of the most interesting books were especially challenging. One in old German that was missing a couple of pages. It was a popular fairytale so I found the missing content online and a closely matching font, and reconstructed the pages. Another was in an Asian script I not only couldn't read, I didn't know how to sort or even properly rotate some loose pages, so I had to ask the owner. In a few cases when bits of the cover were missing, I found photos online, and printed a patch. Fun times!
      • riffraff 5mo ago
        that seems wonderfully varied and entertaining :)
  • ttsalami 5mo ago
    Hi! I've been interested in starting book restoration as a hobby as well, are there any resources you recommend to start learning?
    • ggambetta 5mo ago
• edu 5mo ago
  I’ve recently started making bread, at the moment still with fresh or bakers yeast and planning to grow my own sourdough. It’s not very niche, but as a hobby it’s pretty fulfilling. It allows for a lot of play, and you end with something tasty. Also, makes for a great small gift for friends and family.
  • __fst__ 5mo ago
    My wife got a square cast iron dutch oven that she bakes bread in. The breads have this nice crust and soft texture inside. To die for.
  • bluGill 5mo ago
    I make most of my bread with sourdough. It is really easy, it takes a bit longer, but there are less steps - just mix some more flour/water (sometimes salt, but I've not had a problem when I forget though others say it helps the taste to add salt - YMMV) into your starter and wait. Yeast is faster by a lot, but it is a lot more complex and so I don't find it worth it.
• achenatx 5mo ago
  Create custom software for non profits is pretty rewarding. They cant afford anything and have process flow needs that are completely unmet. The software wont be sexy, but will help the non profits and the people they serve
  • dansmith1919 5mo ago
    Oh damn, I love this one. I’ve been vibe coding a ‘public benefit’ app on the side that has a few hundred users but never thought of doing something for an actual non-profit. Care to elaborate on your process? Curious how you approach them and come up with the best path forward with limited time (assuming you have a full time job as well on the side). Thanks!
    • bombcar 5mo ago
      I would recommend finding a local non-profit you're interested in helping, and start volunteering. Don't go in guns blazing "I'm here from Hackernews to save you" but get to know the people and what they do, and then how to help will become apparent. By local I would recommend truly local and not a "division" of a national non-profit; those are an entirely different beast.
  • bilsbie 5mo ago
    I’d love to get involved with this. How to do you organizations that need help?
    • hermitcrab 5mo ago
      I would suggest looking for local charities whose mission you are care about. Then just finding out what issues they have. I ended up building a simple system based on Airtable for a local charity. Although pretty unsophisticated it was transformative for them. https://successfulsoftware.net/2018/02/04/volunteering-your-it-skills/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2018/02/04/volunteering-your-...
  • KellyCriterion 5mo ago
    That could actually lead to a profitable business in the longer run: You will have great insights and lots of working code that may end up in a commercial product that someone is seeking? Esp since you mentioned unmet requirements, thats actually a good indicator
• tombert 5mo ago
  I have been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find the owners of the old Digital Research "Concurrent DOS" operating system. There's a lot of interesting turns in the search and it's been fun to document. I've written a blog post about it [1] though there have been a few updates since I've written that. I honestly think it might be a fun thing for me to keep doing, whether or not I'm successful with my search. I think there is a lot of old software that is just sitting on old hard drives that is waiting to be preserved. [1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/03-March/The-Quest-for-Concurrent-DOS-Part-1 https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/03-March/The-Q...
  • joleyj 5mo ago
    FYI 4699 OS is based on Concurrent DOS 286 and runs worldwide to this day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System?wprov=sf...
    • tombert 5mo ago
      Thanks for reading the post! I have been looking into the Concurrent DOS 286 and FlexOS lineage. Since there is still some level of commercial usage of it, it seems like people are a big more reluctant to talk about it in any capacity.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • davis 5mo ago
    Damn, this is really cool man. I'm a big fan of Gary Kildall, he's one of my heroes so this is great to read.
• cadr 5mo ago
  I don’t know how niche they are, but a few I’ve done in the past - 3D printed musical instruments. Print other designs or contribute your own - lock picking. When you really get into it, you modify locks to make them more of a challenge and mail them to people - Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat. I’m currently mainly interested in linearizing switch-mode amplifiers, but was doing fox hunting for a bit (radio direction finding), and periodically do POTA (transmitting from parks)
  • devrundown 5mo ago
    > Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat Really good way of putting it! POTA can be a lot of fun.
    • Temporary_31337 5mo ago
      HAM radio is whole range of things that were not possible when I was getting into it - first of all it's super cheap to start now, and you can probably bounce RF signals off the moon for less than $100 nowadays. Shortwave radio has always allowed signals to go around the world (by bouncing off the stratosphere). Most likely the new digital + AI capabilities means that a few well positioned relays could make for a very independent, low bandwidth Internet. Solar powered BTS or APs all kinds of experiments are possible...
  • pikewood 5mo ago
    Any pointers to resources or groups around 3D printed musical instruments? Sounds really interesting!
    • cadr 5mo ago
      There is a /r/3dprintedinstruments subreddit that if you sort by best of all time has a lot of good stuff. Fipple flutes like recorders and ocarinas tend to be easy to start with. I also had good luck with the Modular Fiddle [https://openfabpdx.com/download/modular-fiddle-complete-design-package/ https://openfabpdx.com/download/modular-fiddle-complete-desi... .
• JKCalhoun 5mo ago
  Six months deep now into analog computing. (I have a modular, hobbyist analog computer wrapping up—just writing the manual). Going to have to do something on the other end of the spectrum after this. Maybe RISO printing…
  • subdomain 5mo ago
    Riso printing is cool -- there's a small-ish Riso community on the Mastodon server for type design, typo.social
• mcnnowak 5mo ago
  Try playing Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder (or any number of other systems.) Pathfinder is super deep and complex. There's also an entire community of people who play Table Top Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) solo and use the outcomes of their play reports to blog or write fiction. Also, the tooling around these games is very interesting if you want to build an app: Crafting calculator? Generative hexcrawl maps? Random tables? Statistics tools for dice rolls?
• chromacity 5mo ago
  Almost everything you can do on your own is a "solved problem". Why go into woodworking if you can buy an Ikea stool? The point of hobbies isn't to solve problems - that's called a job - but to learn and have fun. Find a niche where you can resist the temptation to constantly compare yourself to eight billion other people on the internet. Something where success isn't measured in Github stars, Youtube likes, or Reddit upvotes. Once you get in that mindset, almost anything goes. I know people who collect RPN calculators and are having a blast. All kinds of hands-on crafts are great too. I like making electronic music and I'm pretty bad at it.
  • bananaflag 5mo ago
    > Almost everything you can do on your own is a "solved problem". Not everything. Take cooking, one of the most basic hobbies. It's easy to come up with recipes that you enjoy that you cannot order anywhere. Or the comment here about designing your own clothes, same idea.
    • rgoulter 5mo ago
      OP's post features he wants "that isn't absolutely crowded that I could meaningfully contribute to." I could read that as: wanting to do something interesting that others would benefit from. Though, I don't really think that's a good reason to filter out things to be enthusiastic about.
  • awkwardleon 5mo ago
    I like Kurt Vonnegut's take on this: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.” And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.” And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”
• jedberg 5mo ago
  I make holiday light shows with an open source program called XLights[0]. I'm sure you've seen the videos[1] of what people[2] can do. Usually the top comment is "man that is cool but I wouldn't want to be their neighbor!" followed by "my neighbors love my light shows". Creating the sequences is time consuming, and lot of people end up buying them or sharing them, but those are rarely as good as the ones you make for yourself. Some folks have dabbled with using AI to create the sequences. I think the biggest issues are lack of training data and it's a very visual art, so there needs to be a better feedback between the text representation and the visual manifestation. So if you're into using AI to make physical world things better, that would be a good place to look! [0] https://xlights.org https://xlights.org [1] https://youtu.be/enhhtPZMwCE?t=119 https://youtu.be/enhhtPZMwCE?t=119 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5dfpe_-Lgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5dfpe_-Lgg
  • rationalist 5mo ago
    Warning: Do NOT click on [1] unless you have 25 minutes to spend transfixed on a video. Holy cow...
    • jedberg 5mo ago
      It takes about 10 hours per minute of song to make a sequence like that. Imagine if AI could help speed that up!
      • bombcar 5mo ago
        I wonder if you can break down the sequences into segments (parts) and then the AI doesn't have to know how to control LEDs directly, but can instead put sequences together in accordance with the music. Maybe even process MIDI files somehow ...
        • jedberg 5mo ago
          When we do it as humans, that's basically how we do it. We may have an overall idea for a theme across the song, but usually you're zoomed into a few seconds of music and adding light effects to it.
• autocorr 5mo ago
  Echoing others, Chess engines certainly aren't a solved problem! In fact there are a lot of niches that are absolutely starving for effort. Ones I'm interested in are related to Chess variants and puzzles. Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety of tools to train new neural nets for these variants, generate opening books, puzzles, etc. You can play some of them on PyChess (pychess.org). These are projects basically run by a couple people with huge backlogs of bugs and feature requests. An enthusiastic developer can easily get involved! Or just enjoy playing different variants and getting involved with the player community.
  • Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
    Ohh about fairy stockfish, I had actually looked into it for something like spell-chess (which is an completely unsolved problem!) I was playing chess with one of my friends and we played spell-chess which is an clash royale/clash of clans x chess thing where you get two spells of freeze and jump Freeze allows you to select a tile and have a 3x3 square radius which freezes those pieces Jump allows you to select any piece (opponent or yours) and it will effectively allow you to jump over that. When me and my friends were playing, I kept trying to do something wonky to find the most optimal play. I had thoughts for a day or two to find/make fairy stockfish or atleast had the idea to do so but not the experience to do so but I certainly wished even from the end point perspective as to what/if the game was solved. I don't know but these things make me feel as if perhaps, just maybe, the game can be played a certain way where even in the best game, its not draw but rather a particular side wins (effectively solving it), I felt like these spells were too overpowered so there was an possibility about it, you just made me remember a lot of things about these things that I had thought. It was these thoughts which randomly led me to discover fairy stockfish which is an really interesting project!
    • rainrat 5mo ago
      Belzedar94 made a prototype that plays Spell chess about 6 months ago: https://github.com/Belzedar94/Fairy-Stockfish/pull/37 https://github.com/Belzedar94/Fairy-Stockfish/pull/37
• VimEscapeArtist 5mo ago
  Gamey Boy / Modretro Chromatic / LSDJ / Dirtywave M8 / anything F# / MiniDisc community
• NoboruWataya 5mo ago
  Hnefatafl, a simple board game that was played by the vikings and others who had frequent contact with them. Or rather, what we play today is an approximation of what they played back then as we don't really know the exact rules they used. It's interesting in that unlike chess and others, it is asymmetrical, and there are a number of different variants each with their own challenges and different balances between attacker and defender. The main community and learning resource is at http://aagenielsen.dk http://aagenielsen.dk.
• Skidaddle 5mo ago
  I’ve started making what I “joy machines” that I am putting up in or near my neighborhood. They’re some combination of public interactive art (e.g. push a button and it prints out a compliment) and little art on display that I design and 3D print for people to take.
  • DeltaCoast 5mo ago
    Very cool! Any links to posts about some of them?
    • Skidaddle 5mo ago
      See my reply above!
  • jasondigitized 5mo ago
    I'm intrigued and need to see some images or videos now.
    • Skidaddle 5mo ago
      Here’s the initial post about! https://www.instagram.com/p/DUeWPKPEqQB/?igsh=bjJiM3VlM3ZxZ3k1 https://www.instagram.com/p/DUeWPKPEqQB/?igsh=bjJiM3VlM3ZxZ3... I have this delusion of grandeur about starting a movement to take all of the mostly-idle 3D printers in people’s homes and to use them to create little tokens of joy in people’s neighborhoods.
• aivillage_team 5mo ago
  [dead]
• mattmcegg 5mo ago
  FPV drone racing
• fsiefken 5mo ago
  * playing shortlarps * using short boardgames to measure cognitive performance on various metrics * creating simple 3d boardgames with raylib kolibri_engine * dancing and studying vajra dance and the vajra song from namkai norbu * reading and studying about: mahamudra and dzogchen vs christian contemplative traditions and mystics, and transpersonal psychology
• JimBlackwood 5mo ago
  I do gundog training. When I started with our first dog I did not expect to enjoy it that much. It’s hard to express how much it takes mentally and physically, and the bond you build with your dog is crazy. Best of all, you don’t actually have to hunt. You can stick to dummies. In terms of contributing in a meaningful way, your local trainer will always be happy with helpers. If you need to setup multiple 200m retrieves for multiple dogs, it helps if you have someone out in the field doing the work. And lots of stuff to organise and help out with.
• alyd 5mo ago
  Boat building is in a really interesting time with new materials allow foiling, along with new battery technology giving new power sources.
• lostathome 5mo ago
  One of my hobbies is organizing events. I, like to think, I am pretty good at it. Main point is to create good initial conditions, then people take care of the rest.
  • racl101 5mo ago
    Money to be made there. But then it would be a job.
