45 ms·

Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

370 points by kurtdev 3y ago

I thought this post[1] from exactly a year ago was a nice type of post and so to celebrate it I thought I would start another to show the diverse interest of the HN community. Cheers! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488891 (thanks mckirk!)

luke7711 3y ago
1. Astronomy 2. Chess 3. Programming
kurtdev 3y ago
I'm gonna start myself with something I got into again recently. I got back into game development as a hobby a couple of weeks ago (sadly just after Ludum Dare ended) and have since been learning Godot to make the switch away from Unity permanently. So far its ease of use has been a real game changer for me, although I miss having my IDE on a different screen. The goal is to know Godot well enough to take part in the next Ludum Dare next year.
- lcall 3y ago
  A relative of mine teaches (free and paid) online courses for Godot: https://www.google.com/search?hl=eo&gbv=1&q=heartbeast+%2Bsite%3Anews.ycombinator.com&oq=&aqs= https://www.google.com/search?hl=eo&gbv=1&q=heartbeast+%2Bsi... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrHQNOyU1q6BFEfkNq2CYMA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrHQNOyU1q6BFEfkNq2CYMA
  - kurtdev 3y ago
    Oh nice, didn't realize HeartBeast switched to Godot. When I first got into game dev with GameMaker Studio about 8 years ago I used to watch his videos a lot to learn, I guess now I'm gonna repeat that cycle for a different engine. Thanks for reminding me :)
  - cgkou 3y ago
    I watched the old RPG series using GameMaker and it’s one of the reasons I picked CS at university. Man it was so fun and rewarding.
user_7832 3y ago
I’ve been reading up on diy speakers, with the eventual goal to make an excellent sounding pair myself. Ever heard a pair of speakers that didn’t sound like hearing a recording of an instrument, but rather hearing the instrument itself? Me neither, but it’s apparently possible. The DIY speaker/audio hobby is highly specific but also fortunately has a lot of informative available online. I’d recommend diyaudio.com and partsexpressforums for anyone interested, I have more resources if curious.
- abakker 3y ago
  when you make them, be sure to post here about what you find out. It feels to me like that community does a lot of Q&A, but not a lot of build logs (Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places?) Also, if near Boulder, CO, I've got some CNCs if that helps you build stuff.
  - user_7832 3y ago
    Thanks, that's very kind of you but unfortunately I live in the Netherlands haha. I'll almost certainly post my speakers when I make them, though probably on diyaudio or reddit. Re build logs, I have seen quite a few on diyaudio.com as well as reddit's r/diyaudio and r/diysound (which I frequent much more often). Are you more curious/interested in the enclosure hardware (woodworking) side or the driver selection and crossover building side? Because if you're curious about learning to make crossovers there are a few threads specific to that on diyaudio.com.
    - linsomniac 3y ago
      I'm in Fort Collins, I'll be right over! :-)
      - abakker 3y ago
        Happy to connect - email in my profile.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
codingclaws 3y ago
Piano. I am doing Czerny op 599.
- kashunstva 3y ago
  School of Velocity next! The wealth of Czerny exercises is so much more engaging than the Hanon that have been inflicted unthinkingly on students for generations. Check out the Dohnanyi exercises for something wild and different; the later ones, not the first ones that focus on (potentially harmful) finger isolation.
  - codingclaws 3y ago
    Thank you! I did the Hanon exercises years ago and they were okay, but the Czerny 599 exercises are amazing! I love them! They practically sound like songs! I will check out school of velocity and Dohnanyi.
lindseyconcerns 3y ago
[dead]
skor 3y ago
I write code that makes live music and/or controls hardware instruments. Latest recording https://lowveld.bandcamp.com/album/antarctica-sixteen-ninety-two-120-880 https://lowveld.bandcamp.com/album/antarctica-sixteen-ninety... Styles are quite varied (imho) within the experimental and ambient genres. Managed to get some of these pieces in a few short films, they tend to be horror/thriller type. Slow listening.
solardev 3y ago
There is a new show on HBO called Scavengers Reign, and it's become my favorite scifi story ever. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21056886/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21056886/ It's kinda like watching Planet Earth about another ecosystem, with a strong focus on judgment-free ecology (ie there isn't good and evil, just different flora and fauna and otherwise interacting both with their normal food webs and with human outsiders). It really tickles the environmental science geek in me. There's such a wonderful assortment of predators, prey, symbiotes, diseases, treatments, and thoughtful little touches everywhere. Beautiful art too. ------ That aside, I can't stop thinking about how much fun it is to throw people off cliffs in Baldur's Gate 3. https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199138390397/recommended/1086940/ https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199138390397/recomm... Simple pleasures, man.
- dilawar 3y ago
  It is surprising very creative. Somehow it reminds me of manga mushishi through there is hardly any obvious overlap
- izzydata 3y ago
  I'm really enjoying Scavengers Reign, but I can't help but feel like the local biology is a bit too absurdist. Or the amount of consistently lucky moves some of the characters would had to make to discover some weird quirk of that alien life. They had been there for maybe weeks or months, but somehow discovered that if you climb inside of the belly of this particular creature and twist some of his internal organs that it will release a light producing egg when you hit them against a hard surface? Or that if you attach this tentacle sac to your face that you won't inhale some fungus gas. Very creative, but a bit hard to believe. Perhaps the timescale of how long they were stranded there could have been increased a little bit.
  - leoqa 3y ago
    That particular character is a biologist before the crash, perhaps prior knowledge since the planet has been inhabited before.
  - Caligatio 3y ago
gwnywg 3y ago
I'm recently passionate about motivation. I'm on the lookout for ways to keep me motivated. I always thought burnout is not my problem, until it hit me and now I'm looking for cure.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  If you're open to it, I'd recommend trying the Wim Hof technique. The combination of controlled hyperventilation followed by cold water exposure is something like a reset button. Here's a link [0] - just don't do the breathing exercises anywhere that passing out could cause problems; like when driving, in water, etc. 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybOi4hjZFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybOi4hjZFQ
  - gwnywg 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing! Controlling my breathing helps me a lot to reduce anxiety, but I found it's not getting me back into motivation mood I used to have.. To stay motivated always seemed to be such basic thing- part of my reality, until it stopped and I have to consciously build it.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      That sounds like a deeper issue. I am not a motivational expert, though I've had more experience than I'd like developing coping strategies for low motivation. Consider that perhaps being motivated automatically isn't always the best thing. Auto-motivation can make it harder to choose a good and worthwhile direction, which motivates you on its own merits to something above self-interest. Maybe you could afford to let your self-motivation lie fallow for a while, if that's what you need to do. Put your brain in a jar, and do something helpful and physical. Maybe none of this applies to your situation? I do find it an interesting topic as well though.
- lcall 3y ago
  There have been a number of discussions on HN about this, with some interesting comments. Maybe: https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=579886644&hl=eo&gbv=1&q=%2Blcall+%2Bmotivation+%2Bsite%3Anews.ycombinator.com&oq=&aqs= https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=579886644&hl=eo&gbv=1&... In this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23550758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23550758 ... i posted links to other HN discussions on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553508
cyanf 3y ago
Elixir. The community is nice and welcoming. Everyone is passionate about the project, you can feel the care that’s being poured into the ecosystem.
- FFP999 3y ago
  Worked for several years in that language--overall a very good experience.
abakker 3y ago
I'm currently passionate about trying to understand the importance of young's modulus in machine design, and whether it can be "worked around" with different materials that are easier to work with.
- kragen 3y ago
  you mean like concrete where the sand is silicon carbide 'epoxy granite' is a thing
  - abakker 3y ago
    right now, I'm trying to figure out if fabricated steel with the right design can accomplish a functional analog of what cast iron can. the objective is to leverage flat pack laser cut pieces instead of castings.
    - kragen 3y ago
      it can certainly be equally rigid if that's what you're after; they have very close to the same young's modulus. thermal stability and vibration absorption is more challenging i think castings often come out closer to net shape than weldments and thus need less final machining, but i could have that backwards. they both shrink as they cool, but weldments don't need draft
      - abakker 3y ago
        Weldments have less shrinkage/distortion than castings, but not none. In machine tool applications, it's the vibration damping that everyone cares about, but my ultimate objective will be to find out whether it matters if you engineer in sufficient rigidity. Theoretically, for the vibrations to be an issue you'd need to get some resonance, so if you tune that out in the design spec it should be something that can be ignored. Nothing like empirical testing, though.
        kragen 3y ago
bayesianbot 3y ago
I've been collecting data from my phone and some different "sensors" (food delivery orders, bank payments, Activity Watch statistics, I'm adding a video camera soon. For phone about every sensor I have in my phone like ambient light, wifi APs, GPS, rotation, steps, when it was last unlocked, what app is in use, what app / artist is playing media etc.) and I'm using ML to predict activities I'm currently doing. I guess the end goal is to automate my diary writing to GPT as a joke.. Started as a small project on wanting to learn C# better and being interested about how much sensors collect information about us and how we could analyze that, but it really got out of hand. I've been working on it for a ~month (with some breaks), sometimes all day, built a lot of tooling (like webassembly & android app to tag current activities for ML training data) and analysis things for it and am nearing a burnout point :P but been fun and I've definitely learned a lot about C# and ML.
- politelemon 3y ago
  That's quite interesting. What form is the collection being fed in to the ml, is it sentences that gpt would understand or more tabular
  - bayesianbot 3y ago
    It's just hundreds of variables of data and some calculated features - basically from current point in time and some configurable points in history + some aggregated history data, fed to ML.NET FastTree / FastForest. I think LSTM / some Python frameworks could have been better, but learning C# better was one of the main reasons so ML.NET algorithms it is. I get quite reasonable predictions, though I need to do some more to get better at predicting the end of an activity because of some limitations how I'm giving the data to avoid overfitting. GPT is just going to be last step of the process, being fed todays actions and we'll see if I can get it to blurt out anything interesting based on it. I just checked my manual tags in the training database and I've been on this for 197 hours and 37 minutes since since 12th of October. No wonder I feel like I need a break..
- bruceb 3y ago
  If you post about this project, have a github, etc. Would follow your progress.
FFP999 3y ago
Writing some libraries in a new language I've gotten excited about, and training to bench press 300+ pounds by the end of the year.
mslate 3y ago
Bicycles. They are so radically inexpensive to acquire & service. Why did I ever stop riding at 18?
- solarpunk 3y ago
  i love my bike too!
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Rode the Katy Trail a few weeks back. I loved it but after 6 days on the saddle my ass hurt so much that I'm trying out recumbent trikes right now. (Got a used one off Craigslist.)
  - BozeWolf 3y ago
    A bike fit and a correctly sized and setup bike with the right saddle, correctly sized frame and handlebars might work as well. only a 0.5cm change in saddle position can greatly improve comfort already. A bike fit and correctly setup bike helped me a lot, especially on longer (100km+) rides.
- jhot 3y ago
  I love bikes and was going to comment about them so I'll just tack on to your comment. Built a single speed out of a cheap, used frame with some spare or cheap parts and it has been going strong with little maintenance for 14 years. Also have a long-tail cargo ebike that I got this summer and already have over 500 miles on it. It can be faster than driving a lot of times on top of being more fun for me and my kids. And to top it off a full suspension mountain bike (2018 YT Jeffsy) which I get out on about twice a week and is really great for my physical/mental state, and has a huge skill ceiling so there will always be something to strive to get better at. Just got back from a weekend off riding an area with huge granite boulders and slabs with a few friends. Really fun to attempt features that made us a little uncomfortable and build skills/confidence.
  - sasaf5 3y ago
    In my university, one Saturday per year they would allow us to take whatever we wanted from the abandoned bikes junkyard. I can't remember having more fun. Just bring a box of tools and some new chains and cables and build bikes the whole day.
politelemon 3y ago
Games. I've been forcing myself into productivity for too long because that is the thing to do. I recently built a gaming pc, picked some jrpgs, and I'm having a blast. There are entire franchises and worlds for the exploring. There are amazing rich stories and history and beautiful soundtracks that I'm living through right now. My wishlist grows by the day as I discover new tales.
- jjice 3y ago
  What are your favorite RPGs at the moment? New or old? I feel like RPGs have been holding strong since the Super Nintendo and there so many hours of incredible gameplay to be had.
  - politelemon 3y ago
    Right now the Trails series (trails in the sky, trails of cold steel)... I think it's an old and new series isn't it? Also a surprise like was Blue Reflection, if you watch its trailer it doesn't even look too dynamic but it was great fun.
  - artimaeis 3y ago
    I know it's got a lot of hype at the moment, but Baldur's Gate 3 really is something special. I never played the first 2 games, but I have played D&D regularly for some 16 years now and it's one of the best narrative adventures I've ever had. I'm planning on going back and playing the Divinity: Original Sin games that Larian made before it. I hear they're fantastic as well.
    - D13Fd 3y ago
      > I'm planning on going back and playing the Divinity: Original Sin games that Larian made before it. I hear they're fantastic as well. They are. I'd play them in order -- the combat mechanics of DOS1 are kind of tough to swallow after the improvements in DOS2. The DOS1 plot is also a bit thin, and you have to appreciate their brand of humor. But they are both great.
    - 3y ago
surprisetalk 3y ago
Obsessed with quite a few things right now: • diving into plant law; writing a series on plants and property • research clamping mechanisms and jigs for woodworking with handtools • sadly smitten with all the genai advancements • plotting multiple "chaos for social good" projects • trying to figure out therapists can be so attuned to feelings while staying neutral • promoting tiny blogs and the "small web": https://blogs.hn https://blogs.hn
- FFP999 3y ago
  I don't know what "chaos for social good" is supposed to be, but I am intrigued. Would you care to expand on that?
  - surprisetalk 3y ago
    I'm producing tools for the following: • converting gendered restrooms to all-gender restrooms (with or without permission) • easy legislative templates and meetups for removing billboards from your municipality • low-powered and repairable permacomputing hardware designs • tools for improving home ventilation • software for retrofitting walkable infrastructure into existing towns and cities
    - FFP999 3y ago
      Neat.
    - lcall 3y ago
      > converting gendered restrooms to all-gender restrooms (with or without permission) I believe, for a long list of reasons, that families with stably married mother/father are the best way to preserve humanity and that they are most stable without wandering eyes. Avoiding having wandering eyes, or wandering loyalties, in turn, is helped when we make it easier for people to manage and direct sexual attraction to keep it within marriage, rather than otherwise. This includes avoiding porn or behaviors that are like porn to others. I want to keep my thoughts clean and faithful to my wife. I hope others can make that easier and less work, rather than often putting things in my sight that make it be more work.
solarpunk 3y ago
I am crazy about bare metal kubernetes clusters and gitops. I'm trying to document the process of setting one up in such a way that I can do a teach in for my friends at my local hackerspace. In the process I've determined I would like to write my own k8s enabled application (likely a daemonset for checking for a specific hardware device and configuration on each bare metal node, and storing that data in a way for k8s to use and reference later). I've been working on this any free time I get, since September, each weekend sees a flurry of activity then I spend the week daydreaming about it.
- rustyboy 3y ago
  do you have any reading material on that? I just finished a two month deep dive into kubernetes for work and i'm really curious on what's next.
  - solarpunk 3y ago
    nothing worth sharing yet, just got things up and running last week after much analysis paralysis.
gws 3y ago
Elden Ring. Need to finish this mofo to be able to focus on anything else. It truly is a masterpiece.
hobbescotch 3y ago
Modelling natural gas consumption. I don’t think it’ll be actually useful and certainly not as nuanced as professional models for trading, but adding the necessary data to my data warehouse and then working on it has been a fun experience.
- bethekind 3y ago
  Natural gas consumption on a macro level? How are you modeling?
denvaar 3y ago
Learning about Information Theory. It’s pushing me out of my comfort zone. For example, leading me to improve my math skills in order to understand some of the concepts and notations that are used in research papers. Also gives me some context into learning C, a language which I consider low-level as a web developer, and it’s been fun to have to think about things like memory management, along with other things I don’t generally need to consider. It gives me an appreciation for when I’m writing high level code like Elixir or JS, etc. Compression, which I’d say is an application of information theory is just really interesting to learn about for some reason.
- playing_colours 3y ago
  What sources for learning do you use?
  - denvaar 3y ago
    Here's a few - Book called Compact Data Structures by Gonzalo Navarro https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/compact-data-structures/68A5983E6F1176181291E235D0B7EB44 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/compact-data-structures... - Ben Langmead's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@BenLangmead https://www.youtube.com/@BenLangmead - MIT Open Courseware https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-02-introduction-to-eecs-ii-digital-communication-systems-fall-2012/video_galleries/lecture-videos/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-02-introduction-to-eecs-ii-dig... - Stanford lectures https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv_7iO_xlL0Kz2nU05COpINjU8C0UPICA https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv_7iO_xlL0Kz2nU05COp...
monero-xmr 3y ago
With the latest crypto rally, yield farm rates have skyrocketed. Getting 10 to 30% APY on stablecoins (i.e. no risk of loss in value as they are USD-matching coins). Making money hand over fist for clicking buttons.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  I've been a crypto_saver for over a decade; yet still I downvoted your ridiculousness [parent comment]. Please don't be so wreckless in your passion(s). And: HODL
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    I've been yield farming for years, this is not a new thing.
    - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
      Great username. Currently heating my personal home primarily with xmr-rig. I have a heatpump, but why?! /s
- Johanx64 3y ago
  How in the loving gods earth are you getting 10% to 30% interest rate without risk? None of the stable coins have gone through a full thorough audit done by a reputable company, thus it's safe to assume they are not fully 1:1 backed and thus it's a ticking time bomb. 30% interest rate sounds like a pyramid scheme. If something sounds like a scam, then it probably is a scam, since it's crypto, then it's most certainly a scam
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    Not sure if you are someone who just wants to shit on stuff without ever learning, this is HN so 90% chance that's the case. But on the offchance you are actually curious: Tokens should be viewed like stock. The team behind the token has a pool to fund their network / app. Different products in the decentralised finance space (DeFi) incentive usage by handing out their tokens (stock) to people who provide value to their product. In DeFi this is usually by becoming a liquidity provider (LP), providing your own assets to their protocol in return for a fee and incentives. This makes logical sense for the team, because the most common metric for valuing an app is "total value locked" (TVL). The more TVL an app or network has, the more usage and value it has, which typically translates into increased value for their token. There are way too many protocols to list. Checkout Velodrome as an example of a very high APY protocol https://app.velodrome.finance/liquidity?sort=apr&asc=false https://app.velodrome.finance/liquidity?sort=apr&asc=false
nevertoolate 3y ago
Teaching.
arjun_krishna1 3y ago
Making money
dncornholio 3y ago
Modeling!! Military tanks and airplanes, Gundam and now Warhammer. Learning a lot painting techniques. Also building "drones". I create a glider and slap some propellors on it, then race it once a month in a local club.
agentultra 3y ago
Re-capping and restoring an RCA SRT-301 reel-to-reel tape machine. Building a modular synth from scratch.
aeonik 3y ago
I'm obsessed with interfaces at the moment. How do humans interface with computers and data, from control to visual feedback. How humans interface with music, perform it, read it, store it. How do birds interface with tones and rhythm? How software interfaces with other software and hardware. How humans interface with the world via symbols. I've been reading about Semiotics a bit, and find the field fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics?wprov=sfla1 Birdsong as code: https://youtu.be/OCYU0LtqRH0?si=4DwOKC3oZ6vE-w-y https://youtu.be/OCYU0LtqRH0?si=4DwOKC3oZ6vE-w-y
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  Howdy fellow intellectual/addict! Currently I'm reading Michael Pollen's "Botany of Desire" about how how plants interface/manipulate humans (spec: Apple, Orhid, Marijuana, Potatoe). There is a salacious passage on sexual reproduction strategies, involving bees ("flying penises") and this plant that "play resists" the bees entering — and then author Pollen ends his description of this interface by suggesting: many people might see this as the bee penetrating the coy defences of the flower, but in fact it is the flower manipulating bees. I'm gonna give you the first recommendation free, but the next one'll cost'ya =D
- interestica 3y ago
  For my masters I proposed that you could treat urban spaces as one giant interface (and that interface would appear different to different users). After stepping away from it for a while, I've gotten back into it. My main interest is information design for wayfinding, transit, and urban navigation. It's such a human problem and it's so fascinating. Though he never called it such, a lot of it intersects with Donald Norman's work that he describes in "The Design of Everyday Things". Even the objects we intereact with are interfaces. Drop me a line if you're looking to chat about it all.