• notsrg 5mo ago
  We got into scuba diving about 3 years ago. Have something like 200 dives now logged across Southern California, Hawaii and the Caribbean. Planning on adding Indonesia to the list later this year. That wow factor you experience the first time you dive hasn't gone away after 200 dives and I don't think it'll go away after 2000. Probably the most life-affirming thing I've ever gotten into and can't recommend it enough.
• dizhn 5mo ago
  I saw a few videos of making glasses (cups) out of nice liquor bottles. Seems like a nice cheapish hobby.
• ryandrake 5mo ago
  If you like to work with your hands and have space, build something physical: big and complex, and actually finish it. I built a single engine two seat kit airplane in my garage, did all the flight testing, and now have an interesting way to travel/commute as a result. The "finish it" part is the most important bit. Computer people spend too much time working on projects that don't have a "done" state. Change that up.
  • bluGill 5mo ago
    I would start smaller though. There are a lot of half finished airplanes (where the last 20% takes 80% of the time...) and the maker is dead. I've been working on a ukulele for over a year now and it isn't close to done yet, and this is a much smaller project. (Or maybe I should say I've been working on raising kids for a decade and there is another left?).
    • codazoda 5mo ago
      Oh, yeah. I’ve been meaning to build an electric ukulele. I’ve built some handmade electric guitars, slide guitars and similar. Mine are rudimentary, more akin to a cigar box guitar (if not less complex). Examples: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPmHtIa9vAm8wNPeTXP4MoZjOAqssOaTW5XnmBqXmlcYdKhAPglQJTcoqSJI_fAcw?key=NXJHNmd6dUFRTVY2QklLcVVrZzdzYm5sQWp3YVd3 https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPmHtIa9vAm8wNPeTXP4MoZ...
      • exDM69 5mo ago
        Great looking instruments. I've built half a dozen similar box guitars, it's such a fun little thing to build. Do I see a piezo disk under the bridge in the 3rd instrument? Do you use some kind of preamp with it? I have been recently experimenting with different kinds of piezo pickups [0] and preamp electronics for them. I've figured out a pretty nice JFET based circuit for the preamp and ordered tiny 13x13mm PCBs with tiny SMT components assembled and it works pretty well (but needs a second revision). They mount directly on the volume potentiometer and fit in a small space. The one thing I haven't figured out yet is grounding the electronics. In a typical electric guitar you ground the electronics by touching the (grounded) strings, but that doesn't work very well (at all) with slide guitar when your left hand has got a bottle neck slide on it (made of glass or ceramic which is an insulator). Drop a message below if you want to geek out more about home made guitars and/or related electronics. Depending on your location I could also send some preamp PCBs your way. [0] https://hazeguitars.com/blog/piezo-pickups-evolve https://hazeguitars.com/blog/piezo-pickups-evolve (not my site)
• hyperific 5mo ago
  Get your Part 107 federal drone license and volunteer for your local fire department or search and rescue. When the FD responds to structure fires they sometimes have to go up on the roof to cut an air hole. This allows oxygen into the building which helps prevent backdrafts. A FLIR equipped drone can help direct the hole cutter around hotspots on the roof. If your local fire department has a drone, it might not have the staff to be able to use it on calls.
  • avidiax 5mo ago
    How involved is the license? I've flown racing quads and RC planes, so I think I have the hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness skills. Is this something that would be saturated in the Bay Area? Does the SAR team provide the drone?
    • hyperific 5mo ago
      You'd need to schedule and take an exam. There are lots of resources online to help you study. I recommend the Youtube video from Tony and Chelsea Northrup. I'm not sure how saturated it would be. My advice would be to contact the closest FD (or PD if you wanted to go the SAR route) and ask. If they say they're covered, ask if they know any other stations that could use a hand. There's bound to be a department that needs volunteers. The FD should have an enterprise level DJI (or equivalent) with color and IR cameras but it will probably depend on how well funded the department is. SAR may be a different story as far as equipment but I don't know since that's not the route I pursued.
• afc 5mo ago
  I got into designing my own knitting patterns. I enjoy that I can customize everything — the yarn material, color (including marling, helix knitting, double knitting), yarn weight, needle size (e.g., resulting in "airy" vs "packed" textures), knit textures (e.g., stockinette, linen, miss, etc.), construction process (e.g., can I figure out a way to knit in the round vs flat?), cables, gradual increases/decreases, selvedge/cord, desired ease, etc.. I wrote software to generate patterns given configurations and keep track of which row I'm on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089 I am sharing some of my patterns here: https://alejo.ch/2s0 https://alejo.ch/2s0 I'm currently working on my second ruana.
  • eru 5mo ago
    A few years ago I helped the wife write her own Haskell software to help her generate her knitting patterns in LaTeX. Fun times. Should be much easier these days with all the AI help available.
    • srean 5mo ago
      Please consider writing a blog about this. Would love to know more.
      • eru 5mo ago
        Sorry, I don't have time. See https://www.mathemaknitter.com/ https://www.mathemaknitter.com/ for her (sadly neglected) blog that also links to her ravelry account and patterns. Mostly the conceptual evolution was: Knitting patterns have a lot of numbers with mathematical relations between them. You could keep track of them by hand, but spreadsheets are already an improvement. Especially when you want to make edits to earlier parts of the pattern. Well, spreadsheets aren't too bad to write, but they are basically write-only software, impossible to audit. She'd already learned programming in Haskell before, so going from there to using Haskell for making the numbers work out was a small step, conceptually.
        • 5mo ago
• biotinker 5mo ago
  I got myself involved with a nonprofit local group preserving local pioneer era apple trees. They've been DNA testing and cataloging the trees, and had all the info stashed away in google drive and onedrive folders. The founder was looking to step back so they asked me if I wanted to step up as project lead, which I did. I took the info and organized it into a nice wiki-style site with maps and descriptions so everyone in the community can learn about the old orchards. https://heritageapplecorps.org/index.php/Main_Page https://heritageapplecorps.org/index.php/Main_Page I've also learned how to prune and graft hundred year old apple trees and now have a couple dozen young grafted trees growing in my garage, all clones of local hundred year old trees, some of which genetically tested unique and are of currently unknown varieties.
  • anfractuosity 5mo ago
    That sounds really cool, how did they do the DNA testing out of interest?
    • biotinker 5mo ago
      We work with Dr Cameron Peace's lab at WSU. They send us test tubes, we send the tubes back with leaves in them, they run the DNA tests and compare against an apple ID database they've built. We pay ~$50 per test, which is what most of the groups budget goes towards.
  • andrewhaupt 5mo ago
    Thats awesome! I'm doing apple stuff on the other side of the Cascades (Eugene), starting a cidery and trying to find rare varieties to graft. And doing little software projects like https://pomological.art/ https://pomological.art/. Would love to get in touch if you want people to propagate these varieties you're finding and would potentially be interested in sharing some scion wood!
    • biotinker 5mo ago
      Oh cool! I've used pomological.art! Great site! I'm in the middle of building out a similar big project that takes a different tack: looking through every period pomological text (e.g. Apple of New York, Fruits and Fruit Trees of America) and pulling the images, descriptions, etc for every heritage apple variety. Includes the watercolors too. I also pull in every scanned catalog from nurseries selling fruit trees in the PNW from the late 1800s. The goal is a tool we can use to identify apples, and also have comprehensive info on every variety, using public domain period content. It's not fully done yet, there are bugs/issues right now but you can take a look here: https://heritageapplecorps.org/varieties/ https://heritageapplecorps.org/varieties/ I think we grafted ~90 scions this year. A lot of them we haven't actually DNA tested yet so no idea what they are. So many of these trees are on their last legs, so our priority is cloning them first, and then once the clones grow, DNA test those as funds are available. I make my own cider too (though as a hobby). If we ever find ourselves in the same city I'd love to meet up and we can swap scions/cider/etc.
• vibe_that_works 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Sharlin 5mo ago
    Animal cruelty, what an awesome hobby. Biohack yourself all you want, but playing mad scientist on test subjects that cannot give informed consent is evil.
  • gf263 5mo ago
    wtf?
  • racl101 5mo ago
    Bruh
• blobbers 5mo ago
  What you’re looking for is a research topic, or maybe a better way to put it is your hobby is research… if that makes sense? So for ideas, sorry that’s going to be whatever floats your boat. You listed a bunch of different things. But hobby is normally “playing softball” or “guitar”, but it could be “researching next gen PCs”… but that seems more like a PhD lab project.
• davidgh 5mo ago
  A group of us in our community broadcast many of the local high school sports. Our original setup had a scoreboard that was really clunky to manage and was hard to learn, so I built a web-based version that pretty much any 12 year old with an iPad could use. I have worked with the logs extensively over time to convert the simple data inputs from the scoreboard controls into charts & graphs that update in real time on the screen to “tell the story” of the game, and generate “talking points” from the data. It allows us to plug in students as commentators and they can talk about the game much more confidently because they can visually see the game's storyline that is based on actual data. “The Trojans are on a 14-4 streak starting late in the 3rd quarter, and that has flipped the lead in their favor” is a lot more fun than “the Trojans are doing well the last little bit”. It’s been fun (and challenging) to develop the right UI to display the game’s story in a way that is rich yet easy to read at a glance. And it has been cool to see the students increase in how professional they sound on the live broadcast.
  • jasondigitized 5mo ago
    Would love to see this in action. Anything you can share? Also, what gear is used for this? Having recently been in charge of a scoreboard made by Daktronics for high school games, I was intimidated by the UX.
    • davidgh 5mo ago
      You can use it here: https://scoreboardmax.com/ https://scoreboardmax.com/ All features are included in the free version, just some usage limits. If you decide to use it, send a message using the “Contact Us” from with the account and I’ll send you the details on the analytics / charts as they are at unpublished URLs.
      • jasondigitized 5mo ago
        Thank you!
• bokohut 5mo ago
  Walking and finding history if your location has such history to offer to find. People pay vast accruing cumulative sums over time to go to the gym and my exercise pays me with every single walk. Some of that modern human history I have found dates back hundreds of years in the form of coins and bottles while some of the native human history I have found dates back 10 thousand years. I cannot neglect the fossils either as the oldest I have found reviewed by an expert is said to be Paleozoic tabulate coral being over 251 million years aged. Thanks to gravity everything lost in the past is under our feet and as digitalization has taken over our global society, created by some of those reading this here, there are not many folks walking let alone looking. I found my first item over 14 years ago now and while my partner HATES the aggregate volume of the things I have collected she cannot neglect the uniqueness, rarity and value of some of those items. Every single walk inspires real motivation however one needs their health first to take that walk. Stay Healthy!
  • s3tt3mbr1n1 5mo ago
    Very interested to hear more. Do you live in an (old) city or more rurally?
    • bokohut 5mo ago
      A town along the water in Maryland founded in 1694 that has documented colonial roots as well with being present in water way form on the only known Native American Chesapeake Bay hand drawn deer hide map, 1590-1620, which still exists in a British museum. The history here over time is extremely vast and I have been very fortunate in my walks to have located many items related to that history. Speaking only to the Native American finds I have located hundreds of points of vast variety, many hundreds of tools large and small along with objects no expert can explain yet they know to be Native American from their workings. With each tide change the shoreline is manipulated thus revealing more while covering the things missed until another tide change. One's mind may be curious to ask also of what other things I have found and foregoing specifics I can say as a lead on to those curious that one of the first railroads in the US terminated at the waters edge behind my location. And on that railroad it has been documented that U.S. Presidents, Kings and Queens, Daniel Boone, Benjamin Latrobe, Lafayette and more road those rails and therefore stood on this ground I now walk. Not to far from that railroad was the county's first tavern which hosted those riding the rails and served them libations in bottles while along that journey. The British landed behind my location too during the War of 1812 and burnt a small supporting outpost town and many boats very near that railroad. In 1999 a water based archeological dig was conducted where a British boat was discovered along with many items in the vessels hull from that era. I left much out but this alone should reflect the quantity and quality of the items I have found. I have literal buckets of finds and even more buckets of items I have yet to sort.
• ogou 5mo ago
  Printmaking. In a tiny apartment I did linocuts and Gelli prints on my kitchen counter for a few months. https://lucidbeaming.com/art/prints https://lucidbeaming.com/art/prints
  • apgwoz 5mo ago
    I like your stuff! I’ve been coveting a plotter for a while, but I’m pretty sure it won’t get used enough to justify the expense. :/ I do find the term “printmaking” hilarious because there’s just sooo many ways to make prints. I tried to get into linocut fairly recently, but the battleship grey linoleum I had wasn’t very good. It cracked and crumbled pretty easily. I did get some of pink Speedball “blocks,” but it gets expensive pretty quickly. I guess more to the point is the feeling that I lack much to say. But, that’s an excuse. :)
    • ogou 5mo ago
      Thanks for the compliment. Linocuts and monotypes have been considered printmaking for hundreds of years. Those pen plots are also collaged and modified by hand, so not only mechanical. I see all that as traditional printmaking. As for having nothing to saw, there can be a lot of fulfillment in exploring basic themes, like geometric shapes or silhouettes of animals.
      • apgwoz 5mo ago
        There’s no doubt that stuff is print making. My point is that there are multiple ways of doing (within each of these): relief, Intaglio, lithography, screen printing, offset. So if you say, “I’m a print maker,” it describes basically nothing. :) This is just a general statement, not directed at you. Sorry it felt that way.
• romeroej 5mo ago
  im an airsoft nerd. its a fun way to blow some steam with friends. not the tight milsim approach just the recreational way,
• _spduchamp 5mo ago
  I build weird experimental instruments and then play them at the local electronic music open mic nights. My main instrument is the electroduochord, a stereo two-stringed instrument played with a drone motor rotary magnetic bow. https://youtu.be/G1ftvw-Y6pk https://youtu.be/G1ftvw-Y6pk I've also hooked up audio jacks to small solar panels to convert vibrations in light into sound. https://youtu.be/ZF2Rn5YfBC8 https://youtu.be/ZF2Rn5YfBC8 Now I'm working on cybernetic drumming and rhythm synthesis. https://youtu.be/oJZeP4Naqxo https://youtu.be/oJZeP4Naqxo https://youtu.be/NwNrJLvHuAE https://youtu.be/NwNrJLvHuAE
  • nathan_douglas 5mo ago
    Really dig the sound of the first one, though all of these are really cool.
    • _spduchamp 5mo ago
      Thanks! I have some albums that were made using the electroduochord. This one was created autonomously using a feedback algorithm controlling the speed of the rotary magnetic bow. https://stefanpowell.bandcamp.com/album/autonomous-drone-lullabies https://stefanpowell.bandcamp.com/album/autonomous-drone-lul... It's an album meant for falling asleep.
  • solstice 5mo ago
    I dig the electroduotone. Congrats! Have you heard of electronicos fantasticos? It's this band from Japan who make incredible music with instruments they made themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0VYsiMtrNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0VYsiMtrNE
    • _spduchamp 5mo ago
      Yup, I've seen some of their stuff. They mostly make conventional music with unconventional instruments which is cute but doesn't quite interest me. I prefer music that is a bit more experimental and works with the texture of the sound more than melodic structure.
• Nesco 5mo ago
  Synbio but it’s expensive as hell
  • laxpri 5mo ago
    what is it
    • Nesco 5mo ago
      Synthetic biology: changing genes or expression of genes in cells, etc
• jbethune 5mo ago
  Local urbex and exploration of 'haikyo' areas. Easy for me since I am in Tokyo and it's super walkable. I have taken to just getting on the train and getting off at random stations and walking in a random direction for a couple of kilometers. Every now and then I run into interesting abandoned buildings or neat shrines. Also makes for good exercise.
• JonathanRaines 5mo ago
  High altitude balloon launches using weather balloons to get photos of the curvature of the earth.
• a3w 5mo ago
  Lockpicking.
• afc 5mo ago
  I don't know if it's niche, but I like making granola for my friends and family. I give them a big jar and tell them free refills are included ("just bring me the empty jar"). I get pretty good nuts and tend to make largish batches (around 2 kg), and, because of the refills, I get a good sense of who appreciates it — always happy to make more for them. My recipe is here: https://alejo.ch/365 https://alejo.ch/365
  • dbacar 5mo ago
    any chance we got it in English? would love to try
    • DANmode 5mo ago
      You need help translating a two-step recipe? On HN? Are you sure?
      • deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
• avipars 5mo ago
  I design print on demand t-shirts and merch https://www.amazon.com/s?refresh=1&rh=n%3A7141123011%2Cp_4%3AAmCan%2BTech&linkCode=ll2&tag=everythtec0d0-20&linkId=76b0ea48fe34451b28247c44dd461374&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl https://www.amazon.com/s?refresh=1&rh=n%3A7141123011%2Cp_4%3...
• BirAdam 5mo ago
  I've been conlanging since I was about 8yo or so. This hobby also has me randomly learning natural human languages too. I've always just enjoyed it. I could make up reasons for enjoying it, but I am not certain that any of those would be true.
• jaggederest 5mo ago
  I'd suggest you try out something completely offline. My next candidate is flintknapping, but there are lots of really interesting historical crafts that are in need of preservation and are extremely interesting to learn and gain expertise at. Woodworking, oil painting, pottery, analog synthesizers, animal husbandry, spinning and yarnmaking, knitting and weaving, sewing, pattern making, metalwork, welding, endurance running, rock climbing, beekeeping, brewing and distilling, the list goes on and on. Contrary to popular opinion they are all extremely technical and demanding fields, and getting to reconnect with the physical world and the people in it, as well as history, is extremely rewarding.
  • tastyfreeze 5mo ago
    All primitive skills are great fun to learn. A logical followup to flint knapping is arrow making and bowery. There is something magical in making lethal ranged weapons with sticks, rocks, and string.
• pyuser583 5mo ago
  Learn how to calculate longitude and latitude by eyesight using the Ptolemaic system. Then add a telescope or sextant. This is lots of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.
  • laxpri 5mo ago
    say more
• frabia 5mo ago
  I recently started looking into hydroponics gardening. You can start very easily with a Kratky system and some herbs, and then take it a step at the time. I’m quite at the beginning myself, but I like it so far! It’s a nice mix of science and craft.
  • dan353hehe 5mo ago
    Yep! I have a small setup with just some used food grade pickle buckets, and have been growing greens and things for a bit over a year. Going to get some more and expand them this year. It literally uses no power as pumps are not used, and water usage is very minimal. I live in the desert so low water usage is very important. It's an interesting hobby, as you have to adapt it to the area you live, and where you grow the plants.
• elevation 5mo ago
  Consider mathematics. If you already know enough math to derive the quadratic equation, you might make a small change, like adding X^3 or X^4. See where your own techniques take you before looking up the answer. With just a few pen strokes, you will be playing with an equation for which there is no general solution, or no known solution. In mathematics it will take you very little time to start playing at the boundaries of human knowledge, and it's relatively easy to memorize a few starting points that many hours of passenger travel fly by.
  • jolt42 5mo ago
    I like this. I like crossword puzzles but don't like I'm just solving pre-made puzzles rather than exploring new territory. Math seems the best candidate but are there other fields with similar challenges?
  • codazoda 5mo ago
    Since I was a kid I was fascinated by computer math, such as a projectile in Scorched Earth (wind, angle, velocity, gravity). I turned 50 this week and I STILL haven’t dug into how even the basics work.
    • elric 5mo ago
      Can still remember the sound of the Funky Bomb firing in Scorched Earth. Thanks fot reminding me of that. If you're interested in this sort of stuff, the book Nature Of Code is great for exploring this topic by creating simulations. There's a Javascript version and Java based version (using the Processing framework). It isn't actually all that difficult, and I found it very satisfying to work through.
  • ivanjermakov 5mo ago
    There is a lot of less popular math problems in spatial and high dimentional geometry, packing, topology. Nice example of something many of us could try: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45694856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45694856
  • futune 5mo ago
• lwarfield 5mo ago
  I do a lot of lindyhop Swing dancing as a hobby. It's not innovative work, but I find it rewarding.
• hermitcrab 5mo ago
  I make my own hot sauce: https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/08/04/making-your-own-hot-sauce/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/08/04/making-your-own-ho... It's quite easy and you don't have to make it super hot. I am currently growing chillis for the next batch.
  • trick-or-treat 5mo ago
    I've got a local guy that provides me all my hot sauce. I used to buy from supermarkets but I've become convinced that sourcing everything I eat locally is the way to go. Anyway I only need to order from him like once per year because he sends me about 1l of this carolina reaper sauce that is so potent it only takes a few drops.
  • kashunstva 5mo ago
    Growing chillies easily becomes its own rabbit-hole. I grow between 30-40 different varieties, which, depending on where you live, can be an interesting and near year-long venture.
• bgirard 5mo ago
  I've been using Codex to build a repo that pulls down astronomical datasets and runs simulation to try to find explanation for the hubble tension. Having an agent to do the tedious bits and also having an LLM to bounce ideas has tough me so much about astronomy. I don't have serious hopes of finding anything new and novel but it's still a lot of fun.
• vandahm 5mo ago
  I build ukuleles and guitars from scratch. That's not as niche as what a lot of people do -- it's just woodworking -- but I do software for a living and enjoy making durable, physical things in my free time.
  • jassyr 5mo ago
    Very cool! I've been playing uke for a few years to help me disconnect from the real world. Did you go to a luthier school or self taught?
• pinkmuffinere 5mo ago
  Hey, I love this thread!! Thanks for asking the question, there's _so many_ interesting responses in here!
• Igor_Wiwi 5mo ago
  I make AI music https://suno.com/@igorstechoclub https://suno.com/@igorstechoclub
• AbraKdabra 5mo ago
  Not too niche: Traditional archery. Niche: Make wood climbing holds.
• aslushnikov 5mo ago
  I'm very much into niche hobbies: they usually have nice tight & friendly communities. Below are some of my favorite I'd love to share: - FPV drone flying: once you've spent 5-10 hours to get initial reflexes for the controls in the simulator, the first flight on a real machine outside feels magical. - Electric unicycles: the "mind-controlled" PEV, and arguably the best way to get around in San Francisco. - Foiling: the closest feeling to riding a hoverboard. You can kite-foil, pump-foil, sup-foil etc, but wing foiling is the easiest to get started. - Knots: tying laces properly just makes life easier, and tying tucker's / voodoo hitches for the first few times feels like a magic trick. - Cardistry: learning to do a proper riffle shuffle and a few artistic cuts adds some fun to the most boring part of any card game.
  • hermitcrab 5mo ago
    >FPV drone flying What sort of set-up would be a good one for a beginner?
    • aslushnikov 5mo ago
      The setup I'd recommend: - Velocidrone [1] flight sim - Any FPV controller that connects to laptop. 2 solid choices are TBS Tango 2 or DJI FPV Remote Controller [3] I spent ~20 hours in the sim before advancing to real drones; a few of my friends followed this path and successfully passed an improvised exam on real drone after just ~10 hours in the sim. As for the drone itself, the easiest setup is probably DJI Avata [4], but it's less of the proper "FPV feel". I personally fly Flywoo Explorer [5] with DJI system: it's a small & nibmle long range drone, easy to travel with, and powerful enough to chase kiteboarders even in a strong wind. P.S. Don't be discouraged with sim flying: it's actually very fun, feels similar to TrackMania Nations. [1] https://www.velocidrone.com/ https://www.velocidrone.com/ [2] https://www.team-blacksheep.com/products/prod:tbs_tango_2 https://www.team-blacksheep.com/products/prod:tbs_tango_2 [3] https://store.dji.com/product/dji-fpv-remote-controller-3?vid=164841 https://store.dji.com/product/dji-fpv-remote-controller-3?vi... [4] https://www.dji.com/avata-2 https://www.dji.com/avata-2 [5] https://flywoo.net/products/explorer-lr-4-o4-pro-sub250-4k-1080p-micro-long-range https://flywoo.net/products/explorer-lr-4-o4-pro-sub250-4k-1...
• bramgn 5mo ago
  Juggling! I used to juggle when i was a teenager, managed to juggle 5 balls and clubs. Then after decades of neglecting it, i picked it up again and i found the joy in this hobby again! I can highly recommend.
  • hyperkewb 5mo ago
    Same! Highly recommend checking out your local juggling club if you have one!
• kattjakt 5mo ago
  I highly recommend getting into loudspeakers or audio reproduction in general! Without a doubt the most enjoyable, satisfying, and enriching hobby I've had so far. A couple years ago I decided to build a pair of synergy horns (look them up!) which included all kinds of interesting stuff! For example, I had to learn CAD, the principles of CNC and how to create toolpaths, what a waveguide is, general woodworking, and lots more. There's also lots of interesting "subhobbies" one may dwelve into such as psychoacoustics, signal processing, LEM/BEM simulations, the optimization of horn geometries (look up AKABAK or Ath4 and their respective DiyAudio threads), analog crossovers, or acoustically treating a room to reduce reverb. Building speakers and experimenting with bracing and lining/damping have been rewarding for me as determining wether I prefer A or B really requires me to _listen_ in a different way from say, listening to a conversation (or even to music!). It feels very grounding and meditative in a way, and at least in my case, indirectly trains one to notice and appreciate more sounds in everyday life. A big bonus is that it becomes really easy to throw outdoor parties out in the woods when one doesn't have to rent gear. Loudspeakers and bringing people together is a damn good and rewarding combo.
  • srean 5mo ago
    Could you suggest any books, resources.
• SAI_Peregrinus 5mo ago
  My wife & I are Scottish Country dancers. It's a social dance form (it's traditional to swap partners for every dance so nobody has to bring a partner, though not required). Pretty good cardio, there are groups all over the world, so it's often not that difficult to find a class. Other similar social dance forms from the UK are Contra dancing, English Country dancing, and Ceilidh dancing. Square dancing in the US developed out of these forms. Many other cultures have their own social dance forms, with varying levels of formalization. Meaningful contribution is easy: these groups always benefit from more participants. Scottish Country dance has a formalized teaching certificate program, roughly equivalent to a Master's degree worth of work (and if you're a UK resident it qualifies to teach PE in UK schools).
  • dboreham 5mo ago
    The Gay Gordons have entered the chat..
    • SAI_Peregrinus 5mo ago
      ... taken Allemande hold, walked forward, turned around, and walked out of the room.
  • dddddaviddddd 5mo ago
    > Meaningful contribution is easy: these groups always benefit from more participants. Same for probably all small dance communities! While it seems like a different kind of 'contribution' than the OP is looking for, it's very meaningful personally to share music and creativity with people. (Personally, I dance lots of Balboa -- a swing dance with a local scene of probably less than 100 active participants.)