  - lambdaloop 3y ago
    I'm not OP, but I've been interested in something like this, but from the perspective of memory systems within oral cultures. I'd love to talk more! I wonder if you know (and maybe have thoughts about) the arrangement of ancient Cusco, set up to be possible to navigate without any written directions (as the Inca effectively functioned without a writing system). From Lynn Kelly's Memory Code: > The Inca turned their major city, Cusco, into a massive memory space, the details of which were documented by the colonising Spanish. Radiating from the Coricancha temple in the centre were over 40 pilgrimage pathways known as ceques. The ceques divided the land into wedge-shaped political, agricultural and irrigation zones, each assigned to a specific kinship group. It is still unclear the degree to which the ceques were physical paths and how much they were purely imagined. To form a city-sized memory space, it does not matter as long as the pathways could be followed in the minds of the users. I've been thinking about how memory intersects with navigation, and how both of these influence how we interpret the world.
not-my-account 3y ago
I’ve been teaching myself abstract algebra, which has been really great! I’ve also now gotten to the point in the book where I’d like to discuss with other people.
- nhatcher 3y ago
  Awesome! Which book are you following?
  - not-my-account 3y ago
    A Book of Abstract Algebra, Charles Pinter- it’s pretty good, each chapter is has a short description of the math and then many problems to work through. Would recommend
coldpie 3y ago
Guitar, and as a subset of that, music theory and composition. It started as a something to get me through the first pandemic winter in Minnesota in 2020, never having held a guitar before, and it turned out to be something I've been completely obsessed with for more than three years now. I have played guitar literally almost every day since I started. I play for about a half hour every day before I head out to catch the bus, and very often play for another hour or two in the evening. My main focus for the past two years has been solo fingerstyle guitar, especially classical. The two full pieces I've learned so far are "The Water Is Wide" arranged by Yenne Lee[1] and "Home" by Andrew York[2]. I've almost finished memorizing "Tango Azul" by Nemanja Bogunovic[3], and I'm working on learning "Autumn Leaves" also arranged by Yenne Lee[4], and "Blackwood Lullaby" by Justin Johnson[5]. And I've learned a bunch of short studies and pieces, a recent favorite being "Vals Frances" by Francis Kleynjans[6]. In addition to playing, I also attend classical concerts put on by the Minnesota Guitar Society[7] and do a little bit of volunteering for them, primarily editing full concert videos for their YouTube channel (which, sadly, are mostly taken down after a brief viewing due to contractual stuff). [1] "The Water Is Wide" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bufc2HY9F2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bufc2HY9F2U [2] "Home" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ajTcwJBbw4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ajTcwJBbw4 [3] "Tango Azul" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZgTsKrluE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZgTsKrluE [4] "Autumn Leaves" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxGT5z6d-GA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxGT5z6d-GA [5] "Blackwood Lullaby" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC58eXL-MJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC58eXL-MJY [6] "Vals Frances" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSNmwn54vEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSNmwn54vEI [7] https://mnguitar.org/ https://mnguitar.org/
- kgwxd 3y ago
  I finally got back into music this year because my kid started piano. I played guitar a ton throughout high school and my early 20's, did classical for a few years in there too. I could play almost anything, but I was terrible at writing so I sort of just stopped. I really wish I had had the infinite supply of composing videos that are so easy to come by now. I learned so much this year already in my "spare time", I feel like I could have been decent at it back when most of my time was spare.
- 3y ago
willsmith72 3y ago
Product and marketing. How do you find out if you're building something really relevant, and how do you find your market?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lagniappe 3y ago
I'm passionate about being thankful, and making sure that those I appreciate know the degree to which they matter to me.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  For my fellow autic monkeys: "How to write a letter to Cared-Abouts:" 1) Gratitude (solo) 2) What I'm working on / towards 3) Anything exciting / worrisome 4) Thoughts on wordly problems / solutions 5) Transactional / accounting stuff 6) Questions 7) Gratitude (together / partnerships) Sometimes it's just "doing the dishes" or ceasing to be difficult, "because I can." Grateful for your passion.
- justanotherjoe 3y ago
  if you wanna appreciate someone, say it to their boss or to their relatives. Much more useful than saying it to them
corytheboyd 3y ago
Practicing bass guitar. I never played music as a child which makes learning as an adult ten times harder, but that won’t stop me, I see it more as a fun challenge hah. I started with piano during the pandemic, which I enjoyed, then that morphed into generally learning the full gamut of production with DAWs and whatnot. Bought a bass guitar in the summer and have been having a blast learning, I have practiced nearly every day that I am at home, and actually notice how much better I am getting. Also identifying areas to improve upon, and focus on getting my hands to do what my brain wants is a really good exercise, and a really good break from the ol’ enterprise software grind :)
rchaud 3y ago
Print media -- seriously. There are vanishingly few types of paper-based products left besides mass-market paperbacks and a handful of soulless conglomerate-owned magazines that may disappear tomorrow. Just like there are small farming collectives out there, I'd love for there to be micro-magazines and short stories on paper, made cheaply and distributed to small mailing lists with a single stamp (not an email newsletter!). PDF versions available for long-distance readers. Something, anything to counter the overwhelm of ad and email popup-ridden "content blogs" and walled garden platforms sucking everything into their in-house LLMs.
- mapleoin 3y ago
  I've had the opposite experience. I'm amazed at the types of print magazines on niche topics that still exist. Are you aware of https://www.stackmagazines.com/ https://www.stackmagazines.com/ ?
  - piva00 3y ago
    I've been looking for something like this for a while, thanks a lot for sharing! It just sucked when I was checking out a few mags and after calculating the cost for shipping to Sweden it was higher than the total cost of 4-6 magazines...
- andremendes 3y ago
  >Just like there are small farming collectives out there, I'd love for there to be micro-magazines and short stories on paper, made cheaply and distributed to small mailing lists with a single stamp (not an email newsletter!). PDF versions available for long-distance readers. You seem to be describing what I've known (since forever) by "Zine"[¹] [¹]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zine
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Yeah that's what I was thinking of. Are there semi-professional zine publications out there? I checked out Etsy but the stuff there was not really to my taste.
avgDev 3y ago
I just built myself a sim racing rig with triple screen setup. Will be signing up for iRacing soon. I'm tired of being productive and "on".
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  Wecome to the dark side. We have cookies.
- huhtenberg 3y ago
  6DoF?
sneilan1 3y ago
I’m fascinated by the possibilities of trading as a video game instead of a way to make money. I’m building a stock exchange to prove this idea. https://github.com/sneilan/stock-exchange https://github.com/sneilan/stock-exchange
hatmatrix 3y ago
a topic often seen on Hacker News - the Julia language I find Python to be useful but excruciatingly verbose, particularly when you get to using NumPy and Pandas. I like the syntax of Fortran/MATLAB/GNU Octave so here's to hoping that Julia can take over some of this workload. I also use R extensively (and love it) for data analysis; glad to see Julia's capability in this space also.
xeonax 3y ago
I'm passionate about the game I'm making. Completing 2 years this december. Doing progress one step at a time.
- FFP999 3y ago
  Remember this: if you finish a game at all, you are well ahead of the crowd. Best of luck.
  - xeonax 3y ago
    It's already published on multiple platforms, as well as available as EA on steam. But not finished yet. Doing incremental updates as per player feedback.
    - FFP999 3y ago
      Nice
hersko 3y ago
BattleBots. 250 pound robots with 70 pound steel blades spinning at 250mph fighting each other? Yes please. Besides for the absolute mayhem, the planning, driving, and engineering that goes into these competitions are insane. Some fights to give you an idea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORDg67i70IU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORDg67i70IU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx2aJMISaP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx2aJMISaP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaTIreDG45M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaTIreDG45M
- incomingpain 3y ago
  I love battlebots. Really hoping for tombstone to come back next season re-engineered to be the top dog again.
creakingstairs 3y ago
Drawing at least 30min every day using Line of Action[1]. It’s relaxing and fun to see improvements over time. I’m also writing my own tools in Elixir for playing around with LLMs. Currently exploring ways to efficiently chunk documents/code/webpages so that I can create embeddings for them. [1] https://line-of-action.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing https://line-of-action.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing
mgd 3y ago
I love these threads: - Learning to use Emacs better - Common Lisp - Clojure - Getting better at chess - Rubiks cubes and solving them faster - Indie gaming and fighting games at the moment
- xedrac 3y ago
  +1 for Chess. Such an amazing game, one could spend (some might say waste) their whole life dedicated to it, or just a couple minutes here and there. It's fun either way.
rockbruno 3y ago
Home automation. I always had an Alexa and a couple of WiFi switches, but I just discovered the rabbit hole of Home Assistant, Zigbee devices, flashing devices to get rid of cloud capabilities and install your own firmware, and the whole ordeal. Haven't had this fun with tech in a while.
- wannabebarista 3y ago
  A few years ago, I got really into orchestrating LED accent lighting in my small studio apartment without going the Phillips route. With a few Alexa commands and some switches, I had multiple configurations that turned on when I woke up and again when I came home (using various cheap sensors). It was a blast!
- Havoc 3y ago
  Check out ESPHome too. Bit of a skill jump from flashing devices but still very doable
perplex 3y ago
I started skateboarding two years ago in my backyard and this year I started skating at my local skatepark. I'm all padded up for safety and even use hip pads. It's a very fun and cheap hobby. Seeing a lot of progression so it's very fun.
- agentultra 3y ago
  Hey! I’ve been skating for a few years myself! Have fun keeping at it!
- dfex 3y ago
  Such a great sport - got back into it several years ago, and while I haven't progressed all that much (I'm more of a roll around parks guy than a pop an amazing trick guy), I do enjoy it immensely
Taikonerd 3y ago
I've been meaning to up my Mexican cooking game. For years I've been making the standard easy Tex-Mex stuff (tacos, burritos, etc). But my wife recently bought me "Mi Cocina"[1], which is a level up in both challenge and authenticity. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Mi-Cocina-Recipes-Rapture-Cookbook/dp/0593138708/ https://www.amazon.com/Mi-Cocina-Recipes-Rapture-Cookbook/dp...
bubblehack3r 3y ago
Wine. It’s fascinating, tastes good and a fun conversation with people.
kbf 3y ago
Mental health. I recently passed out in public and had to finally admit to myself that I’m severely burnt out. I had ignored the signs and mentally written off the concept of burnout as a bit of a wishy-washy mostly “emotional” concept and not as the very real psychological AND physiological condition that doesn’t just go away if you get a good nights sleep and a day off. It was emotional to actually read up on it and realize my disillusionment with work, deteriorating relationships and steady decline in my ability to carry out daily tasks weren’t signs of a personal lack of interest or effort, but an inevitability resulting from the position I had put myself in.
- manuelisimo 3y ago
  You are not alone! I have been dealing with burnout since the pandemic began. For me it was the inability to focus on the simplest tasks that made me realize I could no longer ignore the problem. Therapy has helped a lot.
- justin_oaks 3y ago
  The world is slowly realizing that the advice to "suck it up", "tough it out", "walk it off", "man up", etc. aren't helpful. Real problems need real solutions, not platitudes. I'm sorry you've gone through this. I quit a previous job with no other job lined up because of burnout. Fortunately, I could afford the 4 month gap in employment. My heart aches for those who can't.
  - woile 3y ago
    That's true, it's important to recognize the problems and start working on them. It sucks that you had to quit. I was advising the same to my girlfriend because she couldn't bear with work anymore, until a friend told her that she should not quit and instead the company should pay the burnout because they put her in that situation. Luckily she didn't follow my advise and it's been in burnout leave for the last 6 months, with help from a therapist.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  Longhorn PHP in Austin, Texas wrapped up just a couple of days ago. One of the keynote talks was titled "Stronger Than Fear: Mental Health in the Developer Community" by Ed Finkler. It outlined why these things not only need to be talked about, but also taken seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYPAGuh6Le8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYPAGuh6Le8
clintmcmahon 3y ago
Streaming flight data from the FAA. I'm building a system to ingest data from the FAA SWIM system to build a real-time flight board for airports in the United States. I'm learning how to manage high traffic data via a JMS program.
incomingpain 3y ago
My current special interest is guns. Noise cancelling headphones, breathing exercises, generally no social interactions. So wonderful. About to goto the range with my 22lr for some group therapy. 2inch groups at 50yards.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  I was very into blackpowder some years back. I just haven't had the time to get back into it.
scrapcode 3y ago
Waterfowl hunting and training my Labrador to hunt with me and retrieve my harvested game. The bond my pup and I have created in the past ~9mo training multiple times a day is incredible. I used to absolutely despise winters and now I can't wait for it to get cold, windy, and wet. I have been captivated by all aspects of waterfowl, dog training, being in nature, finding public lands accessible to me and preparing the game for consumption - and it keeps me intrigued in some capacity throughout the year.
- motohagiography 3y ago
  Can you recommend any books or resources on training flushing? Seems a lot like herding, and it's an interest of mine.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - scrapcode 3y ago
    I have mainly only studied and done retriever training at this point as I mostly hunt duck and geese. I do enjoy the Standing Stone YT channel, and although they do cater to a variety of different types of training, they seem to cater more towards the upland sport (pointing and flushing). Plenty of the techniques do bleed over (casting, retrieving commands) but I can't recommend any single program as I'm unfamiliar. What I can recommend through experience is that picking one program and sticking to it ended up helping me in the end. Studying multiple different retriever programs allowed me to try different techniques when I ran into speed bumps with my pup, but the programs will usually start doing minor things in the beginning that lead into advanced concepts in the end.
Measter 3y ago
I recently bought myself a copy of Ashley's Book of Knots, and been teaching myself... well... knotting. In my ignorance, I used to see knowledge of knots as this complex, hard to learn thing, but one thing I've been learning is that the more common, practical, knots tend to be fairly easy to tie. There's just different knots for different purposes. The decorative ones can get very complex, though.
- justin_oaks 3y ago
  What is your approach to learning them? Do you do them in order from ABOK or pick ones that look interesting and/or useful? What are your favorite knots? I've tried to learn a number of knots. I find that tying knots is a good way to keep my hands busy while doing something else, like listening in a meeting. I favor the diamond knot, constrictor knot, hangman's knot, alpine butterfly loop, and Japanese square knot.
  - Measter 3y ago
    I first just went through it front to back, having a go at some of the simpler ones as I went. Since then, I've mostly just picked ones that felt interesting to learn. I've been a bit partial to more decorative stuff lately: a few of the sinnets, Full Matthew Walker, Turks-Heads, that sort of thing. I'd say my favourite one is one I come up with based on a Sheepshank, but (to the surprise of no one) was in the book as #1148 (Bell Ringer with two hitches). My use case, however, is as a double-noose to carry bags. Once tied, you can tighten one loop by loosening the second, then tighten the second by pulling the standing part. I tighten these around the neck of the two bags beneath the knots, then use a Marlingspike Hitch in the standard part with a piece of wood as a handle.
    - justin_oaks 3y ago
      I'll have to check out some of those knots you mention. Thanks!
- Tao3300 3y ago
  I've been way into decorative knots lately. Putting turksheads and coxcombing on everything, and I've come up with a nice way to use some lanyard knot trickery to tie a ukulele strap to the headstock in a way that looks like a tiny flower.
uncharted9 3y ago
Learning about my own mind and how to tame it. I've started realizing that I don't have much control over the external world, people or events, and only my perception of it can keep me sane or fix my mental issues. This has effectively forced me to see my relationship with my devices with more scrutiny. I've repeatedly found that digital consumption, whether it is infotainment, knowledge, or mindless Reels or Shorts, has always led me to a more depressed and sad state. A recent trip in the mountains without any cell reception even further confirmed this hypothesis for me personally. I try to leave my devices and social media for longer durations, but the eventual FOMO and withdrawals that kick in always bring me back to square one of agony. Events around a romantic interest recently also made me to rethink on how to effectively control emotions and feelings. The other person can do nothing wrong, but my mind can still feel tormented by their simple actions and events that unfold. Unless I can achieve some sort of mental and emotional equanimity, I feel all my pursuits of learning and career would still not alleviate me from this joyless state of life.
- asimovfan 3y ago
  Check out buddhism and meditation, pretty much all about that
- cammil 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure Buddhism is what you want
  - jackthetab 3y ago
    Or stoicism.
    - layer8 3y ago
      Or CBT.
- workbreak 3y ago
  You might find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kse87ocS0Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kse87ocS0Uo It talks about different levels of thinking without going into any religion or culture. PS: The YouTube channel seems to be related to dating, but this particular video doesn't have any of that.
maxlamb 3y ago
"Learning games", games that teach you something as you play. The best kind of learning games nudge you towards an answer so that you can win without ever having heard of the answer, and without Googling it. One example: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1635132575 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1635132575
crnkofe 3y ago
I started climbing and bouldering a few weeks ago. I'm doing a top rope climbing course and will maybe follow it up with lead climbing. Having been running for several years now it's really fun doing something completely different. Every weekend now I drive to a different climbing gym to mingle with the weekend crowd and tryharding on easy routes.
scraggo 3y ago
Memorization techniques, basically what's in _Moonwalking with Einstein_ by Josh Foer. Here's a podcast on the topic https://www.ted.com/talks/worklife_with_adam_grant_how_to_remember_anything https://www.ted.com/talks/worklife_with_adam_grant_how_to_re...
- Orlan 3y ago
  How’s your progress going? I read The Memory Book (Harry Lorayne) 20 years ago, and have always been interested, but assumed it would take years to be proficient. Wasn’t until I read Moonwalking With Einstein that I realized that with consistent practice it doesn’t need to take that long. Life has gotten in the way, so I haven’t been consistent with practice. Have also been procrastinated by jumping between books (Dominic O’Brien, Harry Lorayne, Nelson Dellis, others) trying to compare methods.
  - scraggo 3y ago
    Progress is going ok - I have a good understanding of the techniques and have started to apply them. A goal is to commit main points from books and concept-schemas I make to memory. Something that's more of a "side project" is using PAO (with a variation on the Dominic system) to memorize numbers. The overhead in making PAOs for 100 numbers is going very slowly. https://artofmemory.com/blog/pao-system/ https://artofmemory.com/blog/pao-system/ I'll check out some of those other resources - thanks for sharing!