• chasd00 5mo ago
  amateur liquid bi-prop rocket engines for the High Power Rocketry hobby are gaining momentum. There's lot of opportunity there for performance profiling and even more if you have access to a machine tools like CNC lathes. There's also interest in active stabilization of amateur rockets using engine gimbaling which would put so much more performance in reach. These guys are legit and actually flying airframes instead of just ignition on a test stand. https://www.halfcatrocketry.com/ https://www.halfcatrocketry.com/ The hobby is geography constrained though, you need access to large open spaces. Even small engines are spectacularly loud and igniting one in your garage would scare the crap out of your neighbors. Edit: if you're in/near LA this club is pretty much ground zero. Tom Mueller of SpaceX's Merlin engine series fame was discovered here iirc. https://rrs.org https://rrs.org
  • towledev 5mo ago
    As a kid, I dreamed of doing this. Some of my earliest googling was related to rocket fuel, probably right after October Sky came out. What differentiates High-Power from the other options?
    • hermitcrab 5mo ago
      Model rockets are classified as 'high power' above a certain impulse. In places like the UK and US you are expected to gradually work your way up from low impulse motors (A,B,C) to high impulse motors (J,K,L+).
  • hermitcrab 5mo ago
    Probably better to start with solid fuel motors? lots to learn before progressing onto liquid fuel motors.
    • LM358 5mo ago
      Solid rocket motors are conceptually simpler, but much more dangerous and in many jurisdictions legally dubious to make yourself compared to hobbyist bi-liquid or hybrid designs.
• Shalomboy 5mo ago
  You should try getting _extremely_ good at Trading Card Games. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic The Gathering all have extremely active current player bases and loads of places to play across the Americas, Europe, and (mostly east) Asia. Getting deep into card advantage, deck construction, and hypergeometric theory has been an absolute blast. Plus, the online simulators are free for Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon are free and pretty current with the paper game. Making new friendships with people not in my usual circles has been so rewarding, I can't recommend it enough. Not to mention the most meaningful contribution of all - winning events moves the needle on the way the rest of the playerbase plays the game. I could go on and on about this.
• MandieD 5mo ago
  My hobby involves some of the oldest technology we've been able to find evidence of. It started as spinning with a hand spindle using prepared (combed/carded) wool, and has evolved into looking for interesting fleeces directly from the shepherds (plenty given away or sold cheaply around here), figuring out how best to wash and process (hand comb? drum carder? spin directly from the slightly-opened locks?), working on which settings on my spinnng wheel will produce the twist I'm looking for, and most recently, dyeing using Easter egg dye and vinegar, which is surprisingly effective. Oh, and of course, knitting and crocheting with the results. I still use hand spindles to spin while walking, watching my kid on the playground, or on transit.
  • monssooon 5mo ago
    Im imterested in hearing more about this. Do you have a YouTube channel or any other place to follow you?
• johnthedebs 5mo ago
  I got into fig (and since then, more broadly, fruit) cultivation. Figs have a rich history, lots of variety, and there are very active online (and in-person) communities where you can buy or exchange plants and cuttings, advice, and fruit. This grew out of an initial interest in gardening, and the long-term goal is to create a food/fruit forest around our house where me, family, friends, and neighbors can walk around, spend time, and eat the absolute best fruit possible. So far I've got about 40 fig trees in containers (~30 varieties), am focusing a bit more on blackberries this year (4 varieties that were planted last year), and we also have strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, as well as a more standard annual garden with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc as well as some wild edibles: mulberries, wineberries, and black raspberries. There's a lot of interesting angles to this hobby: fruit selection, cultivation, harvesting, pest management (annoying but still interesting), landscape design, etc. Planning cycles are months at a minimum, and but more often you have to keep in mind what you want the landscape and experience to be like years from now. It makes it more enjoyable to spend time outside doing physical things when the weather is warm, and I mostly take a break from it (or switch to planning) during the winters here.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 5mo ago
    You've probably already discovered this, but in case you haven't: watch out for the black raspberries if they're in the ground. They spread at an astronomical rate and are practically unkillable after they're established. OTOH, they are delicious.
    • johnthedebs 5mo ago
      For sure! We ended up learning this the hard way. We moved into this house partly bc it had an extra ~acre of space beyond the main "yard" which was starting to turn into a forest. We cleared it of woody stuff but left some black raspberries, maybe 10 plants? 2 years later, it turned into an impenetrable ~1/4 acre thicket of mostly black raspberries with some wild blackberries and wineberries among them. We paid to have it mostly cleared again, and now we are occasionally mowing whatever is not intentionally planted or mulched.
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• ky-hy 5mo ago
  I do wrestling and BJJ, helps me cope with my stressful job and besides my joints hurting (especially fingers) from time to time, it was great for both my mental and physical health
• nate 5mo ago
  Taught myself to use a sewing machine. Then I made my own EDC wallet thing. Basically a zipper pouch that can fit a lot of things while keep them as spread out in my front pocket. I've got a version of this now in my front pocket for like 9 months: https://share.zight.com/wbu487ew https://share.zight.com/wbu487ew Yes, it's big, but it's the most comfortable from of a big wallet. It's funny though. I can't help feel the pull to try and make the hobby a business. But then it probably becomes unfun. But my brain just can't not think that way.
  • simgt 5mo ago
    Did the same two years ago, it's such an underrated skill. There's a good amount of complexity that goes into making an item without just following a pattern. I recommend going through the basics (Tock Custom has a nice energy [0]), then picking up a fairly complex pattern for a common piece of clothing. Of course there's also r/myog. [0] https://www.youtube.com/@TockCustom https://www.youtube.com/@TockCustom
    • nate 5mo ago
      Yeah, it's funny how many times I basically made the same damn thing just fine tuning a half inch wider, or seam allowance. I also can't believe how tedious cutting fabric is. Even for a tiny project like this it was such a pain in the ass. Even with nice circular cutters and mats and rulers. I'm now tempted to get a cricut 4 to make the cutting easier.
• sage76 5mo ago
  Working through PRML and creating a full solution set, albeit very slowly. https://github.com/abhimanyu-jain/PRML_Solutions https://github.com/abhimanyu-jain/PRML_Solutions
• Arch-TK 5mo ago
  I don't quite get your point about 3D printers. I spent many months redesigning, improving and rebuilding a prusa clone, not because I couldn't afford anything else, but precisely because I could afford to "waste" time and money learning and having fun. Once I felt like the printer was in a useful state, I spent some more time getting it to a point where it could print nice ABS parts for a Voron Trident. Of course I couldn't just build a Trident. That would be too easy. Before I had even finished assembling it, it already had a number of bespoke modifications that I had designed. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Have you ever _looked_ at the klipper source code? It's like a fractal of weirdness. I mean it works, and clearly the person behind it is very knowledgeable about many things. But it makes for such an enormous and fun playground for improvements and redesigns. I've redesigned the entire build system for the firmware component. I've made the host component an actual (almost) normal python package. I changed a bunch of core aspects so that it could be packages for a linux distro. I am working on making the native helper a normal python native extension library too. And I am also writing some proper test rig for it. And while I was at it, I started writing my own display software which doesn't use Wayland or X. It is going quite well actually. (Writing it in Rust) This hobby (and, really, any hobby) has as much depth and obscurity as you are willing to look for.
  • ex-aws-dude 5mo ago
    If you're just a regular joe who wants to print stuff it has definitely changed You used to have to do all that tinkering because you had no choice which is not the case anymore If your goal is just to print stuff then it doesn't really feel like a hobby, its just another tool in the workshop the same as a tablesaw or welder
    • Arch-TK 5mo ago
      My point was, if you enjoyed it when it was tinkering heavy, nothing stops you from continuing to enjoy that even if there are now plenty of printers that don't require it.
• platevoltage 5mo ago
  My thing right now is Arcade Machines. I cant get enough of them. I have a 1988 Sega Aero City cabinet that I'm doing a kind of rest-mod on.
• linsomniac 5mo ago
  I've been working on trying to help fill out the MeshCore network in our area for off-grid communications. Some of us are setting up solar powered, battery backed MeshCore nodes, they have no connection to power or Internet. You can use a small device (like a credit card or a small walkie-talkie) with a phone, or a blackberry-like device, to send/receive encrypted messages, chat on channels, or communicate on BBS-like "room servers". It's interesting for if there were some sort of disaster impacting the cell network, or for use in the back woods where you have no cell contact. But it's extremely unreliable. My coworker who is into it, he lives 2-3 miles away but we can rarely communicate because he lives in a bit of a bowl that we don't have reachability into. Meanwhile I'm regularly getting messages from 30-70 miles away no problem. It reminds me a lot of HAM radio, where there are other better ways to communicate, but if those ways broke it would be nice to have an alternative. https://meshcore.co.uk/ https://meshcore.co.uk/
  • linsomniac 5mo ago
    Part of why I'm doing it is my office has a nice, unused tower on top of it. The office itself is ultimately not that high, but the 20ft tower on top of the 3 story building helps a lot. I can JUST reach the 8ft TV antenna mast at my house, depending on tree vegetation (we'll see how much worse it gets as the trees leaf out this spring). It operates in the 900 MHz ISM band, so it can "punch through" more than WiFi can.
  • andrewrn 5mo ago
    Oh this is sooo cool. I want to try and do this in the summer too. This might be of interest to you: https://youtu.be/XTnYVh7K6xQ https://youtu.be/XTnYVh7K6xQ
    • linsomniac 5mo ago
      I had watched the first half of it a couple weeks ago and it does indeed sound pretty interesting. WiFi HaLow is a long distance capable variant of WiFi and Reticulum is a mesh network protocol. If I had more people buying into MeshCore, I might push it to doing something like this, but at the moment I think this sort of setup is beyond anything more than just some simple testing in my case.
• koliber 5mo ago
  A while back, at a company I used to work at, we did intros of new hires. This was one of the questions. One person shared that they do composting and worm farming. That was memorable. Sharing here since it's about as interesting and niche as I can imagine.
  • asdfqwertzxcv 5mo ago
    You: "So, what are some hobbies you enjoy in your free time?" Them: "I got worms." You: "I beg your pardon?" Them: "That's what I do. I got worms and wormfarms and do composting." Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMcjYD-ISv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMcjYD-ISv0
• germinalphrase 5mo ago
  I started hand carving and painting fishing lures a few years back, mostly from gathered or gleaned materials. It started as something to keep my hands busy in the Minnesota winter evenings, but there is actually quite a lot of depth to the materials/buoyancy/fluid dynamics that dictate how the lure moves in different water conditions. Each one is also a little work of art which is nice.
• ribice 5mo ago
  Two things, but mostly revolves around sports. As my job in software engineering is very sedentary, I try to remain active in my hobbies. First is gym - I go every morning before work, do a 2-mile run or 5k, depending on my mood, and then power lifting. On weekends I hike or climb. I find it very liberating when visiting places without any kind of network and it's me, nature and socialising. I've recently also started an outdoor agency (it's local to my place) - for when AI takes over my job completely: https://boa.ba/ https://boa.ba/
• vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago
  I set up trail cameras in remote areas to watch bears, mountain lions and other critters. Getting there is very hard so it keeps me in shape and I am always fascinated when I can watch new footage. once I have more time I will try classifying and trimming the videos with AI so there is a tech component too. And maybe in the long run do my own cameras that have better detection than the usual PIR sensors that trigger a lot for moving branches or leaves.
  • emyeskay 5mo ago
    How do you manage power source for the cameras, protection from natural elements, and what about internet?
    • vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago
      The cameras are sealed and a set of batteries last around 3 months. There are cameras with cell connection but that gets pretty expensive and doesn’t work in remote areas.
• udioron 5mo ago
  I am enjoying "trigbagging"/"trigpointing" in Israel (look it up!). I also built an app for this hobby (currently in open beta)
• zgougou123 5mo ago
  My niche hobbies is carving wooden spoons and I think it balance very well with any work behind a computer. It’s surprisingly deep for something that looks so simple. You can start with almost nothing: a small axe to split the wood and a knife to shape it. That’s enough to make your first spoon. From there, it can become as technical or as artistic as you want, depending on how far you go. There’s also a whole international community around it. People organize small gatherings and larger meetups where they carve together, share techniques, compare tools, and pass down very specific bits of knowledge. There is a whole series of videos about this on youtube on a channel named "zed outdoors". This hobby also had me look around for wood everywhere, when walking or driving and you can do it almost everywhere as long as you have a small knife with you. Also, using a spoon you made yourself is genuinely satisfying in a way that’s hard to explain. It changes the relationship you have with a very ordinary object. It looks like a quiet craft, but you can go very far with it.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 5mo ago
    That actually sounds like a lot of fun. I have lots of various kinds of trees ranging from very soft to extremely hard and dense (juniper!) woods. I think I'll try that sometime.
• microscoper 5mo ago
  I think a really underrated hobby is amateur Microscopy, I don't know why its not more popular. Looking at moss, pond water, microbes, tardigrades, paramecia, cells, plants, crystals, stuff around the house You can get a decent microscope for like $250 and just get a smartphone mount to take high quality pictures/videos. I feel like with astronomy/telescopes you spend a ton of money just to see a blurry blob whereas microscopes are way more bang-for-buck in terms of how much cool science stuff you can see for cheap.
  • kraftverk_ 5mo ago
    Any suggestions for a good bang for the buck microscope? I have been wanting to get one for ages
    • contingencies 5mo ago
      I can recommend the mono 'zoom tube' industrial cameras with live USB output. Very cheap in China, often expensive when resold overseas. I think a 4k one should be $100 or less. Maybe $150 including stand, ring light, etc. USB UVC control.
    • microscoper 5mo ago
      I got a Swift SW380T and have been pretty impressed with it These are some examples of the quality taken with an iPhone: https://imgur.com/a/Fvgfk7J https://imgur.com/a/Fvgfk7J When I started out I got a lot of good info from the youtube channel Microbehunter
• gunalx 5mo ago
  Ham radio, can be either really technical designing transmit protocols, antennas, SDRs or really just talking to random people as far away as you can reach without being bound to the internet.
• ronjakoi 5mo ago
  I've been growing bonsai trees for about 13 years. It doesn't have anything to do with computers, so it's a nice counterbalance to my software job. I don't really even take pictures or videos of my trees, I want to keep the subject as analog and simple as I can.
• prudnikov21 5mo ago
  My wife started reselling vintage furniture as a hobby, but now it has become her full-time job and she earns money from it. We live in the UK and went to France for shopping for the first time last weekend. Happy to answer any questions
• cameldrv 5mo ago
  Flying sailplanes/gliders. Once you get good at it, you can fly hundreds of miles (or more) by understanding the weather and figuring out where the air is going up. Lots of opportunities to nerd out. Aerodynamics, weather forecasting, remote sensing, in-flight user interfaces, strategy, communications, and also just satisfying to figure out how to coax the atmosphere to get you somewhere for free.
  • andrewrn 5mo ago
    I did a few flights in college but never got my license because there wasn’t an instructor light enough to meet weight requirements with me lol. Do you have yours? If so, how long did it take you?
    • cameldrv 5mo ago
      I did it back in college too. We had a great club that really catered to students. It was $ 14 for a 2000 ft tow, and $99/yr for a membership, that included all glider rental for the lower performance ships (Schweizers). The instructors were volunteers, but you had to wait. There was a signup sheet, and the first one to get to the field got the first flight. Weight wise I was skinny back then and it wasn’t a problem. I soloed my first full year and got my license the next year.
• skillsettler 5mo ago
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• zippyman55 5mo ago
  Artisan pizzas! Local food bank Clothing give—a-way for homeless (organized) Toastmaster public speaking Organized a youth chess club (great) Lock picking Teaching calculus, physics Exercise at the gym Helping a homeless guy get organized Nature hikes in groups Dancing Spanish lessons Chess puzzles Chess lessons Cooking Making past Home improvement Detail your messy car Take an auto class
• romanhn 5mo ago
  I haven't really had a hobby until last summer, when I took up collecting banknotes. Growing up in the USSR, I had a few imperial notes as a kid and wanted to expand my "collection", but didn't actually start in earnest until decades later. Got a few late 19th / early 20th century pre-revolution notes, and then found myself in the abyss of Russian Civil War, where every city and local municipality were printing their own money. Anyways, it's a journey without an end, and I saw an interviewee describing this hobby as a "sickness, do not start", which sort of resonated. As a history lover with appreciation for tactile aspects of history (love 100+ year old books), this scratches this itch better than anything else, while leaving me wanting more. I research and write up every banknote I acquire, and the sense of history I get from browsing my album is like nothing else. For anyone interested, here are the photos of my collection circa end of last year: https://imgur.com/a/zmCXd8l https://imgur.com/a/zmCXd8l
  • pavel_lishin 5mo ago
    That's really neat! I have some old-ish Soviet money laying around that I brought with me when I emigrated. I should really preserve it somehow.
    • romanhn 5mo ago
      I always assumed that newer banknotes are always going to be easier to obtain than older ones. But the hyperinflation of late imperial, early Soviet times means a ton of paper money was printed and is still available at cheap prices. On the other hand, Soviet money from between 1922 and before 1961 can be quite rare and sometimes very very expensive.
• anotherpaulg 5mo ago
  I’ve been building quantum photonics experiments. Repeating the Bell inequality tests that won the 2022 Nobel, quantum erasers, etc. Probably the coolest part has been automating the optomechanical equipment and optimizing physical experiments with Bayesian optimization. Similar to hyperparameter tuning in ML, but with lasers. Also, Thorlabs sells some really fun toys.
• ruslan 5mo ago
  How about demo-design ? I mean good old PC demoscnece. Try to fit something feasible into 64K.
• stavros 5mo ago
  Well I just learned all my hobbies are boring, so bah.
• hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
  Guess this doesn't count as a hobby since I switched careers, but I left software recently to attend violin making school. I'm happier than I've been in a long time. I'd encourage all "mental work" folks to engage with something physical in the 3D realm (art, cooking, gardening, etc.). I really believe humans have a special affinity for creating refined objects, and I don't think software "scratches that itch".
  • timbeccue 5mo ago
    Really cool! I split my time between cello and software so I'm decently familiar with this line of work. What inspired you to switch careers? I imagine it's not easy to get a foothold as a luthier either. Do you feel like you're taking a big risk?
    • hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
      I switched careers because the software and tech world has changed drastically since I first started, and not in ways that I enjoy or that play to my strengths. Fundamentally I enjoy being a craftsperson. That is, someone who through training and experience gets really good at something, and then uses that expertise to create new things. Software wasn't always like that, but more often than not I enjoyed it, so I count myself as really lucky. I think the business of software engineering has changed in ways that make it much less amenable to the "craftsperson ethos". It's not really that hard to start as a luthier - there are 3 violin making schools in the US and you don't really need previous experience, they teach you everything (shout out to The Violin Making School of America - violin making as a newbie can be difficult and frustrating at times but I look forward to school every single day). Since I was a software engineer for 25 years with rather inexpensive tastes generally and no children, and a working spouse, I had saved up enough to not really worry about finances (I certainly needed to downshift some of my expenses, but again, it wasn't that hard for me and in many ways I felt it was liberating - I cook a lot more now, I walk to school instead of rot in traffic, I sold my house which I always hated the maintenance, upkeep and expense of, etc.) I certainly don't have "FU money" but I'm fine being in school for a few years and then making much less than I did as a software engineer.
• aaron695 5mo ago
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• chrysoprace 5mo ago
  Some fantastic hobbies involve learning a new skill that'll serve you in the long run outside of tech, or teach you something interesting that will last after you drop the hobby. I personally love making things, especially food-related things and so I've been a hobbyist baker for about a decade. The Bread Code on GitHub was a fantastic introduction and taught me the basics to branch out and discover better baking techniques. That's the main one I've stuck with. I've also dabbled in home wine making, cheese making, preserving and pickling, and they've all given me a deeper understanding of fermentation even if I've not stuck with them as much as I did with bread. However, if I go for a wine-tasting or a beer brewery I now know what they're talking about when they go into the process of it, which is a good conversation starter if nothing else. There's also gardening, but that's mostly something my partner stuck with instead.
• desmondmonster 5mo ago
  I build Tiki Tube Amps - hifi stereos inside carved tiki heads. The tikis are carved from solid logs and hollowed out before I wire up all the circuitry inside. It's all analog vacuum-tube-driven circuits soldered point-to-point. They're really difficult to make but super fun to listen to. When I'm carving I have to plan out how the circuit will be laid out, ensure there's enough space inside for the transformers, consider grounding schemes, etc. Plus mounting components and soldering inside a cramped log is not easy. But when they're done they have such personality. No other stereo listens to music _with_ you. I love them because they combine many of my disparate interests - woodworking, tiki, electronics, soldering, music, vacuum tubes, metalworking. They're also an excuse to have friends over and throw parties. edit: here's a video where I build one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xo-TGkFvOg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xo-TGkFvOg
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • foresto 5mo ago
    Looks like there are examples here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIRDOcSQGe8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIRDOcSQGe8
  • phrotoma 5mo ago
    Hell yeah this is weird af! I love it <3
  • jrmiii 5mo ago
    Haha, I thought of you when reading this thread. Glad to see you're doing well!
• AbstractH24 5mo ago
  Does Broadway and live theater count as niche? Here in NYC it doesn’t feel like it, but we’re a world unto ourselves
• Glyptodon 5mo ago
  Just a suggestion as this isn't my hobby, but look into gem cutting. There are some tools for designing new cuts, but I think I lot more is possible than is commonly accomplished. And every gem material is different so that adds to things. Plus, the more precise the cut the better the result. And it's very math and loop driven.
  • futune 5mo ago
    This sounds really interesting! How does one get started? Is it expensive?
    • Glyptodon 5mo ago
      I think lapidary and faceting often have guilds or clubs that let you use shared equipment. I think in terms of materials gem rough material is cheap for some gemstones and expensive for others. Obviously synthetic and quartz are cheaper than natural sapphire, but there's a whole range. In terms of equipment I think the faceting machines come in different kinds with different features and are maybe circa okayish laptop prices for a used one but get much more expensive for new ones or specialty ones. I know there are at least two kinds - traditional faceting and concave. I don't know that much about how designing new cuts works, but it's definitely its own niche thing and if you look into groups that do it they'll talk about facet designs and who designed them. I think there are some books and software that folks use, but I don't know a whole lot about it.
• dboreham 5mo ago
  Looks like nobody has claimed this yet so I'll add: heavy equipment (excavators, loaders, chippers bigger than they had in "Fargo"...). Began as a solution to the "can't find a contractor to dig that hole" problem but like most things turned into an interesting rabbit hole and money pit. Interesting social side in terms of learning how to deal with mechanics, parts suppliers, welding, hydraulics, getting to know your way around a gravel pit.
  • emyeskay 5mo ago
    Interesting. Do you rent the equipment out or offer repair services?
• cspada 5mo ago
  Vermiculture - breeding worms and harvesting their casting. Outside of software development I enjoy gardening, farming/breeding worms and collecting their compost for the garden was a fun hobby I could dive into. It is a great amendment to my garden's soil and just a unique thing I can do on my own. I would like to start a small side business selling the castings, extracts, and worms one day.
• kukkeliskuu 5mo ago
  So interesting to read from other's hobbies! I believe we all have three major parts: emotional, intellectual, and physical. I have been very intellectually oriented, meaning I used my intellectual part even when it was not so useful for the thing I was doing. For example, thinking about emotions or how to do something when it is better than just feel or do. My aim has been to become more balanced human being, meaning choosing pursuits that activate those other parts as well. What has stayed with me over the years has been couples' dancing, which fits nicely with physical/emotional side. You just need to find a teacher whose apporach is not intellectual, i.e. based on steps and sequences! I am still doing it 2-5 times per week. I am also doing regularly: - yin yoga - tai chi - winterswimming I have had several other niche hobbies throughout the years, like: - fencing - improv theatre - leather works -- I ended up on a very demanding leather shoe course and made my own dancing shoes - wood crafting -- wooden spoons - traditional survival skills -- various kinds of traditional fire making skills, making traditional traps, making emergency tents, making emergency drafts, learning about plants, learning to skin/handle game etc. Something I wanted to try but did not yet: - flint knapping
• Vaslo 5mo ago
  Do you homelab or self host?
• jocelyner 5mo ago
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• techwizrd 5mo ago
  I am a big fan of fountain pens, and I think they're a great hobby.
  • unsungNovelty 5mo ago
    Finally someone said fountain pens!!! I got into it as well. Made me write more. It is great.
• dirtybirdnj 5mo ago
  I like to target a very specific species (Lake Trout) using vertical jigging techniques. You can do it on a small kayak with a simple fishfinder (histogram "graph") or a large boat with livescope (active sonar). Because of the bait available for the lakers differs from what they eat in different lakes inland and other surrounding states, they are SUPER aggressive when the fishing is good. The game is cruising around until you find marks at the depths and/or structure you are looking for. Once you find them, you drop heavy lures down on them (1-4oz) and they will rocket up sometimes 3/4 of the water column +(70ft / 21m) and absolutely crush your lure. This tactic also requires you to properly reel your lure to match the intensity of the fish. Too fast or slow and they will swim off. Sometimes you have to leave your bait motionless and wait for them to approach and then "fleeing" at the right time to trigger their agression and chase. I've had fish mess with me for 5+mins and still not bite. This tactic works in both ice fishing as well as open water fishing. I discovered this technique trying to adapt what I learned on a boat to kayak fishing. Necessity is the mother of invention, and if you want to catch fish that aren't near shore you gotta float somehow. Part of the kayak adaptation was going from 1/8, 1/4 or 1/2oz lures up to 1, 2, 3 or 4oz. You are often dealing with not only wind that pushes your boat, but also current that pulls your lure in a different direction making it difficult to see your lure on the fishfinder. There are a couple other ways to do the jigging thing but all of this has resulted in a new lure design i've been trying to figure out how to turn into a viable business. I'm also trying to figure out how to do some kind of kayak fishing guiding because there are much higher restrictions / licensing reqs on taking people out on boats https://www.verticaltubejig.com https://www.verticaltubejig.com https://youtu.be/1Z5CPrB3Cpk?si=pD1oQLb6ai7rSujg https://youtu.be/1Z5CPrB3Cpk?si=pD1oQLb6ai7rSujg
• tikhonj 5mo ago
  It's a great time to get into programming languages stuff: designing domain-specific languages, building new tools/abstractions and, especially, formal verification. If you're mathematically oriented, you can explore formalizing mathematical proofs in Lean. LLMs have really revitalized interest in these areas. AI can really help navigate the initial learning curve, can do a surprising amount of "heavy lifting" and can make tedious but useful work much easier. Do you want your little language to have a language server and nice editor-specific syntax highlighting? Do you need to write a parser with decent error messages? Do you need to prove a bunch of largely straightforward lemmas to get to the proof you actually care about? All of these things are easier (and, hopefully, more fun) than they were a few years ago. But, at the same time, there is still a lot of room for human insight and design in this process. There are a lot of areas that AI can't handle (or, at least, can't handle well) and, of course, nothing stops you from doing the fun stuff by hand even if you could hand it off to Claude. And, of course, all this PL stuff was fun before LLMs. It's even more fun now even if you don't want to use AI yourself, because more people are doing and talking about PL stuff online, and there are more tools and libraries you can use yourself.