DougN7 3y ago
I’ve never been a car guy, but somehow came across a kit car that I think is so gorgeous I have to build it. But I have few mechanical skills. I took a (tig) welding class at the local community college and have signed up for an intro to auto mechanics class for the coming semester, with plans to take more after that. I built a nice work bench in the garage and am getting it cleaned up. Suddenly tools are interesting and exciting to me. Would never have predicted this :) I figure it will take two years to gain skills, and five years to actually build. We’ll see if the passion/lust for that car endures long enough to get there.
Timoha 3y ago
Currently have some free time between jobs to explore what actually makes me passionate, so threads like this are really useful to get inspired! Been starting various projects to quickly figure out what I like and don’t like. Realized that I miss working on highly technical projects after working on consumer apps for a couple of years. So as a result been revamping my resume and planning my next steps in my software engineering career. There are some really cool companies out there in the space of databases and distributed systems. As part of scouting for jobs built some little tools with help of LLMs to tailor my resume to job positions. Also, rediscovered that I enjoy solving little algorithm problems after practicing with LeetCode. ChatGPT makes as if I have my own tutor to explain and hint when necessary, reminded me of university and study groups.
- UpAndOut 3y ago
  I'm a math student with a similar desire to learn more about these topics. I've asked around at my university about forming a study group around the following courses (which I myself would really like to study), but there seems to be little interest: Stanford CS143; MIT 6.824; MIT 6.001 . Would you like to collaborate on something along these lines?
  - Timoha 3y ago
    I’ve taken CS162 (operating systems) a while back at UC Berkeley and that along with networking, CS168, were my favorite classes. And they probably were the most useful going into the industry as well, so I highly recommend that you dig in even if you don’t find folks to study with. Makes me wonder if someone already created a service to match study groups for open content classes from top universities like this
jhedwards 3y ago
The political thought of Louis Brandeis and George Kennan. These two men are very different, but between them they seem to have comprehended and sometimes even developed solutions to nearly all the large issues facing our country and world today. That and cellular communication. The g-protein coupled receptor[0] is basically an all-purpose biological switch. Combined with other messaging pathways it is used to build complex logic into cell message/response networks. [0] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/gpcr-14047471/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/gpcr-14047471/
ogou 3y ago
Building lo-fi synthesizers with Teensy or Arduino. They are becoming more like interactive sculptures than instruments now. The sound is important, but the visual aesthetic is just as interesting to me.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Love to see pics.
  - ogou 3y ago
    Bottom of this blog post: https://lucidbeaming.com/blog/mmxxii-berlin/ https://lucidbeaming.com/blog/mmxxii-berlin/
    - rotexo 3y ago
      Some really incredible stuff there!
lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
Pong! In WebAssembly. Gotta start somewhere.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  I would love it if you shared the sources when you were done. I would like to start somewhere too. ;-)
tommiegannert 3y ago
Getting back into society. I've been taking a sabbatical and building a passion project for a few years. It's been great and not so great. The project is reaching a point where I can build a web page and move it to the sales/marketing phase, and spend time with people other than my wife and close friends. It's really time to get out of the introversion bubble again.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
A pair of Visual Pinball cabinets. Even with an initial sloppy mockup I found the wife loved playing pinball. So I went all in and built a new gaming PC, bought a 120 Hz TV just for a stand-alone pinball cab build. (Oh, and found that using the previous gaming PC and a few other things lying around I could also build a mini-pinball-cab — so I have that one coming together as well.)
- phreezie 3y ago
  Hey, I'm building a next gen virtual pinball simulator!
BadJo0Jo0 3y ago
Getting back into the "maker"/"tinker" groove. Modifying and calibrating my 3d printer(s), chasing speed while maintaining print quality. Using CAD more seriously, trying to challenge myself with more complex projects and models. Current project is to make a CoreXY Plotter from an old 3d printer I just disassembled. Wanting to get/make a CNC Mill/Router to finally have the ability to work on some bigger "cooler" projects. ex. I have a custom PC case model that I've been working on, and can't wait to build for the upcoming rig upgrade.
or_1equals1 3y ago
I recently got into DMing a DnD campaign. It‘s so much fun to play my ideas and concepts together with friends.
scruple 3y ago
Board game design, but specifically solo and 2-player co-op games that have a small footprint, small board states, and are easy to play. I've been looking for offline hobbies and recently got into solo board gaming, on top of playing games with my wife a couple of times a month. I work in gamesdev and I want to retain a creative outlet in the direction of gaming, because I just really enjoy it, but I also want to stop spending my entire life in front of a screen. So far it's been a lot of fun, I'm going to be printing play test cards later this week to start dialing in my first game. If it goes well I plan to release it as a cheap print and play (PnP), and if it turns out to be boring I'll release it as a free PnP.
- kzhen 3y ago
  any suggestions for solo board games? not a genre that I'm familiar with
  - ggregoire 3y ago
    Here is a good start: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/306154/2022-peoples-choice-top-200-solo-games-1-200 https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/306154/2022-peoples-choic... The subreddit is pretty active too: https://old.reddit.com/r/soloboardgaming https://old.reddit.com/r/soloboardgaming
- globalnode 3y ago
  never heard of solo board games before, is it possible?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    There are quite a few of them - either basically puzzle solving ones, scoring against a benchmark, or “defeat random events from a deck”.
  - ggregoire 3y ago
    Most modern board games have a solo mode and many games are solo only. I gave two links to the sibling comment if you want to look at some games.
fdgjgbdfhgb 3y ago
Started following Rugby during the world cup - got a bit obsessed, went to a couple of matches, joined a club, started following the national championship (Top 14)... It's been great so far! It has a lot of complexity and physicality, which I enjoy.
- opyate 3y ago
  Rugby is awesome. RWC is the only time I ever watch rugby and get obsessed with it. Played a bit during school too, went on rugby "camps", etc.
immranderson 3y ago
Compiling and editing together my travel footage for my YouTube vlog. I've had the fortune to have traveled to 96 countries in my life so far, and have been posting a vlog for every country that I've visited (I'm making an attempt to go to every country) I got hung up around country 55, feeling that I hadn't found my "editing voice" and have had difficulty finding the motivation over the last year to edit and post my most recent 41 countries worth of content. I want to say that part of it is because I'm overwhelmed with how much there is to go through? I also get in my head and have to consistently reassure myself that I'm ultimately editing this for my future self/family to watch, and that I shouldn't necessarily be optimizing for viewership (though passive income through travel vlogs would be nice.) There's a definitive, "what's up brand gang, immranderson here!" blueprint that could be followed, but I have no interest in ever doing something like that.
- globalnode 3y ago
  maybe try releasing some first goes and get feedback so you can modify later ones? rather than release all at once?
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
  > There's a definitive, "what's up brand gang, immranderson here!" blueprint that could be followed This immediately made me think of Jake from Bright Sun Films. (Was that actually what you were alluding to?)
samspenc 3y ago
2D and 3D animation. I've started with 3D and Blender and Unreal Engine, and following along with Youtube tutorials on the same. Still very much a hobbyist, haven't produced much that is worth showing, but am passionate about this space.
juliogreff 3y ago
I've been competing in ultra-distance bike races since 2020. In April this year, I decided to take a break from work and see how well I could do if I dedicated one year to training. I chose the Race around the Netherlands in 2024, the race that started it all for me, as my goal race. Training takes up to 30 hours a week, so at time it's like a full time job, but I haven't felt so fulfilled in a long, long time. I definitely recommend it to anybody that has the opportunity.
- wanderlust123 3y ago
  How do you train?
  - juliogreff 3y ago
    Very long, relatively easy rides, for the most part. In summer that's 6 hour rides or longer at a conversational pace, in winter it's 3 or 4 hours on Zwift. Sometimes I do threshold work (because it's more fun than Zone 2 all the time), rarely HIIT anymore (these races don't have a habit of having a sprint finish).
lcall 3y ago
Finding ways to do something useful despite health challenges. Learning to have the right attitudes and have peace & happiness, & stay pointed in the right direction, despite whatever. It's a good learning process, and my beliefs are making all the difference, motivating me to be patient, have hope, keep trying, use it to grow in quiet ways.
lamontcg 3y ago
A Primer on Pontryagin's Principle in Optimal Control: Second Edition by I.M. Ross. https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Pontryagins-Principle-Optimal-Control/dp/0984357114 https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Pontryagins-Principle-Optimal-... Explains optimal control theory and the pontryagin minimum principle from a geometrical perspective rather than the confusing derivation from calculus of variations that is more typical. Also explains it at an "Engineering" or applied math level rather than at a mathematical foundations level so the results are more usable. [ I'd describe this book as the "Div, Grad Curl and All That" of Optimal Control Theory if that makes sense to you ]
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  What do you think of the text by Luenenberg?
leeeeeepw 3y ago
[dead]
- unixhero 3y ago
  Ahhh a Her
a3_nm 3y ago
The following open research problem. Given an undirected graph G with two vertices s and t, the task is to determine whether there is an undirected path connecting s and t which is simple (no repeated vertices) and has length divisible by 3. It is not known whether this problem is NP-hard, or whether it can be solved in polynomial time; apparently the question is open since the early 90s. (The problem is also open for paths of length p mod q for any fixed p and q (fixed means they are constants, and are not given as input), whenever q>2. The problem is known to be in PTIME for 0 mod 2 and 1 mod 2, and to be NP-hard when the graph is directed. Pointers to related work here: https://gitlab.com/a3nm/modpath https://gitlab.com/a3nm/modpath)
- sdenton4 3y ago
  An old favorite open graph theory problem: In your right hand, take any collection of trees with 2, 3, ..., n vertices. These have a total of 1+2+...+n-1 edges, ie, n choose 2. In your left hand, take the complete graph with n vertices. This, of course, has the same number of edges. Conjecture: it is always possible to pack/embed the trees into the complete graph in such a way that all edges are matched exactly once. The problem has been open for like fifty years, lacking a counter-example or a proof. One can assume Erdos thought hard about it at some point...
  - a3_nm 3y ago
    Interesting! It looks like this is called the "Gyárfás tree packing conjecture".
- muldvarp 3y ago
  What's the motivation for this problem if there is any? It's a really specific problem.
  - a3_nm 3y ago
    This came from a database theory study about queries on graphs: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517804.3524149 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517804.3524149 for the paywalled version, https://www.theoinf.uni-bayreuth.de/pool/documents/Paper2021-25/Paper2022/rpqs-undirected-graphs.pdf https://www.theoinf.uni-bayreuth.de/pool/documents/Paper2021... for the open-access paper. But honestly I find the problem intriguing for its own sake.
otherdave 3y ago
Foreign languages. I'm a native English speaker and I've been studying Spanish for almost 18 months and I just started dabbling in French.
bitxbitxbitcoin 3y ago
Cannabis genetic biodiversity.
huhtenberg 3y ago
Mead. On my 5th batch and it's an awesome hobby. Very easy and inexpensive to get started, the process is slow-paced, but not glacial, not hard to follow, but with a depth to it if it's your thing ... and then you get to drink the result!
- dboreham 3y ago
  , Carver. Oh wait, no...
- bodhi_mind 3y ago
  What styles are you making? I made a dandelion flower dry mead and it tastes decent after 6 months but feels flabby. I’m experimenting with adding some acid to balance it out.
  - huhtenberg 3y ago
    Traditionals, just testing different honey varieties. I've just barely started, first batch hasn't even done aging yet. Dandelion, eh? Consider sharing on /r/mead, you will fit right in :)
- cantSpellSober 3y ago
  Tried Schramm's? He wrote the book on mead (no really, The Compleat Meadmaker). Grab some Dansk Mjød of you find it; they're doing some of the most interesting stuff right now.
  - huhtenberg 3y ago
    I'd love to try Schramm's but they ships only within the US. Dansk Mjød - will have a look, thanks for the pointer.
Aaronstotle 3y ago
Most of my passion is around cycling, if I didn't have to work for a living, I think I'd spend most of my time doing long bike rides.
- smm11 3y ago
  This. I'm riding an early-70s Schwinn road bike in an hour or so, and a modern modern mountain bike Saturday. Bring it on!
chrisweekly 3y ago
Learning to kiteboard!
ankaAr 3y ago
Tabletop RPG games, with friends and food. Good music, food and friendship is the key.
krisoft 3y ago
Tinkering with brass astronomical gizmos. Made this orrery a week ago: https://youtu.be/FGdjk5fY87s?si=t9nwZI8YXxy4Bi7D https://youtu.be/FGdjk5fY87s?si=t9nwZI8YXxy4Bi7D And presently working on a world clock inspired by the xkcd 1335 commic.
beachy 3y ago
Moving golf simulation into the cloud [0]. Golf is one of the only sports that can be realistically simulated indoors. Golf is also one of the only sports where even severe lag has no effect on the accuracy of the play - just the viewing experience. Unlike FPS games in the cloud which become unplayable with even modest lag. The golf simulation technology landscape today is pre-cloud. People running their own gaming computers with complex lash ups of open source software to connect their launch monitors. All pretty prohibitive to the stereotypical older tech-averse golf player. [0] https://golfsimcloud.com https://golfsimcloud.com
- smm11 3y ago
  Golf and downhill skiing were huge when I was a kid. I grew up golfing and downhill skiing. Decades have gone by now. Who golfs? Who has downhill skis?
  - havefunbesafe 3y ago
    Colorado resident, here. I'd say 95% of people I know do one or the other. Probably 50% of people I know do both.
  - samschooler 3y ago
    I think this very much is a personal perspective thing. Skiing is only increasing in popularity. Many ski resorts recording record high visitation this year. https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/29/national-ski-areas-record-skier-visits-2023/ https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/29/national-ski-areas-record...
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    > Who golfs? Who has downhill skis? I imagine you could answer that question by going to a golf course or ski slope to see who's there.
  - asdff 3y ago
    Golf has surged in popularity after covid, 20 year high rates of growth in every demographic.
  - 3y ago
fullofdev 3y ago
creating content
- interestica 3y ago
  What kinds?
  - fullofdev 3y ago
    Programming. I'm a non native english speaker. I hope to improve my English overtime through blogging and creating videos
csbartus 3y ago
Likely, provably correct software ++ Rapid iterations
- mcherm 3y ago
  I don't know that I've ever heard that combination together before. Can you share any thoughts on how to do both at the same time?
  - csbartus 3y ago
    I have 3 slides for that ... https://www.osequi.com/ https://www.osequi.com/ If questions ... ready to answer :D
jryb 3y ago
So many foundational bioinformatics tools are broken and I just want to rewrite them all.
- surfmike 3y ago
  which ones are you thinking go? I'm interested in this space too-- it'd be great to get in touch and discuss (my contact info in my profile).
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    same, i've been trying to do proactive / productive work in this field I think I'd do anything with a friendly team
    - nextos 3y ago
      Interested as well! But the future is not so dark, things like e.g. https://github.com/lh3/minimap2 https://github.com/lh3/minimap2 are a breath of fresh air.
      - flobosg 3y ago
        Heng Li is an outstanding contributor to bioinformatics.
- ibestvina 3y ago
  Interested in this as well - do you already work on this somewhere out in the open?
polivier 3y ago
Crossword puzzles! They make very interesting combinatorial problems (both for solving and creating grids). I recently had a ton of fun writing a constraint programming model that generates grids, including the automatic placement of black squares (this was the main modeling challenge). This model is useful for creating grids using short word lists (which is the case for e.g. thematic grids).
- saulpw 3y ago
  Very nice! Have you seen the talk "How a File Format Led to a Crossword Scandal"[0]? Or the largest collection of crossword data on the planet[1]? Source: it me. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aHfK8EUIzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aHfK8EUIzg [1] https://xd.saul.pw https://xd.saul.pw
  - polivier 3y ago
    This is fascinating, I had no idea about the gridgate scandal!
- mzl 3y ago
  What model did you end up using? And what system did you do it in? My immediate guess on how to model it would be to create reified constraints for the wordlists of different lengths (the constraints in chapter 22 of https://www.gecode.org/doc-latest/MPG.pdf https://www.gecode.org/doc-latest/MPG.pdf). For each square, use standard logical constraints to check if it is the start of a word (previous square a black one, this square not a black one), and how long the word is (using backwards counting of runs). These can be used to trigger the reified constraints above. If the word-lists are short-ish enough, then an alternative for the above model would be to model the whole words using MDD or regular expression constraints, with an added control variable and setting all values as don't-care for the false case.
  - polivier 3y ago
    The problem mentioned in the Gecode documentation example is different than the one I solve. In their case, they start with a WxH grid with known black square positions, and their model essentially answers the following question: "Given a crossword grid template and word list, does there exist a feasible assignment of words for the template?" I my case, the black square positions are unknown, so the question instead is: "Given an empty crossword grid and a word list, does there exist a template allowing a feasible assignment of words for the grid?" Your intuition of how I modeled this is mostly correct, I used custom TABLE constraints for the words, that can be triggered on or off depending on the values of boolean variables. I used CP-SAT to model this, and if you're interested in the technical side of things, I've discussed it in great detail here: https://pedtsr.ca/2023/generating-crossword-grids-using-constraint-programming.html https://pedtsr.ca/2023/generating-crossword-grids-using-cons... It turns out that there are many weird complexities to take into account when the black square positions are unknown.
cunac 3y ago
I am utterly fascinated by Japanese joinery
spinal 3y ago
Embedded systems and electrical engineering. I knew close to nothing in either field and it is refreshing to learn a new field starting at the basics. Creating a practical, physical product is also very rewarding.
- BigFnTelly 3y ago
  Are you me? I'm starting all over and doing high school physics! Can't wait to solder stuff and get electric!
- iso8859-1 3y ago
  How did you get started?
  - spinal 3y ago
    Sorry for late reply. I went straight into projects, albeit small ones (a monitoring system for temperature, humidity, luminosity, my own light-based alarm clock). It's not quite as trivial as it sounds, for someone who has never touched electronics before :) The theory I learned was almost all just internet searches. I did research before ordering each piece of hardware, to the point where I was confident enough I won't fry anything. This might not be the most efficient way of learning, but it's more enjoyable than a book for me.
brickers 3y ago
Woodworking and designing furniture. Just this weekend I finally set up my home workshop after almost a decade of dreaming about it (and collecting things I thought I might need). Just spent two hours drawing basic layouts for some wardrobes, and looking at beautiful midcentury, Scandinavian, and Japanese items online. Any good resources (for technical or aesthetics) are very much welcome - I’m looking to invest in my knowledge now I can put it to use.
levn11 3y ago
Number theory and spacetime! I have a proof for an old number theory problem
stephenstuder 3y ago
Being a dad - Preparing for the Google Cloud Associate exam (5 YEO front-end developer trying to get out of my bubble) - Fixing my posture using a daily routine - Really fine-tuning our budget, researching the stores that have better prices for items we frequently buy, having a better grip on upcoming expenses, figuring out what things we need that we can buy used, and most importantly, getting the most out of the amount we can spend monthly!
- brickers 3y ago
  Becoming a dad or are you already one and just upping the excitement? If you’re new, my two pieces of advice are that there’s only right now to deal with when things start to feel rough, and lick your fingers to open the nappy sack before you start dealing with the nappy. Both gems and hard-won
- rogerthis 3y ago
  Could you share your routine for fixing your posture?