• bobthepanda 5mo ago
  I like making transit maps in my spare time. I got into tech by liking data visualization, information design, and aesthetics in frontend. It turns out transit maps and wayfinding is one of the earliest modern attempts at information design that is standardized and legible. And it’s fun to revisit because there’s no objective truth about what kind of map is best.
• weakfish 5mo ago
  I found out something that was shocking to me about two years ago, which is that plenty of people learn to play ice hockey, of all sports, as an adult. I don’t know about you folks, but I always assumed it was one of those where if you didn’t play as a kid, you missed the boat. I didn’t even know how to skate, I learned on the fly. And this is in North Carolina! 10/10 recommend. I’m actually typing this lying on the couch after playing in a tournament in the Carolina Hurricanes arena :-)
• komali2 5mo ago
  Go out and record free sounds https://freesound.org/ https://freesound.org/ Go complete OSM quests using the "Street complete" app. Or just add stuff that's not on OSM yet using OsmAnd app. Record open street view photos using Mapillary or similar. Flesh out missing albums and metadata on musicbrainz.
• grigri907 5mo ago
  Women's pro soccer. If you're in the US, we have access to some of the world's greatest athletes with World Cup champions and Olympic gold medalists in nearly every match. Even if you're not in the US, yeah you probably do too. I never feel more connected to my community than when I'm at a game. Supporters groups are welcoming and politically/socially engaged and regularly sponsor community service events. The league is still young and fanbases are small, but it's a really critical point in history to support pro women's sports. It's definitely worth throwing some of that tech salary at. Bonus: it has none of the drama of the men's game!
• scosman 5mo ago
  Making watches. You can start simple ("modding") which is essentially assembling a movement, case, hands, dial, etc. You can keep going deeper: try to fix or build a movement gears.
• calvinmorrison 5mo ago
  NULF - we support the proliferation of utraquist ideals in all congregations. Our goal is to expand access to the eucharist for the laity. been round about 500 years or so but we're having a come back.
• bane 5mo ago
  The demoscene, while not unknown, is still quite niche amongst technologists and digital artists in the most of the world. It has a pretty thriving scene with dozens of get togethers worldwide (mostly in Europe) each year, is creative, communal, artistic, competitive, multidisciplinary, highly influential, and has a near infinite number of ways to engage with it. It has a long running internal culture, but is welcoming of outsiders willing to learn, and is kind of a "third way" to think about software and technology that can often radically change how you think about computing. It's also a recognized UNESCO recognized intangible cultural heritage in at least half a dozen countries. https://www.demoparty.net/ https://www.demoparty.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
• SpaceL10n 5mo ago
  I'm getting into old maps, books, and ephemera - mostly travel and tourism related stuff. I'm also currently researching old printing methods like lithography and letterpress. I recently purchased my first rubber brayer, some cotton-rag paper, some ink, and a 1930's letterpress plate. I hope to have my first pulls this weekend if time allows.
• jareklupinski 5mo ago
  there's a print shop nearby that does workshops, i took a short class there and i'll soon be back with some design files, hope to make a few copies of a zine about publishing a website on the internet
• remywang 5mo ago
  Read manuals to learn niche software, right now I’m reading about LyX and TeXmacs (their manuals are very well written). Lots of these more niche software can always use more love and users.
• notepad0x90 5mo ago
  autonomous weapons? Just kidding. Honestly, the best ideas out there are low-tech. Anything where as you put it is "crowded" with tech people don't want, but is also of good build. Or if you must add an LLM and a touch screen to everything, do it in a way that respects user consent and boundaries. One thing I wanted to get into but can't due to time is sub-150ms responsive LLM for use with drones and bots. Faster response time than a human brain. Multiple LLMs running on dedicated hardware to preempt and predict response for various stimuli. A drone you can't shoot-down with an arrow, and a robot you can't beat at dodgeball. Now imagine the implications of that!? But the first problem I'd like to solve is remotely piloted work. if that LLM and response-time combo works, you would be able to safely work alongside a remotely piloted robot in a hazardous construction site better than you would with a human (it could even improve safety for humans). At all times it is getting audio/sonar, lidar, infrared and visual (image processing) input and several of these really fast LLMs (not just, LLMs aren't great at certain tasks, so naturally other types of ML and predefined routines would also be running) will be preparing if/else decision trees in case a potential condition is met. Sees a ladder just leaning there? what if it randomly slips, how would it react? plan is in place under 150ms while other plans are being formulated for other things as well.
  • aquarin 5mo ago
    Interesting, I am getting exactly into this now. Did you have anything done you can share?
• deleted 5mo ago
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• acuozzo 5mo ago
  NTSC video & film (movie film - 35mm) restoration.
• ricardo_lien 5mo ago
  I'm tinkering with some electronic gadgets like esp32 to build my own things, such as auto feeder for my aquarium or an auto wattering system for my balcony garden. It's kinda hard and takes time because I'm not an electrican, but I'm really enjoy it and taking it slowly.
• MohammadKhubaib 5mo ago
  Building autonomous security systems as a 17-year-old. Turns out confidence-gated AI execution is a fascinating design problem when the stakes are real infrastructure.
• Daub 5mo ago
  > I'm looking for something novel and interesting, that isn't absolutely crowded that I could meaningfully contribute to. I would say that a hobby is a bit like a fetish in that it is derived from our interior psychology. My father’s hobby was repairing old scientific instruments, which was perfectly suited to his disposition for quantifying everything in his life, including his family (bless you dad).
• bradley13 5mo ago
  I guess I'm a dabbler - I have too many hobbies, none of which I take very seriously. Brewing, dry stone walls, math puzzles, etc. That said, if you're looking for something meaningful, consider doing something with kids. Technical or not, it doesn't matter. Could be anything from volunteering at a local sports club to teaching part-time at a trade school.
• jessehorne 5mo ago
  I got into riding, building and customizing motorcycles. The chopper scene could always use the creativity and skills of tech savy folks. Besides the mechanical skills you learn in moments which are as satisfying as they are frustrating, there's ways to utilize programming skills too...think performance/usage monitoring, trip cataloging software, social tools to connect bikers, camping planners, who knows.
• sourdoughtronic 5mo ago
  1. Lacto fermented food, you can spend plenty of time making unique food not available anywhere. Good niche to start is lacto fermented hot sauce. You can go very mild or crazy hot depending on your preference. 2. Sourdough is pretty understood, but there is hardly anything about gluten free sourdough. Basic principles are the same, you make a starter from flour and water, but you need to make it across different gluten free flour and combine them at the end. Endless possibilities with playing with ratios, toppings, etc. 3. Building meshcore / meshtastic nodes for your local area. There are kits / ready make nodes online or you can build your own. 4. Building a cyberdeck. You can start small with ready made parts, while you work towards designing your own PCB, handling battery with BMS, CADing everything, 3d printing, etc. You can specialise by only doing themed cyberdecks like only wearable or only fallout inspired. 5. Self host at home, but only rootless, distroless podman containers. 6. Automate all you can at home and integrate into home assistant. Install wleds, sync them to the music or use them as visual notification for things you care about
  • kruffalon 5mo ago
    Impeccable timing! About 2: Gluten free sourdoughs. Do you have any good starting points or resources to share? I admit I haven't gotten around to search very deeply for them yet as I just started thinking about this again yesterday but previous attempts have not given me any good information just one off recipes rather than creating a new bubbly family member to store in your fridge ;)
  • trick-or-treat 5mo ago
    You lost me at gluten-free sourdough.
  • kristjank 5mo ago
    I would appreciate more data on the gluten-free sourdough. I have a family member who has a wheat/gluten allergy and spends a tonne of money on special diet bread.
• smj-edison 5mo ago
  Not sure if you're into 40s music, but there's a little known instrument called a theatre organ. It was conceived when silent films were taking off, and theaters needed some form of background music. Paying an organist was much cheaper than hiring a whole orchestra, so a lot of theaters opted to get an organ as a cost saving measure (imagine, lol). Anyways, a few have survived, and I learned the basics of playing one. It's an absolutely incredible instrument, in terms of the sheer amount of sounds you can make with it. Someone played the star wars overture for example[1]. It also has one of the most flexible interfaces, with the tabs, second touch, and sustenuno pedal on the volume foot controls. It's inspired a lot of my own tinkering with custom sound synthesis too. [1] https://youtu.be/I2S72eajLzw https://youtu.be/I2S72eajLzw
  • khazhoux 5mo ago
    Holy cow what a workout!! Thanks for sharing this.
• pkghost 5mo ago
  Get a microscope and help me explore the role of structured water in rouleaux formation. Rouleaux formations are clumps of red blood cells, and they're bad because 90% of our circulatory system is < 1 cell wide, so clumps cannot pass. Hematological literature of past 50 years is a bit of a mess regarding mechanisms, seemingly has not considered structured water because it's recent and looks a little fringe. Structured water is known to be disrupted by WiFi, so if a clearer connection can be made between structured water and rouleaux, it could offer the simplest and most encompassing explanation for biological harm from EMF; would also make the benefits of sauna, red light therapy, grounding/earthing, and other practices more legible. I did an n=5 study on sauna and rouleaux (positive result; draft report: https://thespacebetween.xyz/p/sangre-y-sauna/ https://thespacebetween.xyz/p/sangre-y-sauna/), and some n=1 observations of myself with grounding and wifi. Blog post: https://thespacebetweenx.substack.com/p/blood-and-the-specter-of-structured https://thespacebetweenx.substack.com/p/blood-and-the-specte...
  • polishdude20 5mo ago
    What is structured water?
    • oersted 5mo ago
      Yeah okay... Surprised to see this as the top comment. > Hexagonal water, also known as gel water, structured water, cluster water,[1] H3O2 or H3O2 is a term used in a marketing scam[2][3] that claims the ability to create a certain configuration of water that is better for the body.[4] > The concept of hexagonal water clashes with several established scientific ideas. Although water clusters have been observed experimentally, they have a very short lifetime: the hydrogen bonds are continually breaking and reforming at timescales shorter than 200 femtoseconds.[7] This contradicts the hexagonal water model's claim that the particular structure of water consumed is the same structure used by the body. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_water
      • eru 5mo ago
        Though funnily enough, you can make real 'structured water' at home in your freezer. Making your ice crystals hexagonal is theoretically possible, but it's really, really hard to grow monocrystaline water ice. That might be a really interesting niche hobby, though. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA710QYxEu0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA710QYxEu0 for the latter.
• estetlinus 5mo ago
  Muay thai is my favorite hobby. Two kids later, it’s hard to find time, but I had a time where I went boxing everyday. I can really recommend material arts for those with proper work/life balance. No activity brings you more endorphines than being brutalized under controlled conditions.
  • xfce4 5mo ago
    Wrestling is my favorite. I'd like to start boxing, muay thai, or BJJ, but it's just a cost issue honestly. I feel like MMA (by extension, kickboxing and BJJ classes) has become a sort of trend, especially among teenagers/young adults, which is probably one of the reasons why classes cost so much lately. I know lots of people at my wrestling gym who do several martial arts at a time and it's got to be pretty hard on their free time. Outside of drilling and live wrestling, it's really rewarding when I get to teach beginners little movements like relaxing their arms in their stance or different ways to fake shots.
• i_am_a_squirrel 5mo ago
  build a battlebot!
• jasonjei 5mo ago
  I started learning how to make croissants. I bought a Japanese hand crank sheeter, and tried different butters and convection ovens. Definitely put me through a rabbit hole.
• fergie 5mo ago
  Started a volunteer run, drop-in, bicycle workshop a few years ago. Its still going strong- something about the vibe, the practicality, and bike maintenance being just the right level of hard. I don't run it any more, but I drop in from time to time, and it always makes me feel better.
• dhruvkar 5mo ago
  Exploring my own bio-electricity. Something is stuck within my body most of the time. Doing certain movements makes this something flow better. I feel better when this happens. Breathing in certain ways enhances this something. I feel A LOT better when this happens. Still early, exploring.
  • laxpri 5mo ago
    do you mean BCI(brain computer interface type shit) I am in this field
• eszed 5mo ago
  I play vintage baseball. It's baseball using rules and equipment from the 19th century. There's nothing else in my life that connects me to my eight-year old self, but the feeling I get running out onto the field or going up to bat is exactly what it was back in Little League. It's also a really fun community of passionate baseball nerds, and a good motivation to stay fit.