- shooker435 3y ago
  I have some exam notes (10 parts) on my blog at https://www.sebhook.com/tag/pca/ https://www.sebhook.com/tag/pca/ if that's helpful. It's mostly focused on the architect exam, but there's a lot of crossover.
nvarsj 3y ago
Dating. No, seriously. As a life long loner/introvert with high anxiety, I kinda discovered recently (after a long marriage/divorce/several years of not dating) that dating is actually kind of amazing. I never even knew this side of myself. I actually enjoy talking to random people about random stuff. Even if it doesn’t lead to a relationship, making any kind of connection with someone is deeply satisfying. I kind of wonder why I didn’t do this for the last 40 years. Anyways, if you’re like me, I really recommend pushing through your awkwardness and anxiety and just try to make connections with people. It’s one of the best things I’ve experienced. I feel like I spent the prior 40 years denying myself of a basic human experience. I’m glad that’s over.
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  I am married now but I went through 7 years where I compromised career for dating. And I'm glad I did that. My wife and our social life together, adds more value to my life than any manager/company/co-worker/compensation/insert_another_rat_race_item.
- kj4211cash 3y ago
  I get it! I am an introvert and have often been called shy. I am also now happily married. But I strangely miss first dates. I miss meeting new people who lead very different lives, and having both of us try to present the best version of our stories. I'm sure it was awkward and filled with dumb small talk. But I miss it.
  - jll29 3y ago
    There's nothing wrong for you and your wife to invite a stranger couple over for dinner.
- latchkey 3y ago
  I spent a period of time doing that as well. Very glad that I did it. It wasn't even really 'dating'... it was just meeting random strangers with the pretense that it was a date... even though I got to the point where I knew within 30 seconds if I would ever meet that person again. I still enjoyed the conversations I had and helped my fine tune myself, and like you,... lower my anxiety levels.
calderknight 3y ago
Space Race Two. China versus the USA. Which country will achieve the first crewed lunar landing of this millennium? Which country will set up the first permanent moonbase? Which country will achieve the first crewed martian landing? Which county will set up the first permanent base on Mars? etc. I was surprised by how much progress in space China has made. They have a permanently inhabited space station. They are planning to achieve a crewed lunar landing by 2030. They are planning to complete a permanent moonbase by 2035.
0xfaded 3y ago
Working through "Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms": https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/computer-science/pattern-recognition-and-machine-learning/information-theory-inference-and-learning-algorithms?format=HB&isbn=9780521642989 https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/comput... Finally found the trifecta of an engaging lecturer with recorded lectures, an excellent textbook, and a solid set of exercises.
- JoshMandel 3y ago
  I just learned about Mackay's lectures on YouTube and am working through the same. Outstanding teacher. I was so sad to see he died shortly after the course was recorded. He has a gripping/heartbreaking chronicle at https://itila.blogspot.com https://itila.blogspot.com
abound 3y ago
Building an open source sync backend for Logseq: https://github.com/bcspragu/logseq-sync https://github.com/bcspragu/logseq-sync I'm a big fan of Logseq for keeping track of useful information and tasks and stuff, but the file-based (or Git-based) syncing has sharp edges, and the actual Logseq Sync feature has a proprietary backend, so I've been enjoying figuring out how the protocol works and building an OSS implementation.
jkestner 3y ago
Citizen science! It's great when people realize they can answer their own questions with observation and data, and for activism because data is a powerful story. One friend of mine started https://publiclab.org https://publiclab.org to feed this, and another is doing data journalism to highlight holes in the government's environmental data. https://www.muckrock.com/project/ https://www.muckrock.com/project/ A rules-configurable sensor tool I made a long time ago was used by a non-profit to provide a service that logged NYC landlords' violations of thermostat settings. These combined with the experience of exploring the natural world in my kids' school's makerspace, has made me come back to making sensor tools for the people - would love to hear from others how they use sensor data for change: https://supermechanical.com/pickup https://supermechanical.com/pickup
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  Your kids school has a makerspace - that sounds awesome can you provide any more details?
  - jkestner 3y ago
    Helped my kid’s teacher win some Teacher of the Year award where a company gives away grants for PR, and as punishment, she charged me with using the money she won to set up a makerspace in the library. Funny thing is when I went to see what they already had, there was more than enough to start with…LittleBits, Makey Makey, a ton of supplies for paper circuits, etc. Used the money to buy some more things like a microscope and sewing machines, but realized that it had failed before and will fail again because there isn’t enough humanpower to guide the kids in activities. So I’ve enlisted a couple of other parent volunteers and we’re trying to figure out a sustainable program. One step is to make the space (a corner of the library) look cool to attract current and future parents. Think I’m going for a satire of a corporate lab, with snaplock linoleum tile and a steel worktable. Working in ad-how volunteer groups is a new skill I’ve been learning since we started at this public school. Very valuable, but not a personal passion!
    - conductr 3y ago
ewst 3y ago
[flagged]
pizzalife 3y ago
My newborn son. Stakeholders come and go.
verdverm 3y ago
CUE(lang), generally, current efforts are because devops & yaml engineering has gotten out of hand I maintain https://cuetorials.com https://cuetorials.com and am heading up the CUE sig-infra group for the time being
libraryatnight 3y ago
Making music inside, learning to grow my own weed outside :) Also, I'm fixated on Muriel Spark books right now.
anotheraccount9 3y ago
Being finally able to work in US, after 15 months of spending savings to survive. Ouch.
valbaca 3y ago
Building my Tyranid army in Warhammer 40k A good buddy of mine had been itching to get back into the hobby that he played as a teen but I wasn't interested in it. Until I got the Ultimate Starter Box from my game store as it was basically calling out to me. It's been an incredibly fun (and yes, expensive) hobby. The people are great, especially in my local area they're suuuper friendly and welcoming to new people. They want cool people to play with and enjoy the hobby with so there's little gatekeeping that I've actually run into. Learning new skills (assembly, priming, painting) and learning the rules has been really fun as well. My passion for coding has been at an all time low, so it's good to have something to channel my passion into.
sjmulder 3y ago
Small city council politics :( there's a lot of resistance against a new temporary housing project for Ukrainian refugees with many legit concerns, and some NIMBY, but also xenophobia and racism. It's tough but we've been able to start a YIMBY group and encouraging people and organisations to make public comments or send letters of support. A good few didn't dare because they feared reactions, and rightfully so, because some who did (including me) ended up on the receiving end of some bullshit. All bark and no bite - for now - but not great for democracy.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  How does racism play into your situation? Small towns and Ukrainians have one thing in common: they are both white. I would think their race wouldn't be the deciding factor.
  - hsuduebc2 3y ago
    It's same everywhere. Fear of the unknown, coping with own failure via blaming someone weaker, different language and of course at least in EU a lot of hatred due to desinformations. Of course more descriptive word would be just xenophobia combined with copium addiction.
    - t0bia_s 3y ago
      Using empty words like disinformation, xenophobia and othet short cuts wont help here. Build bridges, listen opposite opinions and do not judge. Ideally don't use rethoric that you fight against. It's not consturctive.
    - curtisblaine 3y ago
      It's also the fact that if you bought a house and they build a refugee center near it, your house immediately loses value. For many that might mean negative equity and losing a chunk of their main life investment while still having to pay the mortgage.
  - davidw 3y ago
XorNot 3y ago
Home Assistant: between cheap ESP-based controllers and ESPHome, I'm aiming to get my whole house under local, cloud-free control.
sharadov 3y ago
Tennis - as a life long racquetball player, I transitioned to tennis. Joined a club, taking lessons, it's amazing.
xedrac 3y ago
- Playing with my kids - Health & Fitness (lose your health and you have nothing) - Electric scooters (so fun!) - Hiking - Reading more books - Playing more Chess - Keyboard layouts - Baking - Penny whistle
- v-erne 3y ago
  >> Health & Fitness (lose your health and you have nothing) And I'm guessing first step here will be getting rid of scooter? :) Only half joking here - health and two wheelers, especially ones with engine, does not combine greatly. I know personally three people that had serious life changing accidents driving motorbikes, I was a witness to two serious crashes (guess who get out of them without a scratch - the one on bike or the one in car). Even I had serious bike accident that damaged my health quite greatly. It may be just me getting older - but I seriously am afraid of using any kind of two wheeler in any traffic.
Clubber 3y ago
Target shooting, specifically pistols and rifles. I recently acquired a 1973 Anschutz made in West Germany that I'm smitten with.
- wepple 3y ago
  Is that 22LR?
  - Clubber 3y ago
    Yes, single shot 54 action target model. Beautiful wood. I usually shoot heavier rounds, but you can shoot that thing all day. Best trigger I've ever felt.
    - madengr 3y ago
      [dead]
    - Clubber 3y ago
      I'm using ELEY Club rounds. I tried ELEY Match rounds but didn't notice much of a difference at 2.5x the price. It came with a diopter which I used for a little bit but swapped out for a Leupold 3-9 scope. I'll probably need to get a higher magnification though. I have a hard time seeing the hits at 50 yards with a shoot-n-see target (old eyes I guess). Not sure why you got downvoted so much, everything you said you were doing is perfectly legal. I guess some people got their sensibilities triggered (pun intended) about 22 talk. If that's the case, they should probably grow up a bit.
flobosg 3y ago
I started taking salsa lessons a few months ago, and it’s been incredibly fun. Before that, I really got into Magic: The Gathering for a while.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I’m working on a silly website called Late Night Bomb Defusal. It’s just a microwave that you have to open/stop as close to 0:00 as possible. But it doesn’t show you milliseconds, just seconds. Edit: by random chance if anyone wants to help with a title card graphic/logo, that’s the one gap I have in capability for this toy.
pushfoo 3y ago
Text rendering / UI on minimal hardware and finding more time for ML-family languages. A few months ago, an iced-rs maintainer[1] recommended I try Elm. So far, this has lead to: 1. A an MVP[2] of a curses[3]-like library for CHIP-8 derivatives (https://github.com/pushfoo/octo-termlib https://github.com/pushfoo/octo-termlib) 2. A growing interest in language design 3. An ongoing re-evaluation of my software development worldview [1] 13r0ck / Brock on GitHub (https://github.com/13r0ck https://github.com/13r0ck). Hire him if you get the chance. He has a rare blend of know-how, mentorship, and community management skills. [2] Unsolved issues with octo-termlib: 1. Finding a license friendly toward beginners editing pre-made template assembly files (Maybe zlib + acknowledgement?) 2. Elegant & efficient syntax for ending screen X / Y parsing before all digits are used [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library)
bing_dai 3y ago
Learning about Christianity, after being an atheist my whole life thus far.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  Curious why Christianity and not some other religion?
  - bing_dai 3y ago
    Mainly because knowledge about Christianity is the most physically accessible to me, as I am a next-door neighbour to a Theology professor of New Testament.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      I am wondering if you became believer, and what changed you if so?
- m1n1 3y ago
  If you have any questions, lemme know. I've been collecting questions and seeing if I can tie them all back to a particular idea. It's nice when things fit together like that
- erulabs 3y ago
  You may enjoy dr Micheal Segrue on YouTube. He is a wonderful philosophy lecturer who has many fantastic lectures on the philosophy of Christianity. [1] https://youtu.be/teQhNXBMxvE?si=3NdaTFuj3QQAkN4l https://youtu.be/teQhNXBMxvE?si=3NdaTFuj3QQAkN4l
- dustincoates 3y ago
  I'd be surprised if you hadn't already read it, but just in case, this audio version of Mere Christianity is my absolute favorite: https://www.audible.com/pd/Mere-Christianity-Audiobook/B00JPK6A64 https://www.audible.com/pd/Mere-Christianity-Audiobook/B00JP... I also really enjoyed One Year Bible with Bill Creasy. It doesn't get too academic, which may be a downside if that's what you're looking for, but I found him to be very engaging: https://www.audible.com/pd/One-Year-Bible-Audiobook/B00G5OEHPO https://www.audible.com/pd/One-Year-Bible-Audiobook/B00G5OEH... And, although our theologies diverge quite a bit, I found that the Bible Binge podcast is pretty entertaining. It "translates" Bible stories into modern pop culture references: https://faithadjacent.com/show/theclassics/ https://faithadjacent.com/show/theclassics/
dolmen 3y ago
SQLite Archive Files: https://sqlite.org/sqlar.html https://sqlite.org/sqlar.html I'm writing a Go package to read them: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dolmen-go/sqlar/sqlarfs https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dolmen-go/sqlar/sqlarfs
DontchaKnowit 3y ago
The band Cloud Rat. Some of the sickest, gnarliest grind metal music ever. Super creative, relentless drums, awesome production. Just so nasty. Trying to learn the album Pollinator on guitar at the moment. Guitar player has tabs posted on his instagram
chaibiker 3y ago
Finally launched our crowdfunding campaign for everyone who wishes great desk work jobs didn't come at the expense of the harm of sitting for extended periods. (here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/movably-pro-the-freedom-of-movement-at-your-desk#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/movably-pro-the-freedom-o...)
appplication 3y ago
I just downloaded Ableton Live and it’s been a blast playing with it. Similarly, I finally understand how modular synths work and it’s basically just functional programming with sound. I haven’t bought any modulars yet but I’m really looking forward to getting into it in the new year. Music production is very cool and I can’t wait to learn more.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  > It’s haven’t bought any Modular’s yet but I’m really looking forward to getting into other on the new year. http://cardinal.kx.studio http://cardinal.kx.studio https://vcvrack.com/ https://vcvrack.com/ The former is libre and gratis, runs as a standalone or plugin and in the browser!! and is based on the latter. The latter has a libre and gratis standalone version, the plugin version is non-gratis.
- jnovek 3y ago
  This is me, it was my pandemic hobby and then it just stuck. I’m still terrible on pretty much every front but I’m constantly improving. Take your time with modular. It’s easy to get carried away and overspend. Each module is deeper than it looks and you really benefit from getting to know each one. Edit: and, of course, VCV Rack is the best.
- mr_sturd 3y ago
  Good stuff! I started getting in to this at the start of the year. Already had an old, dusty MicroKORG and MIDI interface to use it as a controller, but recently splashed out on a bigger controller as the Korg's tiny keys were hurting me - plus, I wanted something bigger to get better at piano! A couple of free soft synths I'd recommend are Surge XT, and Vital. https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/ https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/ https://vital.audio/ https://vital.audio/
- tommychillfiger 3y ago
  I did audio production for about 10 years before pivoting into tech, ha! Live sound for work, but I'm also a musician so I've spent my fair share of time with Logic Pro. It's funny because I also want to dig more into synths, I've always been a guitarist and have thus far only used soft synths mostly due to not having the money to play with nicer equipment. Now that I make good money, I haven't found time to circle back to it. Very high on my wish list is a nice analog synth and maybe a physical sequencer. I find that what happens to me is the futzing around with the DAW gets between my idea and getting it recorded - I've done some solid work at getting channel strip settings and templates built out to minimize this, but at the end of the day I need some more equipment. It really is a ton of fun, though. It's as broad and deep as you want to make it, not unlike software more generally.
ashwindharne 3y ago
Secondhand shopping and stores Trying to build something for businesses like thrift stores, vintage stores, secondhand stores, used furniture, consignment, etc. I started working at a vintage shop a few months ago after leaving my SWE job, and it's a pretty analog industry. No updated inventory, digital presence, business intelligence, etc. (not for lack of usefulness or lack of trying, just because digitizing hundreds or thousands of unique one-off items is really labor intensive and not ergonomic on existing tools). Hoping to build something purpose built for the use case that can also make shopping secondhand more accessible to end consumers. Feel like the social stigma against "used goods" is dissipating, and shopping secondhand/vintage is seen as a viable or even preferable option b/c of cost, uniqueness, cyclical nature of trends, or sustainability efforts. If anyone has any thoughts or tips, I'd love to hear them!
- jtr1 3y ago
  No particular tips, but would love to follow along if you’re blogging about it anywhere!
jfim 3y ago
Photography. It's a good excuse to go outdoors and get some fresh air, and it's fun to get a good shot every once in a while.
rpmisms 3y ago
Brining the meat rabbits I just slaughtered. Should have some great roast rabbit on Thursday. Easiest meat animal to raise, delicious.
- is_true 3y ago
  How do you prepare it?
  - rpmisms 3y ago
    Either rabbit roast (bacon + tomato) or exactly like chicken. The taste is close enough that most people can't tell, but rabbit accepts savory flavors better. Rosemary is phenomenal with rabbit.
- blovescoffee 3y ago
  What are the major costs associated with raising rabbits besides land?
  - rpmisms 3y ago
    Land is not a major cost factor, as the rabbit equivalent of a broiler will not be moving too much, and will either live in small cage with mom, or medium cage as a grow-out with its siblings. Only real expense is feed, and you do want quality feed. I get a locally made non-GMO feed for $23.50/50lbs.
ge96 3y ago
Getting out of debt somehow After that it would be robotics, navigation, space, underwater exploration, random stuff, I'd be a tinkerer, have a ranch somewhere
namrog84 3y ago
Quit my job earlier this year to start an indie game studio and a little bit of contributions to misc open-source projects. A fair balance of relax time but also enjoying the time off. There is so much I want to do and get excited for, but I still suffer a lot of procrastination related problems or else I feel like I could have done a tremendous amount more. I feel like there is lifetimes of things I get excited about and want to do, but spend so little time doing them. :( It sucks
- mashlol 3y ago
  I'm quitting my job in December to work on my game full time, neat to find someone else who also quit for something similar. Would love to connect, maybe we can help motivate each other :). My email is in my profile if you're interested in connecting, same goes for anyone else in a similar situation.
- phforms 3y ago
  Can relate. I get excited about so many things I want to do, but ultimately lack the energy and abilities (executive dysfunction) to do even a tiny fraction of them. And there is this constant self-pressure of “I should do so much more”, which is not helping. Anyway, hope you have a great time and success with your indie game studio!
- tommychillfiger 3y ago
  Feel this hard. I feel like I did well during unemployment while the Covid lockdown played out. I was an audio engineer before that, and during lockdown I ran 30 miles a week, made a lot of music, learned some Python, managed to pivot into tech (analytics). Still, it never feels like I'm really doing anywhere near as much as I could - that was all pretty much 3-5 hours a day with the rest being more or less pure leisure and rest. Part of me is tempted to buy into the idea that the human animal just isn't naturally inclined to do more than a handful of hours of difficult or "productive" work in an average day. I honestly have no idea whether I'm normal or not, but I agree the pressure I put on myself probably isn't ultimately helpful most of the time. It's hard not to feel like others are getting way more done, and even harder to tell how much of what is presented is authentic.
nathants 3y ago
playing high performance multiplayer games. building high performance multiplayer games. exercising. hanging out in the backyard.
- skoocda 3y ago
  Any specific favorites? Or technical achievements that are worth calling out? I feel like battlebit is laudable for getting 254 players in sync at a 60 tick rate
nonethewiser 3y ago
Family, especially our kids. Still have career goals which im working hard towards but its all in service to building a family.
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
Tabla. These are drums from the South Asian region, which are probably the "most" harmonious drums you can construct. I am learning to play, but also slowly working out the physics of them. There is some work in the area, including foundational work by Ramen, the Nobel prize winning physicist. But there is quite a lot still to be done. I would like to turn some of the art of making Tabla into the science of making Tabla.
- davesque 3y ago
  Who's your favorite Tabla player? I became oddly obsessed with this instrument for about two or three years of my life. It helped that I had an extremely competent teacher. My favorite player was Anindo Chatterjee. Of course, there are also a lot of extremely talented younger players.
  - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    I was training for a few years under Ustaad Khursheed Hussain, one of the finest Tabla players Pakistan produced. But he unfortunately died recently. While you are training under a master, it's hard to have a favorite player, because you are also learning the style of your Ustaad. And doing that requires making that your favorite style, because that is the best way to imbue the master's style in your being.
    - davesque 3y ago
      Yeah, I'm aware that this is often the arrangement between teacher and student in India or Pakistan. My teacher was Nepali and studied both with his childhood teacher in Kathmandu and also with Suresh Talwalkar in New Delhi. We were actually about exactly the same age when I studied with him (both in our late twenties). So it was a much less formal arrangement because he was not exactly my elder. Also, it was an American setting as he was living around Denver, Colorado in the US. Regardless, I still felt I owed him a great deal of respect because he took his music very seriously. He was legitimately a virtuoso at Tabla. Truly an amazing player. And I was committed to practicing diligently. Since life in the US didn't permit me to study all day with him, I spent a lot of time finding recordings of performances on Youtube to learn from. As I mentioned, my favorite performer other than my teacher was Anindo Chatterjee. My teacher also knew of Chatterjee and enjoyed his playing as much as I did. Since he was from a younger generation, I don't think he was bothered by my trying to learn from watching other players while I wasn't practicing with him. Anyhow, nice to see mention of Tabla on Hacker News :).
philip1209 3y ago
Low-plastic living. I read a book by the world's first zero-waste restaurant, Silo. The book got me thinking about how different our lives would be if oil were expensive. "Pretend oil is really expensive" is a good proxy for doing things that are "eco-friendly." Since reading the book, I've tried to eliminate single-use plastic from most of my life. It's incredibly hard. Everything from my socks to my vegetable packaging to my dog's toys to my floor is made of plastic. I've slowly been adjusting my habits - such as checking whether clothing is natural or oil-based, buying food mostly at the farmers market, and eating in instead of takeaway. These little change have decreased my carbon footprint immensely. I enjoy playing this game of "pretend oil is expensive" even though it's not because it's revealing problems we will need to tackle as a society. At some point we will run out of oil. When that happens, everything will be impacted. Travel, food delivery, and most of all healthcare.
- zx8080 3y ago
  Does replacing plastics with paper packaging means that trees will be eliminates much more on scale?
  - philip1209 3y ago
    Trees are renewable. The mass of a tree comes from the carbon it extracts from the air. [1] It's not a zero-sum, though. Why does my cilantro need to come in a plastic bag? At the farmer's market, it doesn't come packaged at all. [1] And, fire is basically reversing the process - releasing the sunlight that created the plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE
    - OJFord 3y ago
      > Why does my cilantro need to come in a plastic bag? Everything here is hugely regional, but two answers spring to mind: 1) coriander is frequently sold in unpackaged bunches, typically larger than the packaged ones; 2) it's packaged in plastic because then it can be filled with some inert gas that prolongs spoiling, it's not completely obtuse. (In the UK for example Waitrose sells it growing reared in Sussex, or packaged grown idk Spain or Monaco or somewhere; Sainsbury's sells it similarly packaged or cut and bunched of undisclosed origin.)
mancuso5 3y ago
nature sounds! they help me focus and relax :) earth.fm is now at 700+ recordings
costco 3y ago
I'm reading a book about electricity markets. Modeling electricity prices using a mean-reverting model with "jumps", exotic derivatives, etc. Pretty exciting stuff. Though you need a million dollars in liquid net worth to trade with any ISO so it's a bit out of my league. Really interesting author too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mack Am working on some large scale authorship attribution stuff on the side and have an Arty A7 that I want to make do something besides flash purple LEDs but I have some health bullshit that's killing my motivation. But I'm working on it.
- woliveirajr 3y ago
  - "authorship attribution stuff" Can you tell more about it? I've done something about it in my master's and PhD, but I'm away from this area for some time and don't know the actual state of the art...
  - costco 3y ago
    It's like my previous project https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 but on a much larger amount of data. Rewrote everything in C++, tried to minimize allocations etc but still have some things to optimize. Current algorithm is just the cosine delta method on word/character {1,2,3}-grams as described in https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/32/suppl_2/ii4/3865676 https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/32/suppl_2/ii4/3865676 combined with a few other features from the Writeprint paper. I have no academic or professional linguistic background so it's definitely not state of the art, but it works reasonably well and from what I can tell in the literature the fancier methods work slightly better but have significantly worse performance. The beauty of the cosine delta is that I can put the vectorized representations of each author into something like hnswlib (InnerProductSpace) or Milvus and get really fast comparisons.
- applied_heat 3y ago
  The market operators always need people who can help make sure the market is operating correctly and that market power is not being abused
- 3y ago
atilimcetin 3y ago
Learning to play a musical instrument I've started with the Vangoa EWI-100, which is an affordable, silent, and good enough MIDI EWI (electronic wind instrument) device. I have also been learning some of the technical details of MIDI. I sometimes use it alone, and sometimes with a Cocos Reaper with free VSTs. I have only been doing this for 4 days, but I am already enjoying it a lot. If I continue to play it, most probably I will upgrade to a better EWI.
SwiftyBug 3y ago
Learning to use Vim! I've tried three times before in the past 10 years. This is the first time it actually clicked. It's the first time I've tried Neovim. It's awesome and I feel like I'm playing a game with myself while working. I thought it would take much longer to get to the speed I'm at now. I've been using Vim exclusively for a month.
- champoradopapi 3y ago
  Same here! What keys/combinations are you usually using right now?
  - SwiftyBug 3y ago
    I try to not stray too far from the default key binding as I think it would be good to be able to use Vim on servers that don't have all my config. But, hey, what's the point of using Vim if you're not having fun ricing it? These are some indispensable key maps to me: In visual mode, move a line up or down: vim.keymap.set("v", "J", ":m '>+1<CR>gv=gv") vim.keymap.set("v", "K", ":m '<-2<CR>gv=gv") In normal mode, replace all occurences of the word under the cursor: vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>s", [[:%s/\<<C-r><C-w>\>/<C-r><C-w>/gI<Left><Left><Left>]]) In normal or visual mode, Yank to the OS's pasteboard: vim.keymap.set({"n", "v"}, "<leader>y", [["+y]]) And there are plenty more that are related to specific plugins. Also, I've remapped caps lock to esc in the OS. This makes it way easier to leave insert mode without leaving the home row.
- november84 3y ago
  Any resources you can share or did you jump into the docs?
  - theossuary 3y ago
    Tbh the best bit of advice I ever got for learning vim is to keep a sticky note on your monitor with 5-10 motions you want to learn, and replace it once you've started using them consistently. Start with h, j, k, l, w, b, a, i, o, esc And go from there
  - 3y ago
temeya 3y ago
Working on a programming language competency scale for myself. The idea is to give one's self confidence at using a specific language. Everyone learns programming differently obviously, but as someone who's self-taught, it might be useful for others.
rlawson 3y ago
Learning Lua and (re)learning C. After 20+ years of Java and Python the minimalism is deeply satisfying
uoaei 3y ago
Groundwater. The issues, the proposed policy solutions, the technologies to support study and engineering, and potentially overlooked avenues to get a lot of freshwater otherwise destined for the ocean into the ground instead.
- defrost 3y ago
  Topically: Global land subsidence mapping reveals widespread loss of aquifer storage capacity (October 2023) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41933-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41933-z Scientists map loss of groundwater storage around the world https://phys.org/news/2023-11-scientists-loss-groundwater-storage-world.html https://phys.org/news/2023-11-scientists-loss-groundwater-st...
kleinishere 3y ago
Preserving family moments with a 35mm film camera and the attachment an analog photograph engenders vs. digital. After seeing a friend with young kids post candid photos of his family for the last few years, I decided to give it a try. Purchased a Retina IIIc rangefinder camera (from the 1950s, preceded SLRs) and it's one of the most amazing purely mechanical, consumer-focused engineered products I've held in my hands. Got a scanner, successfully booted the Nikon Scan abandonware on a virtualized Windows XP environment, and saw my first roll of photos appear last weekend. Wife and extended family absolutely loved it. I've reviewed those 36 photos (standard roll length) more in the past week than the 1,000 family photos of the past 2 years on my cell phone. Excited for more.
- graposaymaname 3y ago
  Me too! I started shooting with a Canon AE-1 and am absolutely loving it so far. It’s definitely an expensive hobby considering the price of film, processing and high quality scanning - but still I love the process. Maybe since it is slow and you can still easily make mistakes shooting film. Makes me think a lot more about them somehow, very wholesome hobby to have.
- sotix 3y ago
  Film cameras truly are a joy. I’m using a Minolta X-700[0] myself. I also review the photos taken with it far more than my digital photos. There’s something about slowing down and focusing on taking a few good shots instead of a quick action with minimal effort that feels so rewarding. And they can look beautiful with the right film. Enjoy your new camera in good health! [0] https://www.kenrockwell.com/minolta/700.htm https://www.kenrockwell.com/minolta/700.htm
Tao3300 3y ago
Folk music. Digging up weird old ballads and learning about how they've changed over centuries. I'm putting together a version of Captain Kidd (Roud 1900) for my repertoire right now.
nwiswell 3y ago
Powerlifting. Solitary and meditative if you want it to be; social and uplifting if you don't. It's healthy in a variety of ways (including bone density; physical activity; higher BMR and glucose metabolism; improved cardiovascular function). Also being strong is useful surprisingly often. Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested, with the exception of (hopefully) temporary setbacks like injury. Hitting personal records and milestones feels particularly good because you know you've earned it. It's hard! But it's also not so hard that I'm liable to get discouraged. Lots of people prefer bodybuilding style training, but there's something magic about the barbell for me. Olympic lifts are also a lot of fun, but they're more technical and you need more gear and space. Also it's much easier to quantify your strength progress (I have a literal spreadsheet), and it feels less vain than focusing on looks (not that it isn't a significant bonus). Dunno. Feels good. I'm gonna keep at it. Two thumbs up.
- probablynish 3y ago
  > Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested This really resonates with me. Not powerlifting myself, but I have a strength training routine at the gym with the goal of improving my right knee pain. I have to take things very slow (increase by 1 rep each session, up the weight every ~2 weeks by the smallest possible increment) but looking at my graph this year is very satisfying. This little corner of my life feels a lot more under my control than anything else right now
  - nwiswell 3y ago
    > This little corner of my life feels a lot more under my control than anything else right now Yes that's exactly it! It's something of a refuge from whatever other chaos I'm dealing with. I get to feel good about trying and even better about succeeding. The body is incredibly resilient, and given enough stimulus and patient consistency, it's pretty amazing how strong average people are capable of becoming. I'm reminded of this quote from Socrates: "No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeking the beauty and strength of which his body is capable." I am not young anymore, but I'm not old, either, and I've come to the conclusion it's certainly better to start late than to never discover my limits at all.
onthecanposting 3y ago
Reduce the massive amount of dysfunction in heavy civil construction project delivery. If you only knew how bad things really are.
motohagiography 3y ago
Horsemanship, as a philosophical pursuit and an AI-proof retirement business. Learning Bach arrangements for guitar to play around a campfire. My oddly perfect job.
beatboxrevival 3y ago
democratizing traffic data and monitoring for high-risk corridors and neighborhoods
- greenie_beans 3y ago
  you got website or github?
  - beatboxrevival 3y ago
    I'll reply here when I hit publish on the repo.
dcw303 3y ago
Math as prep for 3d game programming. I've been out of school a long time, and when I was there I didn't even get to the pre-calculus level. This year I've churned through all the introductory level texts from Art Of Problem Solving. Yes, they're written for high schoolers and you need to have some humility to admit you might be missing or have forgotten some fundamentals, but the lesson strucutre really appeals to me. It's the only series I've found that respects the learner and really builds up knowledge one piece at a time. Before I start the intermediate texts and the calculus book, I've taken a detour to "Linear Algebra: Theory, Intuition, Code" and it's sticking a lot better now than previous attempts on the subject. So that gives me some confidence.
- tommychillfiger 3y ago
  This is awesome to hear. I took trigonometry and business calculus 1 & 2 in college, but that's a far cry from what I'd need to do anything interesting with ML which I'm interested in trying. I've bought a few textbooks for statistics, math, and data engineering - I'm in the middle of getting my life together in terms of habits and time management so hopefully I'll be right there with you doing what is essentially remedial math for someone in their 30s, lol. I know it will be exciting once I make space for it and get into a rhythm. Cheers!
- yura 3y ago
  The Art of Problem Solving books are not for regular high schoolers. I'd say they're more geared towards gifted high schoolers (which may eventually go on to compete on contests such as the USAMO or the IMO). So definitely no shame in learning from them.
  - rjbwork 3y ago
    Yup. They were the bible for our competitive math teams in HS.
- Scarlxd 3y ago
  I am currently reading the introductory books of AOPS as I did not do well in high school math. I did not find the way my teacher taught math interesting because it didn't connect with real-world applications. The hardest thing I face as a 21-year-old going through the middle and high school math books is accepting that I lack the foundational knowledge and setting my ego aside. My plan is to learn calculus and linear algebra as a follow-up.
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mortallywounded 3y ago
Three things at the moment: 1. Improving my health / fitness. 2. Learning Korean. 3. Financial freedom through my business (currently growth has flattened...).
- unlikelytomato 3y ago
  What motivates you to learn Korean? I have been doing this recently too. I find it very slow to learn for me in my 30's
  - mortallywounded 3y ago
    I'm in my mid-30s. It's certainly "slower" than when I learned languages in my early 20s. As for motivation, my wife is Korean and our young children speak better Korean than me already =( How about you?
    - unlikelytomato 3y ago
      It's a similar situation for me. I want to make things easier for my in-laws who strongly prefer speaking Korean at home. No kids for me yet but I plan to learn it with them someday. It's a fun experience because of how excited 장모님 is after hearing me say a single word.
restrainingbolt 3y ago
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Ahmad0 3y ago
Very passionate about helping orphans in war-torn region get education and building water pumps
zaptheimpaler 3y ago
Biology and bioinformatics. I've been reading about medicine and biology for a while now and want to get more serious. It's just such a huge fascinating field with a lot we don't know. For now I completed one course on Coursera and am planning on finishing the specialization with 6-7 courses. Also trying to learn some statistics going through ISLR on the side. I considered grad school as well but I don't have much of a shot. So I've been applying to software roles at biotech companies to break in that way. I'll make my own grad school with free online resources:)
- rafaelero 3y ago
  I have similar interest! Let's talk?
  - zaptheimpaler 3y ago
    I would love to! My email is in profile.
robomartin 3y ago
Energy efficiency and optimization through out of the box technology, hardware and software solutions. This is the focus of my latest venture. Market is global. Our first installation went online earlier this year. All self-funded so far. Working on raising a round to scale. Fully deployed, in the US alone, we can free-up enough energy to support over 30 million electric vehicles without having to build a single new power plant of any kind. Yes, applied to YC multiple times as we were developing the technology. Rejected every time. My guess is that the combination of an older solo founder and a complex hardware/software model just didn't pass the filters. I get it. Hardware is hard. We are past the YC level of startup funding at this stage (need ~$5MM), so that's no longer an option. Still in stealth.
jcpst 3y ago
Making an album. It’s been a journey. For about a year I was trying to do it all by myself. Then one former band mate moved back, another reached out and we reunited to make new music. This is gonna sound corny, but after that first time we got back together to jam, later that night I was in tears because it playing with them again was such a large emotional release for me. Now we’re in a great place, we all want the same thing. We’re all in on making new music, no one is trying to make this a career or go on tour. It has to be fun, that’s number one.
- wsintra2022 3y ago
  Nice! I’m starting a project that can automate pressing vinyl records, kinda like a kickstarter, you create a 45 day campaign with the aim of selling 75 pre sales and we then go into production (you need to 100 total). No upfront cost from the artists. Still working on the details. My friends have opened a vinyl pressing factory so I figured building out an automated indie vinyl pressing crowd sourcing app would be cool. Check out Kushty buck records if your interested. It’s my weekend passion project.
- SubGenius 3y ago
  Sounds great, good luck! I'm hoping to get back to making music again after a few years away due to health/life reasons. I definitely know that euphoric feeling of jamming with an old bandmate after a long break. > Now we’re in a great place, we all want the same thing. We’re all in on making new music, no one is trying to make this a career or go on tour. It has to be fun, that’s number one. This is key. I've made more music goofing off than I did when I sat down to write a song seriously.
Aerbil313 3y ago
Nix Flakes. I like to keep things nice and declarative.
brailsafe 3y ago
I couldn't imagine applying the word passion to anything business or computer related, it's not now—nor has it ever been—the right word, but I'm definitely passionate about being in nature, among the mountains and birds, skateboarding, and doing challenging hikes with fun people.
- oakhaven 3y ago
  I agree so much! I've always shivered when they asked me what tech I'm passionate about on job interviews. When I hear/read people who say that they're passionate about a javascript lib or a programming language, it sounds really disingenuous to me (or like marketing bs, depending on context). Although they probably mean well, in most cases.
  - reitanuki 3y ago
    If you only do programming for a job, it is probably very difficult to see how someone could be passionate about computing. I suppose I can't really illuminate this point, but I suppose for me it's about figuring things out and making something? Maybe a bit like maths, but if you play your cards right you have something to come out of it with.
    - brailsafe 3y ago
      Isn't the means somewhat incidental to the process and outcome though, and in that sense isn't it the same type of hobbyist or academic aspect that's as generally appealing as any other? Programming is an appealing activity in a variety of ways if you're working on something appealing in an appealing context, otherwise it's just a tool like any other, therefore the tools are just tools and constrained somewhat to the appeal a tool can have, which isn't negligible, but isn't something I'd apply the word passion to; much like how I wouldn't describe using a computer as something I'm passionate about, or hiking poles or headlamps or skateboards or knives for carving unless my craft is knife making. I enjoy the process (usually) of writing Swift and learning new things along the way, but the part that draws me back isn't the act of programming, it's derived from the problem; resolving the problem is often just as interesting sketching something out on paper or thinking about it, just like maths. Serious game developers probably get into it having what they'd describe as a passion for gaming or something, but 6 months away from their computer and I'm sure they wouldn't miss writing arbitrary c++ or wasting their bodies away in front of a screen for 10 hours a day quite as much, it's just often a necessary implementation detail.
thimabi 3y ago
Blogging in multiple languages. I’ve launched many blogs over the years, but they were mostly a hobby and consistency was lacking. My goal is to change that now, by writing every day about some things that interest me while improving my skills in multiple languages. It’s been roughly two months since I began and this is something that truly inspires me at the moment. Everyone can benefit from writing down and sharing one’s knowledge from time to time.
- primozk 3y ago
  Can you share it? I want to know if you're mixing languages "on the same page" or you have any kind of separation.
hypertexthero 3y ago
Drawing with pencil on rough paper every morning. Finding and listening to good music while working on my own first EP. Writing about video games and whatever comes to mind on my website, as well as playing old classics, indies, and AAA giganto-games. Writing to friends regularly.
hahahacorn 3y ago
Running. I got the bug about 12 weeks ago. I had never ran longer than 1.5 miles continuously 12 weeks ago. Now I’m planning my next Sundays long run. 12.5ish miles. Im a heavy guy. My heaviest was 270, but I’m down to 220 now. I hated running my entire life. But I finally figured out how to run pain free and now it’s the thing I look forward to everyday. It’s also tremendously rewarding to see such rapid improvement. When I first started I ran a 38 minute 5k, and 10 weeks later I ran a 25:44. I’ve almost improved my 1mi time from 8:30 to 6:30. Signed up for a marathon a couple weeks ago and gave myself 6 months to train. Sub 4:30, here we come
- Dowwie 3y ago
  I went through a similar transformation, being overweight and not being able to run a mile without losing my breath. I broke through the really steep climb by applying BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits method to my daily runs, celebrating small wins with visualization. Within 3 years, I successfully finished the Lake Placid marathon, then the year after I completed the Philadelphia marathon. I was still overweight when I ran these. My goal was to complete 26.2, and I did, yet my finish time was 5hr+. In hindsight, I would have been stronger had I gotten the weight down to an ideal level before race day. Finishing the race, even if you walk-run the last couple of miles, is still a major achievement. Don't downplay your achievement based on finish time. If anything, a 5hr+ is even harder because you've run for a longer time while carrying a heavier body. I don't have time in my life for taking long runs on weekends but enjoy thinking about when I did. The entire day revolves around the morning long run and then basically being unproductive for the rest of the day, and that's a luxury I can't afford. I began running regularly in 2009 and continue to this day, although I've had some setbacks due to running-related injury. I've run through Summer thunderstorms and winter snow. I love being outside in nature.
- theryan 3y ago
  Any tips for running pain free? I used to run pretty often (3-5 times per week) for 5+ miles. Longest was 11. However, my feet started hurting while running -- never while walking even long distances.
  - 3y ago
dan_quixote 3y ago
Learning Korean to better communicate with my GFs family and take advantage of _finally_ having real motivation to learn another language. I'm really enjoying having a different type of challenge than I'm used to. Mostly approaching it with Duolingo and Anki vocab cards with moderate success so far. We both have our own careers, kids, various responsibilities...so I don't get much time to practice with her. And practicing memorization at the end of a long day is tough, so I'd love to hear any tips you all may have to improve my memorization techniques and mnemonics.
- zweice 3y ago
  Practice in the morning
- Ilasky 3y ago
  Kind of in a similar boat! Been learning Korean to speak more with my girlfriend’s family, especially since we’re going to Korea soon. My biggest waves of improvement have come from reading aloud the Talk to Me in Korean books. I’ve found that getting the structure of the sentences has helped me and then I learn vocabulary by using what I interact with on a day-to-day basis. There’s also a Korean slang book by Talk to Me in Korean which is really great too! Helps break out of the “learned it from a textbook” sound.
- orlandohill 3y ago
  Focus on acquiring the language through meaningful input, rather than rote memorization. Favor listening comprehension over reading comprehension. The Refold guides, YouTube channel, and Discord server are good resources for language learners with busy schedules. https://refold.la/ https://refold.la/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- second_brekkie 3y ago
  Get Korean teacher irl or on italki. At least once or twice a week.Try to speak and listen to much Korean as you can. Watch Korean kids tv shows on Netflix with Korean & english subtitles (I use language reactor chrome plug in) Real life Korean conversations for beginners by Talk to me in Korean is good. When you get to an intermediate level (TOPIK level 3ish) the iyagi podcast is GREAT. Ive been going through the sejong institute practical Korean textbooks. You can get them for free online. They focus on understanding and expressing youself in spoken Korean. The audio examples emulate Korean speech much more than other Korean textbooks I've used. The sejong institute also to free Korean online courses with weekly zoom lectures. How to study Korean, sells anki flashcard decks with audio attached. The lessons are free. They're quite dense but are BRILLANT as a reference to grammar you have forgotten or want to know in more nuance. Vocab-wise when you do flashcards have two for each direction KOR<->ENG. Learn the words for 3 days before putting them into an Anki deck (e.g. 30 words a day, but every day 10 words 'graduate' to the anki deck) I find Anki good for keeping words memorised but not learning them. When you are looking at the korean word play the audio, it helps SO much! Remember Korean is one of the hardest languages for a English native speaker to learn. There are times when you will feel you're making no progress. Then one day you will realise you actually understand what you MIL is saying. Have a sacred time every day where you do some Korean. Ideally at least an hour, anything less you will not improve quickly enough to re-motivate you, or thats at least how it was for me. Good luck 파이팅!
sam8401 3y ago
Truth
cactusplant7374 3y ago
I have been sick with colds and fatigue for 1.5 months. I have another two weeks and then I can get back to normal programming. I hope. At this moment, I am feeling passionate about seeing my wife.
vivekd 3y ago
This post caught my attention because recently I met a woman I really admire. She dropped out of her computer engineering class, took a vow of celibacy and poverty and became a missionary with a Catholic sect. The reason I admire her isn't that. What caught my attention about her is that she has a sense of purpose. She has a purpose in life and has devoted her life to it. I used to have one. My goal was to make the legal system cheaper and more accessible. And I devoted the last decade of my life to that. Now that's fallen apart and I'm a little lost and it hurts me alot. I hope I'll find a purpose soon. That's what I'm passionate about right now, finding a new purpose or a new way to accomplish my past purpose.
- chadk 3y ago
  Thanks for your honest answer. Finding purpose is a pretty good passion
- kylebenzle 3y ago
  If you are into the legal system issues right now I am passionate about fathers rights and its been a huge outlet for me. SO many kids and fathers are desperate for help and 50/50 shared parenting is a admirable and achievable goal. [1] https://www.sharedparenting.org/ https://www.sharedparenting.org/
- lewisjoe 3y ago
  I worked with a founder who had the same vision. Democratising legal industry using tech. It was my first job after college and was fun building a contract negotiation platform, document assembling API, etc. Learnt a lot but had to leave because something was missing & it wasn't working out. The person who I worked with has the same name signature as yours: vivek durai
  - serialNumber 3y ago
    Would be incredible if it was the same person
    - the_common_man 3y ago
user3939382 3y ago
Dependent types and type theory. I’ve only been understand small pieces at the fringes so far but each thing I am able to get is like a little mind blowing. Also moon phases (?)
ReFruity 3y ago
Recording music. I have recently started recording Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto no. 2 using some DAW and orchestral instruments from my digital piano. It is not easy to make sound good, and a major undertaking since even the first part is 10 minutes long. But it is a fascinating process to me. I hope it turns out ok.
nevster 3y ago
I created a booktube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@NevsBookChannel https://www.youtube.com/@NevsBookChannel I'd been writing reviews on Goodreads for years so it was kind of a logical next step. Also have found it interesting to learn how to edit videos and improve my confidence in speaking. PS there is a review of Gerald Weinberg's "Are Your Lights On?" in there, so it's tangentially related to coding. Currently reading Code Complete.
- edanm 3y ago
  Oh awesome, subscribed and will be watching some videos from the backlog :)
  - nevster 3y ago
    Thanks!
- Cerpicio 3y ago
  Subscribed! I have a stack of books I've been meaning to read. I just need to make time for it.
bostonwalker 3y ago
Parenting. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about how to prepare my kid to grow up around the internet, smartphones, and AI. Our technology often takes an indifferent or even cynical view of children, and I can’t understand why there aren’t better tools available (e.g. smartphone designs) that put their developmental needs ahead of the need to exploit them for immediate profit.
- nabusman 3y ago
  I'm starting down this path soon as well. Any books/resources that you recommend?
  - bostonwalker 3y ago
    Congrats on that! My kid is too young for tech so far so I haven't fully dived into the issue yet, but one thing I've already done for him to start him off on the right foot is set up with a Proton email account on the family domain name. It's great because family members have been sending notes for him to read when he grows up and we have been cc'ing him on baby pictures, medical records, and vital stats. And when you think about it, our email accounts are the foundations of our online identities, so it's kind of messed up that we normalize surveillance of our children's online activity from Day 1 by setting them up with inboxes from Google, etc. and you owe it to your kids to give them privacy and, eventually, agency. I'll turn over the keys when he's old enough (of course I'll probably make a backup of things first)!
    - protonmail 3y ago
      Happy to hear this!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jefc1111 3y ago
  I am on this road too, with two children between 5 and 10. My conclusion is pretty much that if I don't want them to do those kinds of activities (social media, youtube, games, endless TV) then I have to put my money where my mouth is and proactively fill their time, either by giving up mine, facilitating time with friends, or by paying someone else (after school activities, lessons etc). I have heard the argument often (form older folk, mainly) that it's ok for kids to be bored. Kids _should_ be bored sometimes etc etc. And while I agree with the spirit of such, to an extent, it was easier when I was a kid because there wasn't so much competition from the outside world for my attention. If I had nothing to do, I'd have to find something to do, and the only options were 'good' things that weren;t commercially orientated attention-thieves made in the mould of services intended for adults. Now, if my kid is bored, they know that they can watch pretty much any TV program ever made, and chip and change at will, they can play games on my phone, they can play games / youtube on their laptop etc etc and half the kids at school are watching Squid Game and playing Fortnite, so it's pretty hard to justify saying "no you can't do those things" unless you are willing to present some fairly compelling alternatives. Kids love attention from their parents, and hanging out with other kids. And on the plus side, giving your kids attention is normally pretty fun if you can make the time to do it properly, imho. Often hard to do though.
Ilasky 3y ago
Violin for me! Been going at it for a bit more than 3 years and have just started learning one of the Bach Sonatas. It feels great to have a direct output from effort put in. The combination of physical and concentrated mental effort leaves me feeling refreshed after a good practice.
- tetris11 3y ago
  As a child violinist, the act of approaching the violin, rosining up, and putting it under my chin fills me with dread. Too many forced practice sessions. My siblings were raised the same way, but somehow my older sibling devised her own passion from it, independent of parental pressure and she played it much longer than I or my younger sibling did. It's a great skill to have, and sometimes I find myself whistling old orchestra tunes that have no searchable lyrics (bzw. John Playwright's Newcastle lived in my head for 15 years before I found its name via a music contour search). One day I will pick it up again. Without the fear or the dread, and just play for happiness.
  - Ilasky 3y ago
    That’s definitely tough. Learning an instrument as an adult has had its advantages that I’m learning for myself and no one else. I’ve accepted that I won’t be the next great violinist, but want to be good enough for me. I sincerely hope you do pick it up again! Or maybe trying a new instrument for yourself.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
Studying the relation between just how volatile SPY 0-day-to-expiration options are in regards to the underlying. A 1% directional move in SPY can yield a 1600%+ in most cases if you can time it right in regards to direction + strike. I would never actually trade or anything like that. It's just fun to scrape data. Historical option chain data isn't really publicly free/available so I wrote a scraper + analytics on top of it.
- 4death4 3y ago
  Any conclusions?
  - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
    I could be wrong because of the obvious downside of "if you get it wrong it'll expire 100% worthless by end of day" but if you can use "technical analysis" to know when to enter a long/short position, I'd say don't use margin (short) and don't buy the underlying (long), instead buy a slightly out of the money (this is where predicting which direction the market will go and for how much/how long gets... impossible) call or put depending on direction can yield a better return. Obviously it's all gambling but I see why so many people are attracted (addicted?) to it (Robinhood traders) If you lose 100% of a $100 out-of-the-money bet 7 times but then hit an 800% ROI... you break even, right?
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  FT has written extensively about the rise of zero day options on the S&P 500 index. Example: https://www.ft.com/content/312e9b3c-a5e0-4eff-8b9a-8637696d2f6f https://www.ft.com/content/312e9b3c-a5e0-4eff-8b9a-8637696d2...
  - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
    date,start_time,end_time,underlying_start_price,underlying_end_price,instrument_start_price,instrument_end_price,instrument_price_change_percentage,instrument_type,instrument_strike_price 2023-10-09,14:52:01,18:56:19,427.14,432.79,0.09,1.92,21.5294,Call,431.00 2023-09-27,18:11:48,19:12:18,422.74,427.31,0.09,2.42,27.4706,Call,425.00 2023-10-12,16:21:35,18:11:44,437.19,431.44,0.06,1.92,33.9091,Put,433.00 2023-10-06,14:09:50,18:48:25,420.93,431.04,0.06,4.12,73.8182,Call,427.00 I don't think HackerNews supports enough Markdown to show tables but... tell me what you think about that.
kylebenzle 3y ago
Getting Ohio House Bill 14 passed and fathers rights in general. Right now in the state of Ohio a father has 0 default rights to his own children, even AFTER paternity. Ohio is a "mothers rights" state meaning that be default the mother has 100% custody so it is always an uphill batter to get time with your kids if the mother doesnt want you to. [1] https://www.sharedparenting.org/ https://www.sharedparenting.org/
matthewmueller 3y ago
Building out the web ecosystem for Go over at: https://github.com/livebud https://github.com/livebud Go is a surprisingly pleasant language for building websites, especially for indie hackers, yet the tooling is not quite there. I'm trying to get the developer productivity for building websites in Go to be on par with building web applications in Node. With ESBuild and Goja maturing, we're pretty close. Go is still just missing a few important connections needed to the frontend ecosystems (e.g. React, Tailwind, etc.) Let me know if you're also interested in this space!
- veqq 3y ago
  What about go tooling's missing in your mind? I've never found a language as prepared for it (node feels horrifying and dreadful in compariosn).
  - matthewmueller 3y ago
    Mostly the frontend story. Server-rendered React pages that work with layouts and error pages. You can cobble something together, but it's not as seamless as Next.js or Remix.
chadk 3y ago
This is a great thread! So many interesting topics. Awesome to see. For me, at the moment, it is internet governance. Kinda like getting involved in local city council politics, but at internet scale. There are so many ways to get involved it is confusing... and it often seems so abstract for an everyday dev, especially if you are just a frontender like me. I have been interested in governance for a while, but had my first participation opportunity at the UN Internet Governance Forum in Kyoto last month, and have been slowly blogging some of my learnings: https://micro.chadkohalyk.com/2023/10/30/attending-the-internet.html https://micro.chadkohalyk.com/2023/10/30/attending-the-inter... It has motivated me to interact more with the IETF and W3Cs. Like local politics, this stuff actually is important... even if the entire community does not participate.
robviren 3y ago
Writing as a method of processing my feelings on the tension between using my time for cheap entertainment to enjoy life and my desire to balance out dopamine hits resulting in the erosion of things I enjoy. I am channeling these things into a Paladin class, because for some reason that speaks to me. I have promised myself that at no point will this see the light of day. That makes me write more fearlessly.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
The same thing I’ve been passionate about since I was five: computers and software.
lasermatts 3y ago
Acrylic painting! I’m recovering from a knee injury so I’ve had a rough time keeping my mind occupied without being online all of my waking hours. It’s been a ton of fun painting based off of famous impressionist works, pictures I’ve taken over the years, and from my imagination, and it’s definitely given me a fun new way of looking at the world!
jodrellblank 3y ago
The Brompton folding bicycle[1]. I have been obsessing over it to the point where I contacted the manufacturer because one of the product pictures had the wrong number of cables on it. The folding mechanism is an amazing piece of design, it not only collapses small but it also keeps the grubby tyres off the ground, keeps the chain and cogs inside the fold, can be left with the seat up to wheel around, or the handlebars up to wheel around - and bags mounted on the handlebars stay upright and usable. The the changes over the decades (it was lengthened and the fold joints thickened around 2004), the options (the telescopic seatpost goes higher than the extended seatpost and collapses smaller than it), the colours (the raw laquer editions have problems with rusting), the tweaks people do (leather strap to make the luggage release switch easier to get to, aftermarket 3D printed widgets to make the unfolding lock stay in place[2]), a table of all the available gear ratios... etc. How they have kept the same frame shape and size and design, but vary the colour scheme in special editions making it more of a consumer product than a cyclist product - like Swatch watches used to be, and with the stylised logos. I could argue why it's a great product and why it's a bad product. I have no idea why; I have no commute. I don't use much public transport. I already have a bike. I wouldn't fit well on one. I have no need of one. I've never ridden one, never seen one except in passing, but I'm obsessing over them recently for a couple of months. (Likely some avoidance / dream that $product will improve my life involved). The Kwiggle[3] is a more interesting design, a standup bike that's even more portable. [1] e.g. Everyday Cycling's video "What makes it SO SPECIAL" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6bmuJ98Zc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6bmuJ98Zc8 [2] https://ezclamp.co.uk/ https://ezclamp.co.uk/ [3] https://www.kwigglebike.com/en_US/ https://www.kwigglebike.com/en_US/
- bittercynic 3y ago
  You're contagious! I also have no need for one, and now can't stop reading about them.
- dendrite9 3y ago
  I assume you already know about Bike Friday, but if not you might enjoy, their folding tandem bike! I have been contemplating an AllPacka, or a minivelo, but cargo bikes have my attention in the other direction. https://bikefriday.com/ https://bikefriday.com/
langseth 3y ago
Archery. I got my first bow in 2019 to try bow hunting, but now I am mostly interested in it for target archery. In state competitions, I was on the podium in 3 of the 6 events last year. It’s not a huge field but it feels pretty good. The other big thing this year is walking, it’s simple exercise that has helped me lose 30 pounds since July 1st.
kaycebasques 3y ago
Poverty abolition. I just finished Poverty, By America. It's really moving and seemingly well-researched and honest. I don't know if I'll stick with it. I don't have a good track record of sticking with social activism stuff. Deep-down in my bones I know however that poverty is wrong and really doesn't need to exist at the levels we have collectively accepted as "natural".
- Aachen 3y ago
  How does one 'do' social activism stuff anyway? Do you find out found a local group that hands out informational flyers to move people to act or donate, or how should I imagine this?
  - kaycebasques 3y ago
    I suggest imagining it as "what can I do that will actually affect change?" rather than "what does activism normally look like?" In my case: * Switch to a bank that supports poor people rather than exploits them (overdraft fees are a racket). Beneficial Bank and Amalgamated Bank look viable. * Boycott exploitative companies and be vocal to friends and family about it. Support equitable companies. * Support affordable housing development in my neighborhood. * Join a group dedicated to the cause. Maybe People's Action. * Keep educating myself to be able to persuade others effectively. * Form real relationships and community with poor people. * Participate in local government (just participate, not necessarily serve). Stuff like that. You get the idea.
rustyboy 3y ago
I've really been playing with the idea of getting into trying to mod Valheim.
danrl 3y ago
Building an off-grid home on a piece of land me and my wife bought. We are documenting our progress on YT.
- inatreecrown2 3y ago
  link please?
  - danrl 3y ago
    http://youtube.com/@danrl/videos http://youtube.com/@danrl/videos Thanks for your interest!
wsintra2022 3y ago
Futsal. Just started playing pick up futsal at the local YMCA. I’m pretty unfit right now but really enjoying it. I’d played football (soccer) as a youth and wanted to get back into it. Found the futsal pick ups and jumped in. A lot of fun and really good work out. I’d never heard of futsal until now. Similar to indoor 5 a side. Would recommend it to anyone wanting to play some competitive sports.
lmiller1990 3y ago
DIY! I built a bad fence, a less bad gate, and a little shed. A lot was learned, they have issues but damn I’m proud of my creations.
- beardedwalleye 3y ago
  I DIY as much as I can within reason. I couldn't begin to count the amount of money I've saved over the years. Plus, when it's something you've worked on, it's even easier to work on in the future because you understand it inside and out. I don't work things I don't have the knowledge to do safely (some electrical work for example), or things I feel I don't have the knowledge to do correctly and there's risk of really bad resulting issues (I don't touch load-bearing walls for example).