  • Klonoar 5mo ago
    Is there a breakdown of this to read? Sounds fun!
    • eszed 5mo ago
      I don't know of a good one, sadly. Run a search for "vintage baseball" and you'll get various amateur sites for various local leagues, with explanations of varying quality. If you're truly interested, swing by a game local to you and watch - and, ideally, follow the players to the pub after. It's all very analog, which is another reason I enjoy it.
    • eszed 5mo ago
      https://www.slowboring.com/p/playing-baseball-like-its-1864 https://www.slowboring.com/p/playing-baseball-like-its-1864 Ha! Here's the write-up I wish I had been published last week. I hope it isn't pay-walled for you.
• mkosmul 5mo ago
  Designing origami tessellations: https://origami.kosmulski.org/albums/tessellation-examples https://origami.kosmulski.org/albums/tessellation-examples It's lots of fun, with folding allowing you to go offline for a while. The community is very friendly, both online and with IRL meetings such as yearly conventions in many countries. Still a kind of niche within origami, so there's lots of room for novelty and explorations. And there are strong ties to mathematical and computational origami if you're into this kind of thing.
• treetalker 5mo ago
  Visiting and educating/programming for the elderly (in nursing homes or just community members) or the imprisoned is both socially beneficial and mentally and spiritually rewarding. Likewise for volunteering at hospices, food banks, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters.
• ivanjermakov 5mo ago
  Many niche sports that are great at making you spend less time sitting in front of a computer. I want to try trials[1] (both bicycle and moto), but it might be hard to find local community for such niche activities (you can always be first!) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_bike_trials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_bike_trials
• michaelhoney 5mo ago
  I built a sauna. It was fun and worthwhile and now I have a sauna! Also I am turning into Middle-Aged Synth Guy.
  • rkhassen9 5mo ago
    Oooh. Would love to see photos and plans! I’m wanting to build one too.
• sunny678 5mo ago
  In my views, you don't need an unsolved filed- you need an unexplored angle. Most "crowded" hobbies still have some gaps who build tools, document deeply, or connect ideas across domains. The average isn't in the hobby itself, but it how you approach it.
• ffwebmaster 5mo ago
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• BOOKHOUSEUK 5mo ago
  I design treasure hunts and then hide them in books. Well, I've just started to. Was obsessed by the book Masquerade, by Kit Williams as a kid. Finally decided that I could probably do that as well. So have started. Very much enjoying it.
  • kruffalon 5mo ago
    I'm just trying to understand what it is you do... Do you make some sort of map and/or list of clues that you hide between the pages of books Or Do you write books that have maps and/or clues in the text?
• eru 5mo ago
  Not exactly niche: raise some kids.
  • tjomk 5mo ago
    Not exactly a hobby either
• ffwebmaster 5mo ago
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• b3lvedere 5mo ago
  To some annoyance of my wife and kids, i like to plant all kinds of seeds in little pots to see if i can make it grow. One kind of success (for me) is a 1m25 / 50 inch tall avocado which is in a big pot now. Took some years. I am working (again) on paprika, spinach, cucumber and tomatoes . Thinking about to start with another avocado seed. I think i would like to have a small greenhouse when i’m ready to retire.
• throw_m239339 5mo ago
  Hardware synthesizers, audio engineering, DSP programming, a whole lot of problems to solve in that domain as big manufacturers sell half baked devices for a quick buck that can barely stay in sync, or gear that is inferior to the same kind of gear from 20 years ago... it's not niche though, synth popularity is exploding, it's just that manufacturers aren't making the synthesizers as powerful as they could be, despite the increase in CPU power...
• mh2753 5mo ago
  My niche hobby is exploring patterns in Islamic Geometry and trying to re create them. It is an art of creating pleasing and aesthetic geometric patterns (from intersecting circles mostly). The art form is very popular in decorating Mosques and other Islamic monuments as human/animal representation is forbidden. [Edit] The thing that I find the most fascinating is that all the complex design you see, are done with only using a pair of compass and rulers.
  • 4ggr0 5mo ago
    are you muslim yourself or did the artistry itself pique your interest? just curious about it, hope that's not a weird question.
    • mh2753 5mo ago
      I am. My interest developed after visiting a number of Mosques/Monuments and seeing the intricate designs.
      • 4ggr0 5mo ago
        stunning buildings and patterns. not religious myself but i have to admit that lots of old, religious sites are absolutely beautiful. i just looked at images of some old mosques (not really a thing where i am), and they look gorgeous :) i get why they inspire you artistically.
  • madaxe_again 5mo ago
    That’s neat - I always find the sheer depth of expression that’s managed with a handful of primitives extremely impressive. Have you ever come across Penrose tilings? If not, they might be something you’d also find interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_tiling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_tiling
  • srean 5mo ago
    Ah symmetry. I am still besotted with spirographs. Happy to meet you. Want to visit Isfahan someday. Now is not the time I guess. The standard recommendation is Alhambra of course.
• andyjohnson0 5mo ago
  I'm looking at doing some field recording. Currently reading around the subject and thinking about starter equipment.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• tempestnick 5mo ago
  So this thing would require you years, if not more before you can contribute meaningfully; and you have to build a community basically from scratch for it -- and before that you not only can't contribute, but you can't even participate. But hear me out. WhatWhenWhere (спортивное Что Где Когда in Russian. Note the "sport" part -- it's an entirely different, much more interesting game than a regular one). Doesn't ring a bell, I know, but mostly because it is almost exclusively post-USSR deal, but wouldn't it be cool if the movement becomes worldwide? You can help! The idea is simple. It's a quiz game. Think pub quiz, but formalized. You have a team of 6, you have 36 questions, and you have a minute to give an answer to each one. Sounds boring? It isn't, believe me, otherwise we wouldn't have people who have been doing it for decades -- myself included, I played my first game at about 13, and I'm over 30 now. Obviously I was doing it on and off for a while, but for last seven or so years it was pretty consistent. Last year I participated in 83 games, so about 1.5 a week. So what's the deal, and what's the appeal? How is it different from a regular pub quiz? First, almost no just trivia questions. Yeah, you can get a question about recent Oscars or Italian brainrot here or there, but rarely and still packaged properlt. Second, and most important, as I mentioned, it is more formalized. There are rules, committees, leagues, nationals, ratings and so on. But the best part -- there is a way to write questions right. There are tools to help you lead players in the right direction, help them determine what possible solutions aren't correct -- all that without revealing anything that would spoil the right answer. Number of letters in the answer, the etymology of the word -- is it Greek, is it Arab, is it French?; grammar pointers, toponyms and personal names. You can make a host read you question in a certain way as a part of the question. You can print out (a lot of games are still played offline) something and turn that into question. You can ask a question that is one word long! You can ask a question without a single word if you set it up right -- recently played one like that. There is metagame to it -- you can set something up in a question 3, to have it come into play in the question 9. There's drama -- captain of one of my teams seduced a wife of opposing team's captain. There's dickmeasuring with global leaderboards. But most importantly, there's a constant race between authors and players to outwit each other. We have a publicly available database of questions played previously -- aptly named gotquestions.online with 6+ thousand of "packets" -- a set of questions, played in one game, usually 36, but since we have 24-hour marathons, some of them are over 600 questions long. And you can see the way questions evolved over the years. It was completely normal to ask something like "What's the name of the painting of the guy with an apple for a face" in the one of the most prestigious tournaments in the late 90s. Now this wouldn't fly even in a school tournament -- because it's not a proper WWW question, it's just a question. A WWW question makes you first unravel the thought process of an author, find a direction of the answer and then try to remember the name of the guy who dug up Troy. So yeah, it would require you to have some general and sometimes pretty deep knowledge of a lot of things, but most of the time it would be just logic, communication -- there are six people solving the same problem in your team, and ability to read hidden hints. Interesting note: in my experience about half of players on any game would be tech guys and gals; almost all the rest would be split between lawyers of some description, and education professionals. Teams I currently play with consist of about 10 IT professionals (one of which also a professor of compsci), a lawyer, a psychologist, a private school headmaster, a professor of law in university (combo) and a logistics manager. So it also a great hobby for networking. To finish my ramblings, I'll translate a question from recent school tournament and walk you through the solution. It doesn't require any intricate knowledge of an original language (a lot of hints built using that) or some deep specialized knowledge from any field, just general one. On the days of the game near the Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo you can find unusual traffic jams. Where does this stadium located? Solving this will take you just a couple of steps. First, make note of the stadium name. Obviously named after someone, but most likely not from English-speaking country. Sounds Italian if anything, and the guy isn't some world-famous athlete to have a stadium named after him elsewhere but the Italy. Keep that in mind -- it's probably in Italy. Next step: unusual traffic jams. What can be so unusual about the traffic jam? Long? Mundane. Colorful? No one buys colorful cars anymore. Not cars? That might work, but what if not cars? Mopeds? Too close to cars and gives us nothing. Bikes? Not Netherlands, and still leaves too many options for a city on the table. Boats? That might work, that's unusual. Are there any Italian cities full of water? Venice would be one. And what do you know, that's the right answer. So yeah, wouldn't this be a great pastime? Join us, play the game, write your own questions, build a community and be remembered as a Person Who Brought The Game to the Anglosphere.
• wqtz 5mo ago
  My hobby involves trying to help my brother get a job. He has a disability and can only work remotely at low-skill jobs. So, I have spent years applying, starting, and doing work in virtual assistant, support desk, and social media management roles for him. I apply to contract and freelance projects on his behalf, get started with the work, and later try to hand it off to him. He will either say one of two things: "You do it yourself" or that his brain cannot process the work. I make 10-15 times more money at my regular job, so hearing him say "You do it yourself" is not fun. This hobby also includes trying to convince him that the business schemes he comes up with are not great—they're exclusively fraud-related, such as various forms of gambling and crypto stuff. Mum keeps telling me that if I do not look after him, he will likely end up in a worst situation. He is in his early 40s by the way. I did a second job as a hobby so I could just pay him the money, but that did not work because he keeps investing it in one of his schemes. So, I have to find him a job and convince him to keep it. I have a set of fake accounts that I use to apply to jobs and beg him take them on while he continuously says "you do it". This has been going on for 7 years now.
  • napolux 5mo ago
    :( Dunno which kind of disability, but at some point you being the good brother can reach a limit.
    • wqtz 5mo ago
      He has a physical disability, and he had major trauma that he is dealing with, but that was more than a decade ago. He went to therapy a few times but a couple of therapist essentially gave up on him. He said they were zoned out when he keeps talking. I have been at my "limit" for several years already. I have a day job, and at night I am making freaking "Happy Easter" posters in Canva for a print shop with 200 followers on Instagram. Everyday I am begging the guy to take over the contract while he continuously keeps saying "you do it" or that his brain does not work. He is literally doing the whole 9 yards. Even has a podcast and live streams. I am not kidding at all. I told myself maybe talking to the camera is a way for him to connect with his friends and a coping mechanism. We all carry our burdens. It sounds extremely disrespectful and dishonorable, but without the help of autistic parenting groups, I wouldn’t have lasted this long. He is my platonic autistic surrogate son.
• binarysolo 5mo ago
  Social dancer here -- without hyperbole this was a lifechanging hobby for the better, and while I haven't been able to "meaningfully contribute to" as a criteria, I am a much better person for it. I'm primarily a salsa dancer (~18 years), but spent a few years doing a buncha other dances to get an understanding of the music and movement so I'm pretty much beginner-intermediate in a buncha other dances (equiv of 1-2 year level dancer) -- Bachata, West Coast Swing, Fusion, and a splash of a ton of other dances. The best I can explain to most people is that dance is a conversation to a topic (music) through the language of motion instead of sound, and that just like rewarding conversations we can have through verbal language and text, some of the most resonant conversations can be had through connection and touch. For the subset of folks who happen to be gamers here, this is a massively multiplayer co-op music game with a very high skill curve. I started dancing due to taking a popular social dance series at college by Richard Powers, and that was the gateway for my lifelong dance practice. It allowed me to indulge in another side of collaborative music, gave me a good relationship with interpersonal connection and physical touch, and provided me with a fairly active and healthy hobby for my life. Can't say enough good things about it, just that the skill curve for beginners is high -- the first year is known as beginner's hell, but once you establish a basic vocabulary in the dance it becomes so much more artistic and creative.
  • onli 5mo ago
    Id like to recommend that even a bit more, maybe from a different perspective. I took a salsa course back in university because a girl asked me, her boyfriend wasnt interested. That lead to dancing a bit more, bachata was just part of the course especially. But also not just one course: It turned out there were tons of opportunities later to join these dance evenings organized in bars. So doing that one first step enabled so many more. I never got good, but: It is still a useful skill to even just know a little bit. To have the option to join instead of having to stay put at the table when your group decides to go dance. I wound up meeting people from latin america later, so that was way more often than was reasonable to expect. Im pretty sure having some basic ability helped me win someone over - to be able to show interest in that hobby -, and even just feeling better when showing my child now how to dance is nice. Especially when you otherwise are mainly interested in technical stuff it is a good counter point.