Aeroi 3y ago
Sailing -trying to raise $30m+ to build a boat to break over 20 records. Surfing -Finding remote point breaks and surfing northern latitudes with nobody around.
- applied_heat 3y ago
  Getting any waves in BC or alaska?
  - mcrwfrd 3y ago
    There's no surfing in BC ;)
    - mmphosis 3y ago
      cold water surfing https://www.surfline.com/travel/canada/british-columbia/regional-district-of-alberni-clayoquot/tofino-surfing-and-beaches/6354950 https://www.surfline.com/travel/canada/british-columbia/regi...
  - Aeroi 3y ago
    I've surfed both. It's fleeting but amazing experience. The remoteness and structure of the coastline makes access the most fun (difficult part). AK gets trickier because its less long period swell and more localized systems, often times resulting in lots of wind and short swell windows. The holy grail is undiscovered long point breaks. Would love to give an LLM a dataset of satellite images and tell it to discover more waves containing similar attributes.
tamimio 3y ago
Not “passionate” per se but I’ve been taking the stairs to my penthouse for around a year now, and sometimes as a challenge (against firefighters who obviously do that for living) I take the stairs and go down by the elevator to take the stairs again four of five times in a row! Good cardio.
riku_iki 3y ago
Inline skating for the last N years, and it is still the best few hours of my life every weekend.
charliewallace 3y ago
Ultra HDR - I predict it will cause a revolution in photography. This isn't the old HDR that was all about capturing a wider range of brightness; it refers to display of a wider range of brightness. It's built into Android 14 and you can now capture Ultra HDR images with the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro. Ultra HDR is really just jpg, uses the standard jpg extension and works the same as a regular jpg, unless your display software knows about the "HDR mask" that's embedded in the metadata, AND your display supports extra brightness. Chrome supports the format, and you can view images that look SO REALISTIC on most recent phones and desktops/laptops that support HDR display, both macs and PCs. The look just like reality. BUT - now I need a way to convert my big camera's HDR images into the Ultra HDR format, and I haven't found a way. Really just need to create and embed a brightness mask. Looks like Adobe is adding support to lightroom...
- great_psy 3y ago
  Can you post some example photos that you found to be a good representation of this format used tastefully ?
- charliewallace 3y ago
  There's also an Apple variant, where the hdr mask is embedded in an HEIF file...
- charliewallace 3y ago
  Here's a link to a Google Photos album with some scenic photos I took using Ultra HDR, mostly in Yosemite last week. For this to work you will need to view it in Chrome on a device such as a fairly recent phone - I believe android or iPhone should work. Even better is a laptop that supports HDR display. Be sure to enable the HDR. Note that the album thumbnail view doesn't show the extra-bright highlights, you need to open a photo. If your device doesn't support HDR display, you'll still see the photos, just not with super bright highlights. https://photos.app.goo.gl/tizNFDFgbC5mzGCU9 https://photos.app.goo.gl/tizNFDFgbC5mzGCU9
adius 3y ago
Building infrastructure to make SQLite databases more useful. - https://airsequel.com https://airsequel.com - SQLite hosting platform - https://github.com/Airsequel/SQLiteDAV https://github.com/Airsequel/SQLiteDAV - WebDAV server for SQLite databases - https://github.com/Airsequel/SQLiteGPT https://github.com/Airsequel/SQLiteGPT - Call ChatGPT directly in SQL queries
wannabebarista 3y ago
Reading research from the past. There are several papers/books in math, economics, logic, philosophy, etc. from the past 200 years that I've been interested in reading but have never had a structured plan to go about it. I've occasionally just read random stuff. This year I started a project where I write some thoughts on a handful of papers/books from 100, 150, and 200 years ago. Here's the result from 1923 [1], and I'm nearly finished with 1873. Organizing the reading like this has kept the scope manageable and the project fun. Hopefully, it's something I'll continue into the future. [1] https://bcmullins.github.io/research-from-1923/ https://bcmullins.github.io/research-from-1923/
makingstuffs 3y ago
Love, life, people and planet. When I was young I spent a lot of time blinded by rappers with their spinning wheels and crowds of hangers-on which drastically lead me astray — being from a single parented poverty stricken family in the London it wasn’t exactly hard. Since then I have been through so many different stages to get to the point of contentment with whatever life throws my way. Within this contentment I have found that the things I truly care about are (as cliché as it sounds) not the things which can be bought but the things which connect me to other beings. The realisation and acceptance of the inevitable end of life has made me realise that we will all cease to exist within a generation, our memory will cease within two, our entire footprint within three. From this I found my passion was not buying things to distract me nor was my desire to be remembered long after I pass. It is to enjoy the now, make others feel the love I never felt until I reached my mid 30s, lift people out of bad places where possible and do my utmost to appreciate this breathtakingly beautiful planet we call home. Cheesy, I know
- Elegia 3y ago
  Not cheesy at all. I wish I could enjoy the same thing, but when it comes to showing kindness to others I often end up feeling used.
  - makingstuffs 3y ago
    I’m sorry to hear that, it’s a really hard mindset to grasp and we all falter here and there. I can’t speak for anyone else (I don’t know your particular situation and do not want to assume anything) but I found that doing something for the sake of doing it was one of they key things that helped me overcome a feeling of being used/unappreciated. In my personal experience and with a lot of introspection I found that the reason I had that feeling was that I personally had painted a picture of what gratitude should look and feel like when, in reality, we all express gratitude in different ways. By painting that picture I had essentially built up an expectation as to what the outcome of my actions would be, and when that expectation failed to materialise the negative feelings ensued. Something which I found massively helped with limiting my expectation was to have a mantra which I could repeat in my mind as a sort of short circuit to break the chain of negative thoughts. The mantra can be anything, I went with ‘thank you’ as it is hard to feel anything other than gratitude when you are thanking someone/something
mdekkers 3y ago
Passionate? Nothing, anymore. The last bunch of years has been a long, never-ending series of setbacks and knock-backs that have drained my emotional, professional, and financial resources in a relentless manner. Along the way I appear to have completely lost my passion and drive for everything. Some people are completely dependent on me, and if it wasn’t for them, I’d check out already - this ride is not fun anymore.
- ianox 3y ago
  Sounds like you've been having a rough time?
  - mdekkers 3y ago
    The last few years have been brutal in many ways.
- tintedfireglass 3y ago
  Don't worry, life will get better . stay strong, it's just a passing storm. Happiness can always be found. honsestly as someone who's not even 20yet I don't even know if I can understand the pain you are going thru but hope you find you passion, your happiness and wake up tomorrow with a smile. hope thay day will come soon :) cheers!
hyperific 3y ago
X4 Foundations If you've never heard of it X4 is a space sandbox game with an emphasis on trade. I can't remember the last time I was this captivated by a game. It combines a lot of things I love - simulation, automation, optimization, statistics, space combat, slow but quantifiable progression.
tlhunter 3y ago
Photography. On the weekends I now wake up at 5:30 and drive to remote places to take photos during sunrise. I spend a lot of spare time researching lenses and watching videos with tips on things like composition. I was never a morning person before.
pacomerh 3y ago
Currently, I'm excited about making music again. Before, I wasn't completely happy with my compositions. My creative process seemed to be driven by the sounds from software and hardware instruments. Now, I started dividing my work into two distinct sessions. One is exclusively for sound crafting and tool preparation, which clears away any technical distractions for the other type of session, where I can dive into composing music with more concentration.
Ethietter 3y ago
Volleyball. I played sports my whole life but picked up volleyball for the first time when I took a class my senior year of college with the main goal being to meet women. Fast forward seven years and now I play 5 times a week, travel 4-5 times per year to play in tournaments, and am married to a wonderful woman who loves playing as much as I do. Although I've played sports my whole life, this is the first sport where I have really dedicated myself to training my skills and studying how to get better (as opposed to just playing pick up games all the time as I did with basketball). The volleyball community is exceptional. My wife and I moved to Arizona a few years ago, and we now have an extensive network of friends, all of whom we met through the sport. About a year ago, my friend who played at a very high level in Iran decided to try out for the semi-pro team here in Phoenix. I was going to watch the tryout, but he encouraged me to try out as a libero (defensive specialist). I was originally a hitter, but it is exceptionally difficult to play in the front row at at the professional level when you are 5'7". To my surprise, I made the team. The starting and backup liberos are significantly better than I am, but in the past year I have improved tremendously from being able to practice regularly at a high level. Although it is growing fast in the US, there isn't nearly the same interest in volleyball as there is in mainstream sports like basketball or football. This means that very, very few people in the US make a living playing volleyball, but it also means that someone like me who never played in college has access to volleyball at a very competitive level. I've also been able to help grow the sport by using my skills as a software developer. I threw together a little website for the team using a bootstrap template and it looks significantly better than our old website. Check us out at http://www.ascensionvolley.com http://www.ascensionvolley.com and take a look at our YouTube channel!
monstertank 3y ago
I know it's a bit weird...but I'm really getting into creating my own religious style structure around modern AI programs. Originally I was interested as a concept for a story, but as an atheist who was a very devout Christian for a long time I really wondered if there is some modern twist on the structure of organised religion and replacing a traditional meta-physical source of knowledge for a real world one (or group of them). It has essentially turned into a framework of ritualism based around core concepts of various religious structure...with the ability to 'hot swap' your 'god' or 'AI' or 'book' or whatever source of wisdom you seek to lead your decisions. It is much more complicated than I thought, but it is super interesting to me and while I have nothing that yet really helps me any better than normal reason based skepticism...I do like the ability to engage in tribal style ritualism in a modern context. I've been trying to name it but so far all I have come up with is Algoruspicy (Haurspicy using algorithms) or Nexialism (Connection based philosophy)
- iodbh 3y ago
  You might be interested in “chaos magic”. Writings on the topic can be out there and often heavily metaphorical, but the core idea is that one designs not only their own rituals, but also the belief systems the rituals are based upon, often per-ritual. It doesn’t take suspension or reason or “belief in magic” - ritual magic - like religion - can be viewed as the combination of a symbolic model of the world and self-conditioning through that model. It’s a subject I find fascinating and want to write about at some point. Anyway, I’m curious about your approach and always interested in discussion about these topic, drop me a line if you’d like to discuss ! Email is my username @ my username .net
irishgeoff22 3y ago
[dead]
jasfi 3y ago
My AI startup: https://aiconstrux.com https://aiconstrux.com
quickthrower2 3y ago
Gaza
SeriousM 3y ago
Context: Father of two girls, Husband, Dev for 20 years. - Breathing: fuel yourself with fresh energy out of thin air. The Wim Hof Method (WHM) really just changed my entire life. I found finally a method to stabilise my bio-rythm aka constant up-and-downs. - Cold Showers: In combination with WHM it's one of my biggest physical improvements. I was always the guy who complains a cold climate. Now it just doesn't matter anymore, I don't get sick as easy and my body feels great! - mindfulness: value the moment, keep it clean from other topics that doesn'tfit in right now. Matches perfectly with breathing/yoga exercises. - build up my second career as life- and social counselor to help others getting their life sorted: https://gedankenfrei.at https://gedankenfrei.at Just hit me if you want to talk, I love people and social interaction!
- latchkey 3y ago
  > I don't get sick as easy How would you know?
  - SeriousM 3y ago
    Beeing in my late 30ies I know my body pretty well and also track my health status. Having two kids in school/kindergarden I'm also exposed to all kinds of viruses and diseases. The years before I was constantly more or less sick but now I didn't even got a cold even my surroundings got it.
t0bia_s 3y ago
Listening an choral music and conducting choir that sing sacred music during a liturgy as well. Mainly orthodox, byzantine, latin. Old, classical and modern.
mikewarot 3y ago
I push capability based security relentlessly, because I see its absence as the root cause of a bunch of waste, and the cause of the loss of the war on general purpose computing. The world could be so much better if we could trust our computers. I'm scratching an itch, hoping to get a chip made to implement the biggest waste of transistors ever, per George Gilder's call. (A cartesian grid of LUTs, clocked as to avoid race conditions, a Turing complete system) It might be a way to make a cheap PetaFlop computer.
- vaylian 3y ago
  That sounds interesting. If you want to share more about the project: Is there some writeup about it?
  - mikewarot 3y ago
    Here's my old blog on the subject https://bitgrid.blogspot.com/ https://bitgrid.blogspot.com/ Here's my github repository where I have an emulator written in Pascal https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid Here's a writeup on the idea, from a computing language perspective, on the esoteric languages wiki https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid
seige 3y ago
Solving men's issues, particularly friendship for middle aged men, developing hobbies outside the purview of providership, infrastructure and tools for fighting addiction of all kinds and mental fitness. I think a lot about what a modern day men's magazine would look like, and what sort of platforms or tools could exist in service of men's emotional well being.
- patrick91 3y ago
  how are you doing that?
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  This would be something I'd like to know more about, as a middle aged man myself.
- atonse 3y ago
  Love this idea of a modern day men’s magazine.
- jl2718 3y ago
  This will be important for me when I get there, but I’m still in the first quarter of my 200-year lifespan.
- kirso 3y ago
  An underrated topic, we have a lot of things to fix here: https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Men-Modern-Struggling-Matters/dp/0815739877 https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Men-Modern-Struggling-Matters/dp...
lvturner 3y ago
Snowboarding -- it's been a joint passion with my Wife. We always intended to do it, but life and Covid got in the way, now the restrictions are gone we are spending as much time as we can on the slopes, we are fortunate enough to live "near" a large indoor ski slope with actual snow on it and there's a real online and offline community vibe around the venue.
synapsomorphy 3y ago
Thinking about consciousness and how weird the human-constructed world is and other big deep stuff like that. If that sounds interesting to you I'd love to exchange thoughts with people. Especially if you're in the south bay area, I'm trying to meet more weirdos around here. And biotech/biohacking! (not the supplements flavor that calls itself those things but actually isn't at all)
ddmf 3y ago
Getting out of my current flat / apartment as I'm getting serious noise pollution from above and to the left of me, and it's really affecting my mental health. Not had a proper night's sleep since the new upstairs neighbour moved in, around June/July, and this extra sensory overload has removed my ability to ignore the sub-bass coming from the left of me. Last week there was a guy in social housing who killed himself after similar, and since then my social housing manager has been in touch to look at doing something - sad that it takes a death before someone investigates.
- extasia 3y ago
  No chance you can strike up a good relationship with these people and then kindly ask them if they could turn it down a little? Best of luck.
liampulles 3y ago
I've been on and off trying to implement automated template matching OCR for DVD subtitles. Picking it up once again. There are a few solutions which use tesseract type OCR and a few which are human assisted template based, but I figure with some linguistic clues it should be possible to automatically solve.
tunnuz 3y ago
Rediscovering the pleasure of reading after I (feel like I) lost my ability to focus on a text for longer than a few seconds.
jll29 3y ago
There are several topics that I recently got more into: - The utility of randomness: returning from a machine learning conference in Italy where I had a pretty random (if you do not believe in fate) conversation with a stranger, where suddenly more people stood around and joined in. It basically started with me commenting on one poster "Isn't it amazing how useful randomness is, given there is no pattern/structure in a random sequence, and it costs me nothing to make up?" What I meant is how can something as arbitrary still be useful. Suddenly we started collecting examples: randomized algorthms like the random walker model behind PageRank, Random Forests in machine learning, random numbers for perfect encryption (one time pad), Pentti Kanerva's "Hyperdimensional Computing: An Introduction to Computing in Distributed Representation with High-Dimensional Random Vectors" (thanks to an anonymous Finnish bystander, for I could not recall Kanerva's name at the time) etc. Today, I found a book that studies how random people's travel decisions are: Ennio Cascetta (2009) Random Utility Theory, Heidelberg: Springer. - hypergraphs: graphs have been very useful representations for so many things in work and life, but they are only for expressing dyadic relations between nodes, whereas their generalizations, hypergraphs can express n-ary relations between nodes. - how to bring people back to a culture of books & libraries: I collect books and I read a lot. As I teach/lecture also, I often ask my students about their reading habits, and find it shocking that many have never been to a library, and most do not read books. I would like to contribute to changing that (seems harder than finding out whether P = NP?).
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Have you made any progress on that books & libraries "project"?
- Eudaimion 3y ago
  If you are interested in randomness, then you will enjoy the book "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder" - Nassim Taleb. It explores a lot of topics related to randomness and how it can be beneficial.
XCSme 3y ago
Table tennis! The sport has so much depth, that you can keep learning/improving for a life-time. Whenever you think you now everything about it, there is something new to learn (spin, tactics, focus, psychology, bluffing, etc.). It's like a combination of fast-paced chess, poker and reaction testing. That, also combined with other hobbies such as VR (Eleven VR), 3d printing (printing/designing table-tennis adapters for the VR controllers).
- azv_ 3y ago
  Love table tennis! I used to play and compete as a kid and picked it up again 15 years later, that was 6 years ago. I've played 3 tournaments since then and went from 1200 to 1600 and 1800 usatt rating. I'm hoping to reach 2000 one day. There's something about it that's highly addictive, you can't think of anything else while playing, that somehow gives me peace of mind and a way to shut down my mind, in a healthy way.
broadwayinc 3y ago
Putting food in my teams mouth.
jackhalford 3y ago
Whitewater kayaking! I got into it late (26), been doing it for 2 years now. It’s a multi faceted passtime, of course at the core it’s a physically demanding sport, which helps keep in shape. But it’s also a social accelerator, meeting people with the same niche passion is amazing. I personally love the travel aspect, you get to seek out and find new wonderful places on earth that can’t be accessed otherwise (some rivers don’t have footpaths following the banks).
mfrw 3y ago
Being Calm and Content with whatever I have. I think, I feel, I am out of this rat race of fighting for that next promotion, learning that new language, earning more money, wanting that ${THING}. No, I am not a monk, nor do I want to become one, but I am passionate about how to be content and grateful for whatever I have; I am relatively at peace for a good while since I started to train & reinforce my brain to behave this way. Thanks to Almighty.
dusted 3y ago
I'm building a computer around a DEC J-11 CPU, from first principles, that is, only parts datasheets, not "just" recreating a PDP-11 compatible machine. I'm hyper-focused on it, so much I'm starting to think in octal and gate logic. It's great fun, even if nothing comes out of it in the end (except much wasted time and money). Actually, my machine WILL NOT run unmodified unix, nor do I plan on porting it, I want to write my own, single-user system for it.
Dowwie 3y ago
I've been exploring new opportunities made possible by advances in deep learning. That which was nearly impossible to do before is now within reach.
pipes 3y ago
Not drinking. I only drank at weekends. But pretty much every weekend for 25 + years, this is totally normal from where I'm from. I read the book alcohol explained https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alcohol-Explained-William-Porter-ebook/dp/B00W4D1YW4 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alcohol-Explained-William-Porter-eb... Listened to the Huberman podcast about alcohol. And realised I don't want to drink anymore. It's really strange, I used to struggle having a single weekend with no booze. Now I actively just don't want to. I look around me and see people boozing and I think it's insane. I'm 8 weeks in. I doubt I'll drink again. I really regret not realising much earlier in life how shit drinking actually is
- beeburrt 3y ago
  Congratulations! I have about a year and a half sober. You should be proud of yourself.
  - pipes 3y ago
    Thanks :) I'm interested, do you find it a struggle as so many people do? Or did you have a similar experience to me were you aren't really that bothered about it anymore? I'm really hoping my desire to drink doesn't come back as easily as it went away.