• hazbo 5mo ago
  Perfumery. It's something I got into a few years ago and has been a real eye-opener into the world of perfumery and our wonderful olfactory senses. Strangely, though I suspect is the case with many other hobbies, there is crossover with programming albeit somewhat abstractly. Often it's about building abstractions and reusable components. For example let's say you wish to create an apple note (typically referred to as an accord). You're not tasked with creating the scent of an actual apple but rather the illusion of apple. This is done by mixing ingredients (usually referred to as raw materials) which are generally split into two categories, synthetic and natural, where a synthetic material if often just an isolated molecule and a natural material may be an oil extracted from nature or a tincture, among other kinds. Once you have mixed the raw materials and are happy with the result, you've essentially created a formula which is a reusable component that can then be used in one or many of your creations. Aside from the creative process of making the actual perfume, you've then got a ton of applications in which to use it such as a fine fragrance, a candle, room spray, shower gel, shampoo, laundry detergent to name just a few. With new raw materials becoming available all the time there are just endless possibilities as to what you can create and it, for me, has been a lot of fun both learning the craft and creating actual perfumes that I myself now wear.
• Natone 5mo ago
  My hobby is growing exotic plants, things like rare tropicals. It’s fun, hands-on, and there’s plenty of room to experiment and try new things.
• n2linux 5mo ago
  Watchmaker in training here - after 20 years in startups I am now in my first semester of watchmaking school. It is one of the hardest things I've done in my 47 years, and I am loving every minute of it. It is training my brain, hands, and eyes to see and do things I never thought possible. Repairing a watch feels similar to dealing with code to me: - observing to see how/why certain watch components/chunks of code work and interact with each other - analyzing performance - disassembling and cleaning parts/"cleaning" code - troubleshooting why something isn't working - repairing faults caused by the previous watchmaker/developer I highly recommend it to anyone needing something physical to do after a day spent staring at a screen. Stare at a watch instead!
  • tjomk 5mo ago
    Are you going there as a hobby or plan to work as a watch repairman/watchmaker? if the latter, how big is the market these days for analog watches? I feel like everyone is wearing electronic watches. I have been thinking of also learning horology as an entry to building automata machines
• best4shipping 5mo ago
  What is barrel shipping nigeria?
• EricEspen 5mo ago
  sailing. you will learn how to be self resilient, to be an electric, plumber, painter, weather and experience (sometimes under your nose if near water) most beautiful places
• LouDNL 5mo ago
  2 years ago I wanted an easy way to listen to commodore 64 sid tunes on my computer without the need of powering on my c64 everytime but with the benefits of having real sid chips. After doing some research I concluded that the available uab hardware sid boards were either unavailable or outdated. This started my journey to create my own usb board, USBSID-Pico. Currently at version 1.3 of the pcb with an improved version and pro version in development. The board is supported in various commodore 64 emulators, sid trackers and web players. It also supports midi (still in active development) and even has an onboard embedded emulator. As far as I know there are now approximately 300+ boards in the hands of enthusiasts. Ranging from users, chiptunes lovers, demo creators to musicians. The board and it's firmware are open source, and the board is available at PCBWay and via my Tindie. Just yesterday I shipped 11 new boards to new owners across the globe. From personal need to niche hobby supplying fun to other enthusiasts in just 2 years
• Folcon 5mo ago
  I've been building small games on and off over the last decade Started taking it a bit more seriously over the last 3 months and I've started building a specific game that I'm slowly building out It's a top down ARPG called Mechstain where the player creates and pilots voxel based mechs Instead of traditional gear, your mech has a physical voxel footprint that you the player have to fit weapons and components inside Your job is to manage space, power and mass, what you can fit and power directly becomes your stats and abilities, essentially a bin packing problem Basically take Diablo 2 and remix it with Kerbal Space Program, still fleshing out the various systems, but I'm really enjoying the process of slowly designing systems, iterating on it and fleshing it out It's quite fun taking thoughts I've been noodling on for years and trying to figure out if they synergise with what I'm looking at and do they provide interesting player decisions Recently onboarded a 3d artist and it's really making things look a lot better If anyone has experience lighting this sort of game, I'd love to talk to them, still trying to figure that out =)
• SJMosley 5mo ago
  Started pottery (if that's niche anymore) about 4 years ago, my wife wanted to take a class together. Now I'm a teacher! Which is a hobby in itself, I have learned so much from having to teach and explain it. Combine it with some non-niche hobbies my son and I enjoy together and boom. https://imgur.com/a/aJqvVVw https://imgur.com/a/aJqvVVw
• le-mark 5mo ago
  Jogging isn’t niche, but after being sedentary for ten years I had to start doing something. When I was young I could run a 7 minute mile which was nothing to brag about. Now at 50+ that seems like an impossibility. I’ve been doing walk/jog intervals for almost a year and I’m getting better, and focusing on not blowing out my knees.
• rendx 5mo ago
  What I rarely read about as hobby but I really enjoy is touch! Taking massage/therapy classes, like lomi-lomi, craniosacral, acupressure, shiatsu, etc. -- plenty of great courses available. They're typically aimed at professionals since it is "under-explored" as a hobby, but well worth it as self experience. Not only the receiving but also the giving during the training(s), plus all the chances to give nice touch experiences to your friends and family! How many bodies have you deeply touched in your life? Another niche hobby of mine is constellations groups: you meet with others to simulate and explore a problem somebody within the group is facing; a bit like impro theatre but real-life issues. Very interesting and doesn't require any skills, you just "do". I often just go and participate as a viewer: Better than cinema! I also like NVC (non-violent communication) classes and trainings. It's a hobby but a bit more effort, you spend time with other likeminded people, learn something about the inner functioning of others, plus it improves my communication and conflict skills, both in personal and business areas.
  • elric 5mo ago
    I hadn't even considered massage as a potential hobby. I love getting massages, but they're not cheap. Taking a course might be a good hack to get cheap massages..
    • rendx 5mo ago
      Good massage classes cost quite a bit of money. I still find it well worth it on a lot of levels, even if you're just interested in the receiving (for now)! I would compare it more to other hobbies, which often do cost substantial amounts of money (material, travel, equipment, club fees, etc -- none of which you need for this). In multi-session trainings, it is often suggested or sometimes even required to meet with other participants to exercise between the official trainings. Even in cases where that's not officially part of the trainings, I want to encourage you to speak up and announce you're willing to provide your body to others for their training (who may be there for a professional career) -- in fact it's not like you're "asking for a free massage", you are offering a very valuable contribution, since you can give them feedback based on what you both learned in class, which is something other people they know will not be able to do. Also, it takes a bit of courage to ask friends, especially at the beginning, and hesitancy to touch friends in new ways; there's something about being in class together that makes it easier to accept touching the other; it's a 'professional' relationship.
• donamok 5mo ago
  I have a collection of years on the facades of the buildings. https://year-on-facade.uk/ https://year-on-facade.uk/ With focus on unique years rather than number of buildings. Still quite a few to find (and visit) but I consider this to be an almost perfect collection.
• misja111 5mo ago
  I'm playing backgammon. Not just online, but live tournaments as well. What I like about it: it's one of those games that are easy to learn but difficult to master. Modern analyzing tools can detect your errors and weaknesses, providing you with eternal possibilities to improve. But also, I like the excitement of the live tournaments, which like poker, have money prizes and an entry fee. They are all over the world and I especially like visiting tournaments in places which I otherwise wouldn't visit. Plus after a while you'll make friends in the tournament circuit, so it becomes a social thing as well.
• fsflover 5mo ago
  Qubes OS is a niche security-oriented operating system that runs everything in VMs with about 70k users [0]. Even less users contribute with amazing things like running in RAM [1] or using very minimal VMs with Debian and Fedora [3] to minimize the attack surface and bloat. [0] https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/introduction/statistics.html https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/introduction/statistics.h... [1] https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/qubes-os-live-mode-dom0-in-ram-non-persistent-boot-ram-wipe-protection-against-forensics-tails-mode-hardening-dom0-root-read-only-paranoid-security-ephemeral-encryption/38868/ https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/qubes-os-live-mode-dom0-in-ram-... [2] https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-i-learned-to-love-liteqube-and-why-you-should-too-even-if-you-have-enough-ram/18485 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-i-learned-to-love-liteqube-...
• merlin1de 5mo ago
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• wujiahua 5mo ago
  Visit places steeped in history and imagine how people left their mark on these places in the past.
• n8nmarkets 5mo ago
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• stanko 5mo ago
  Maybe not that niche for this group, but I love pen plotting. I use code to create drawings and then pen plot them on paper [0]. The ability to bring something digital into the physical world is really fulfilling for me and makes the process much more tangible. I have an Axidraw A3, and it might be the best purchase I ever made. In the last few months I haven't done much as I'm currently obsessed by gamedev. But now when you reminded me, I want to plot a few pieces I started last year and never finished. [0] https://muffinman.io/art/ https://muffinman.io/art/
  • tjomk 5mo ago
    I love it. Just recently got my first plotter, and it is so much fun. Sadly though this still keeps me near computer.
• klooney 5mo ago
  Sailing. Good to focus your eyes on something not glowing, the cold and wet makes you feel really alive. There's a bottomless pit of cheap old boats and maintenance to learn about- or if you like buying toys, the sky is the limit. I like racing dingies, adds a social aspect, but ymmv.
• asaskevich 5mo ago
  My hobbies are not niche in themselves; however, they are giving me the chance to distract myself from IT and to do something that inspires me and gives me some skills. My philosophy around hobbies is that every learned skill can be reused in different areas. So, I'm trying to: - taking photos. I have photography equipment and some experience in nature/portrait photography; - learning languages. Not only mainstream languages like English (I'm not a native English speaker), but languages like Latin or Interslavic; - biking and running. Just get a good health habit to clear your mind and improve your overall state after a long working day; - playing musical instruments. I have a ukulele, guitar, and keyboard so I'm trying to make my own music; - collecting antique items. For that, on every trip I'm trying to visit flea markets, where sometimes I find interesting items. - vinyl music. That hobby is connected with the previous one; - playing Go. I found this game much more interesting than Chess; - bartending. Not only classical cocktails but some random mixes; Sailing, archery are some I'm looking into at this moment.
• joshmoody24 5mo ago
  Antkeeping, rockhounding, and flint knapping are things I've gotten into recently. Antkeeping and rockhounding in particular have a ton of room for citizen science. Lots of undiscovered stuff out there.
• dooku0721 5mo ago
  Naval once said his best engineers all do some form of art. So I am playing with AI art, and making tools for making the iteration fast and closed-loop.
  • dooku0721 5mo ago
    It has to be Git-like control flow for us builders. My project page, if you are interested in playing around. https://github.com/charismaticchiu/muse https://github.com/charismaticchiu/muse
• evilbob93 5mo ago
  I melt milk jugs and other HDPE plastics into musical claves and drum sticks as an answer to "recycling plastic is kind of bs". It melts at 350 degrees and can be done in a toaster oven in the garage or even the kitchen with proper ventilation. The smell isn't that bad, nothing like if you dropped plastic in a fire. I've also made some sticks from braiding plastic grocery bags which are also often made of HDPE (#2) type plastic.
  • account42 5mo ago
    I'd be worried about coating your lungs with aerosolized plastic, not with what exactly it smells like.
• syngrog66 5mo ago
  wargaming designing improvements to democracy & taxation
• migarka96 5mo ago
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• pigeons 5mo ago
  Magnet fishing
• narag 5mo ago
  I glanced at this question at work, now reading it to find interesting ideas, but also want to share something: six months ago I bought a motorcycle. It was a no-brainer, commuting time is now half compared to the subway and after decades it's invigorating to be back to two wheels, not only physically but also mentally. Maybe not very niche, but you'll quickly find there are many sub-cultures around biking (some of them very friendly) and an endless variety of interesting tech: engines, suspensions, electronics, injection mapping, IMUs, gear materials, GPS... routing is its own rabbit hole. It's not necessarily very expensive. A middleweight bike that will take you everywhere can be bought for less than 10k. Add a grand more for gear and insurance.
• ferguess_k 5mo ago
  I used to do some fossil digging in an abandoned brick factory, where people have open access to layers and layers of shale rock rich of invertebrate animals. I thought it could be a useful hobby to teach my son about Geology in general and get him moving. Sadly I dropped it when he was 3 because I really did not have the time and energy to pursuit it frequently. I also thought about attending a few Geology classes in local universities but that probably needs to wait until he grows up. The other hobby I have is to read the source code of legacy kernels such as Linux kernel 1.0, figure out a very early version of a component (e.g. VFS) and tried to trace how it evolves. I completed the MIT xv6 labs for preparation and just started this journey. Not sure what I can get from it, but it is fun to figure out things -- AND I can label myself as a "kernel programmer" to give myself a bit of self-recognition.
• gilhyun 5mo ago
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• KaiLetov 5mo ago
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• bhu1st 5mo ago
  Chess engine is already a solved problem, yes, but Baghchal would love some attention. I have been maintaining https://www.baghchal.net https://www.baghchal.net for more than a decade now and I dream of the day I could integrate Stockfish like Engine for Baghchal one day. I haven't gotten chance to dive deep into this myself because of work and personal reasons but it could be a great niche to explore since you mentioned about Chess. Look into it. Also, check this: https://github.com/bhu1st/obx https://github.com/bhu1st/obx