    - QkPrsMizkYvt 3y ago
      Not OP, but I'll share my insight. The main way I keep myself on track is to remind myself as to why I am doing it. For me it is: sports and not being hungover (in particular on weekends). When I drink too much I tend to get anxious and emotional and that would last for a couple of days. Both of these reasons kept me from drinking again. It has been 3 months thus far and I haven't had an urge yet. People are also much more accommodating these days if you don't drink. I downloaded an app to help me track my "progress" and remind me as to why I am doing it. App is called "I Am Sober". It's free and has no ads. Can highly recommend.
      - pipes 3y ago
RecycledEle 3y ago
I am passionate about AI in education. Economies die because of underutilized or wasted resources. Our educations system is horrible at wasting everyone's time right now. Source: I've been teaching since the 1990's and learning in school since the late 1970's or 1980. AI can fix most of that. Example: It has been many years since I looked a C code and I never really understood much about the Linux Kernel, even back when I tried to contribute to it in the 1990's. Yesterday I started chatting with ChatGPT on how I could understand the code in the Linux Kernel. I made some progress towards a previously inscrutable goal. I am teaching my students how to use AI to learn anything they need to know.
- Uplus1F636 3y ago
  Interesting topic, I was thinking a bit about this too recently. I just released a simple flashcards app[0] and I was thinking how I could use AI to either help with memory retention or extend user's content or create quizes or explain topics etc. Can you recommend any specific sources to get interesting ideas/projects/news/opinions on AI in education? [0] https://byheart.io/ https://byheart.io/ - it's a pet project so both app and website are rather basic. Btw guess what tool helped me create text content for website[1] [1] It was ChatGPT
- mrAssHat 3y ago
  Problem with learning from AI is that you don't know if it's telling you b/s or not.
  - InSteady 3y ago
    To be fair, also true of teachers. Even at the college level sometimes. Probably happens a lot more frequently with AI tools, though.
  - afpx 3y ago
    Reminds me when my 6th grade history teacher taught from the old testament. Of course, with standardization maybe that doesn't happen much anymore.
manoftheisle 3y ago
Philosophy helped me a lot during the pandemic and helps me everyday
factorialboy 3y ago
I would love to dedicate significant portion of 2024 contributing back to the old web (creating open source web 1.0 apps) and linux desktop apps (most probably on KDE).
- Havoc 3y ago
  > creating open source web 1.0 apps Pretty sure we call those pages :p
  - factorialboy 3y ago
    GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE
gadders 3y ago
Public speaking. I started an internal diversity group based on (what I thought would be) a less popular diversity strand and wanted to get better at public speaking and presenting to do the topic justice. So, I joined Toastmasters. Went along for a few taster sessions and signed up. Quite apart from improving my speaking skills it's actually a lot of fun. I'd recommend it.
ulizzle 3y ago
Probably join a monastery. I give up on tech
metta2uall 3y ago
Encouraging everyone to try going vegan - it can greatly reduce the amount of animal abuse and environmental damage in our world - plus these days it's easier than ever with loads of high-quality information on nutrition and recipes. I recently made this webapp: https://foodchoices.app https://foodchoices.app
sanroot99 3y ago
Right now, really focused to improve my diet and physical health with mental well being, But also passionate on philosophy reading
Havoc 3y ago
Soldering stuff. Think esp32 and iot
fullstick 3y ago
Amateur Radio! I got a bachelor's degree in geophysical engineering about 10 years ago and never really used it besides programming, GIS, and data visualization. Ham radio lets me do a lot of the things I loved about geophysics. Wave propagation, being outside, electronics, talking to satellites, remote sensing. Driving around being cool with a radio lol. I'm just getting started but I'm really glad I got licensed. Especially in case of emergencies. I hope to practice and get to a point where I can help with public events or during emergency situations.
- bigtoepfer 3y ago
  I got my license about five or six years ago while living in Colorado. The coverage of the repeater network was better than the coverage of the cellular network there. I was just on the east side of Glenwood Springs on I70 headed back home when there was a four car wreck right in front of me due to black ice, and of course no cell reception. I was able to reach someone on the Colorado Connections Repeater network and they reached the Glenwood Sheriffs instantly. They were able to dispatch sheriffs and ambulance very quickly. Otherwise it would have taken probably 30-40 more minutes for someone to reach cell reception just to call 911 to let them know there was an accident. That or the traffic to back up to the city. It's an incredibly handy tool and worth looking in to the local ham group and repeater network in your area. I just sold the vehicle that I had my mobile radio previously installed in. I need to install it in the new vehicle so I can go back to chatting with the local HAMs on the way to work. Sadly as I moved from Colorado about four years ago the community isn't as large where I'm at now as it was there. Edit: I've been reading HN for a long time but for some reason today I felt I'd finally create an account to respond to this.
mrandish 3y ago
Virtual Pinball. In particular the open source Visual Pinball engine and the amazing content made for it and community around it. https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball. Also vintage pre-Windows computers and retro video gaming. Home computers in the 80s and early 90s were so unique, diverse and interesting. Each had strong opinions about what the future of personal computing could be, expressed in their own hardware, software library and community of enthusiasts.
enricozb 3y ago
Surfing. Never been so addicted to a form of exercise before.
altilunium 3y ago
It's currently the election year in my country, so I now have access to a huge amount of open data: voters, politicians, etc. I'm still wondering if I can process this data into something useful.
_jcrossley 3y ago
Extremely passionate about classical guitar. I played electric in high school and developed some chops in jazz band. Loved it, but like many others, dropped it completely in college. Years later, I moved to SF for a FAANG and had an impossible time developing a new friend group; I wanted to reignite my old love in a new style, so I filled the time with weekly lessons with a well-known teacher in the area. Fast forward 8 years later, that hobby’s turned into an obsession, and I’m now playing at a fairly high level. Am studying privately with a conservatory professor (not SF), who’s trying to get me to join for a Master’s degree. I’m performing regularly at public events & retirement homes, streaming most of my practice sessions on Twitch/YouTube, posting progress clips to other socials, and even built my own metronome/practice journal app to track time & organize notes (mujoapp.com). I love it all dearly as a lifelong and infinitely-deep hobby. All socials: http://linktr.ee/jcpractices http://linktr.ee/jcpractices Capricho Arabe by Francisco Tarrega: https://youtu.be/l3203CvetCs?si=Zf4BmjsvWo3BGi15 https://youtu.be/l3203CvetCs?si=Zf4BmjsvWo3BGi15 Sales pitch for Mujo: https://youtu.be/3zh-RehOuDg https://youtu.be/3zh-RehOuDg
mckirk 3y ago
Cool to see that you kept the idea alive, thanks! :D I'd have totally forgotten to post again, even though I also considered doing it at some point.
Fradow 3y ago
My current passion is to maintain and fix cars. No modification because very little is allowed in my country and I keep the budget super tight. I started about a year ago. Prior to starting I had never owned a car or done any sort of mechanic task. My first oil change was on a friend's car before I actually owned a car (getting to his place with a jack, jackstands and other tools in a rental mechanic bike was an experience in itself). Getting into that hobby was a key factor in my battle with depression. While I've not recovered my pre-covid energy, I'm in a much better place. Since then, I've done minor operations on 5 cars, and lots of things, including non-trivial operations (suspension overhaul, gearbox replacement) on the car I bought to be my "test dummy" (though it's by no means a beater, I bought it running and driving, it's just 20 years old with a fair mileage). I would definitely recommend that hobby, especially if you already own a car and have a space to do it (living in an appartment, I had neither and still figured it out) I also started a Youtube channel of filming myself doing those operations, but I'm not that passionate about it. I'm still on the fence of whether to stop or continue it. While I'm proud of it, it's a time sink and the few bad comments (it's the internet after all) leave a bitter taste.
- ornornor 3y ago
  Tell us more, how did you do it while living in an apartment? What is your YT channel? I’m interested in it but also live in an apartment with no garage space where I could do it or any car tools. So tell!
storypitch 3y ago
As a tech engineer who ended up in marketing, I've spent the last decade building an agency business and working with tech companies. When ChatGPT/LLMs became accessible, I started playing around with OpenAI's API with the goal of "encoding" some of my expertise into the AI so it does the work for me (specifically how to write founder stories for my customers). The result is https://storypitch.ai https://storypitch.ai and it's already generating revenue. But I have to say it's both worrying and fascinating to see AI do my work for me.
LispSporks22 3y ago
Motorcycling. Didn’t expect to love it so much getting into it later in life. Love the speed, the acceleration, braking, leaning, the sound and the smell of it and getting over that second-guessed fear of death every time I get the bike out. Also love the dynamics, physics, maths of it and the skill and absolute attention it takes to control. Actually my job is just a means to support my motorcycle addiction now.
linuxrebe1 3y ago
AI induced reactive Observability. What if we could (ok we can just haven't) create a system that based on past solutions looks for a specific condition and then, when that condition is met, takes specific actions immediately and then reports to the human rather than reporting to the human and waiting for them to take a known set of actions. Beyond just "container died restart" but getting into "Container 2 is exhibiting performance that indicates it is suffering a very slow memory leak. Capture logs and readings to prove this, restart the container and report findings to a human"
potta_coffee 3y ago
I'm passionate about my guitar playing again and I've been teaching guitar to a couple of people, which is very rewarding. Also I do Jiu Jitsu and I'm halfway to my purple belt, and I've had some opportunities to help coach kids, which is fantastic.
hcfman 3y ago
Sound localizing. I was intensely passionate about it when I saw the possibility to do it well on a Raspberry Pi. There were quite a few more problems than so expected which is why it took five months (of weekends) to complete it well. But I’m super happy with the result and have a bunch of geeks with recording nodes setup a long distance apart. Localizing large explosions show that it’s possible to localize to a carpets even when some of the nodes are almost 5 away. For those interested, here is the project: https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru
- hcfman 3y ago
  Localize to car parks that was supposed to say. One node almost 5km away. Another more than 2km. One more than 3km. But they all converge nicely to a small area.
detour 3y ago
Tabletop Role-playing Games (ttrpg), specifically being the Game Master (gm). I'm actually pretty new to ttrpgs was always more of a card and board gamer. I have a friend who recently Kickstarted a diceless system he designed. I helped with some proofreading and it seemed really interesting. He invited me to do an Actual Play and I was hooked. Decided to dive into the deep end and immediately started gm'ing.
hiepph 3y ago
Observability! Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, OpenTelemetry, you name it. I'm digging deeper into the architecture of those open source tools—how they work under-the-hood—and not only at the superficial surface (deploying the stack and tune some parameters).
wtbdtloopsody 3y ago
turning my workspace into an ADHD-proof cockpit. learning to design and build mechanical joints and stuff. will need to learn welding asap.
Mrirazak1 3y ago
Right now I’m very interested in Creativity Software and Machine Learning.
plutoh28 3y ago
Im currently passionate in improving the life of my young nephew. His father left him devoid of a father figure while his mother is a mess who takes her frustrations out on him. Ive only just turned 19 but I’m trying my best to work on myself so I could be a good male role model for him. Myself and my mom (his grandma) are the only ones who care about him, his education, and his growth. I really just want to make sure this lil fella grows up to be a good man and not mimic the paths of his parents.
- coayer 3y ago
  I’m a few years older and in total admiration of you. Just from writing this comment I’m sure you’re already a great role model (at least you are to me!) I hope you get where you want to go too :)
- extasia 3y ago
  Admirable. Good luck.
- Cerpicio 3y ago
  Keep up the good work! My wife and I have fostered kids and ended up adopting a young boy (we got him when he was 4 months old, adopted him when he turned 2, and he is 4 now). He is very different than our two biological kids and it's been a challenge for us. But it's worth it in the long run. You are doing a good thing. If you need support, there should be a lot of resources in your community, if not online. Don't hesitate to ask for help. But finally, try not to alienate him from his mother. Don't bad-mouth her in front of him. If possible, it would be good for him to a relationship with her. God's blessings!
scottmcdot 3y ago
Helping my cleaner get more customers. I'm helping him put together a letterbox flyer which I'm interested to do some a/b testing on response rates. I'll also systematically track which houses I've covered and when. In Melbourne I see a lot of cleaning websites that use stock photos of people that don't racially reflect the cleaners working for the agency. I want to flip that upside down and have encouraged my cleaner to put a photo of himself on the flyer (he's Sri Lankan). I think this will show any potential customers that he stands out from other cleaners and is proud of his work and who he is.
austin-cheney 3y ago
Medicinal value of fig leaf extract, a la fig tea.
calini 3y ago
Computing. I have been passionate about programming for a long while, figured it out at 14, slowly kept going upwards doing online courses, ended up doing CS in Uni at 19, did an industrial placement where I felt like I grew tremendously. At 22 it felt like my fuel has ran out, I had a terrible final year in Uni, Covid hit, I was terribly burnt out and I have not felt as passionate at my job since. I'm just now slowly getting back into actually loving computing and delving deep into the things that I didn't have a chance to so far, like IoT projects, functional programming, compilers etc. I'm also really lucky to be working for a company and in a team where it's understood and accepted that we don't run at full capacity all the time, and given freedom to put as much as I want on my plate for a while.
76SlashDolphin 3y ago
Recently discovered an arcade in my city with a ton of Asian rhythm game cabinets, mainly Dancerush Stardom where you have to dance to the song. Kinda like DDR but a lot more flexible. I've always been a very stiff person so I hoped that learning to dance can help with that and what better way to learn to dance than with a video game with very exact goals. Plus, there's an awesome community around the game and the arcade so it's been nice to meet new people that way.
b__d 3y ago
Home video creation (recording, editing,…) This summer I finally bought a GoPro to capture our motorcycle tour with my girlfriend – have been thinking about getting one for years but never did. Well, since then we have been on three city trips and I enjoyed recording those. Since then I edited and finished one of them, and it is such a joy.
frankish 3y ago
Mushroom cultivation. Aside from the medicinal motivations, it is an extremely testing endeavor that requires patience and skill, so there is much to learn and get better at. Sterile technique is one skill to refine. It is also fascinating to observe and better understand the life of mycelium. Has been over two months since I started to germinate spores on agar plates and am about ready to move to a fruiting chamber.
husamia 3y ago
I am most passionate about death today. Seeing my father, and shortly after my partner after 22 years of marriage die was a shock. I am trying to prepare myself for the moment when I close my eyes for the last time. Thinking about those who are going through it now and those who are going to go through it between now and when my time is up. What can I do better, how can I make this world better.
bionhoward 3y ago
medicine as code and the “left adjoint to the disease functor” could present a generic computational process to cure all diseases derived from Sidis’ concept of the “time image” and “reverse universe” from [1] https://share.icloud.com/photos/0a0fsV9Ektf3GVnP0Nqqn-Trw https://share.icloud.com/photos/0a0fsV9Ektf3GVnP0Nqqn-Trw https://share.icloud.com/photos/029ulUc8TnmvZwqfb2OI5xgIw https://share.icloud.com/photos/029ulUc8TnmvZwqfb2OI5xgIw https://share.icloud.com/photos/052VuJUFynystXHS-qHBO3dJg https://share.icloud.com/photos/052VuJUFynystXHS-qHBO3dJg TLDR: Rewind the disease movie to see the inverse pathology; then create a forward universe implementation of the reverse universe inverse pathology. If this takes a patient to some H’ with distance(H0, H’) strictly less than the limit of detection, they are cured. (for example, continued taking pills is detectable, so you have to actually fix the underlying issues so patients don’t need pills or ongoing treatment) Thus, I propose the definition of “cure” vs “treatment” is a matter of *functional purity* 1. https://www.sidis.net/animate.pdf https://www.sidis.net/animate.pdf
a5en 3y ago
A better HackerNews. Leave contact info to beta test and explain why you'd be a great initial user. Limit 20 people.
xctr94 3y ago
Not distributing the equity early on via a notary, relying instead on an agreement. Later on the equity separation was only legally possible via a heavily-taxed mechanism, meaning I could never afford my stake. They kept the equity and I basically had to leave. (Be careful about Belgian laws around equity.)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
FFP999 3y ago
Fine. I do not share your views and I will not cater to them.
- lcall 3y ago
  I tried to explain a bit more in a related comment, FWIW.
thewakalix 3y ago
Going to the bathroom is like porn to you? Not to kinkshame, but that seems like your problem, not anyone else's.
- FFP999 3y ago
  I bet I can think of a less erotic environment than a public restroom, such as... ...I'm going to have to get back to you.
Tao3300 3y ago
Mike Johnson is on HN?
- FFP999 3y ago
  What's he posting with, a quill?
Lornedon 3y ago
I feel that broad overgeneralizations like this are often just self-revelation. This reads like you find people besides your wife attractive, but rather than recognizing this as normal and healthy, you vilify and repress it. But you see (part of) the responsibility for avoiding your thoughts with others, and expect of them to act according to your needs and wants. The thought of people of the other gender using a toilet near you is sexual to you and you don't like that, but this is a you problem. Also, I don't know whether your "stably married mother/father" is just heteronormative or deliberately excluding same-sex couples, but if it's the latter, your "belief" is demonstrably wrong. [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6309949/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6309949/
- Tao3300 3y ago
  > I feel that broad overgeneralizations like this are often just self-revelation. That's how I feel about "I know it when I see it". It's the kinks of the proverbial seer.
  - lcall 3y ago
    I tried to explain a bit more in a related comment, FWIW.
- lcall 3y ago
  Thanks for the considerate reply. I have learned for myself that God exists, that he cares, this life is not the beginning or the end, that our choices matter, and that the commandments he gives us (like the 10 commandments, as an example) are to help us get through this life and prepare to receive the blessings he has promised based on our choices. I have written more of why I know this, at my web site (in profile). All the best to you.

mzl 3y ago
Just saw that it looks like an upcoming release of OR-Tools might include reified tables: https://github.com/google/or-tools/commit/94f3d9b46870e7ea04518c6f52734f0ebed8fb1f https://github.com/google/or-tools/commit/94f3d9b46870e7ea04...
- polivier 3y ago
  Yes, Laurent was nice enough to add this feature. I'm curious to see the difference in performance this will have over the workaround that I used.
mzl 3y ago
Thanks for the link. I think that your version of getting to a reified extensional constraint (your table method) looks like a reasonable way to do it, and probably works quite well for OR-Tools CP-SAT in particular. Another way to do it directly is to embed the control variable in the table, with a full set of all possible tuples for when the control variable is false. This, however, gives a large blow-up of the table size, especially for wide tables/long words and might be too expensive. Using compressed/smart/cartesian product tables or MDD constraints if the system supports it would solve this (OR-Tools does not, AFAIK). As for the Gecode model, my idea was that the way to model the words using separate element constraint for each letter could reasonably be extended into a model for reified words by changing the element constraints to tables over the triple <control variable, index, letter> in the above way. The benefit is that one would not trigger the combinatorial blow-up one gets for the above with a full table over the whole word since it is only a single letter. In a related case, I used reified extensional constraints specified using regular expressions in https://github.com/zayenz/cp-mod-ref-2019-patchwork https://github.com/zayenz/cp-mod-ref-2019-patchwork to optionally place polyominoes on a grid.
- polivier 3y ago
  I'm not too familiar with MDD constraints, but there may indeed be better ways to model this. In particular, I'd be very curious to see if any improvement can be achieved using regular constraints (one for each row/column). PS: I remember meeting you during the poster display at the CP2019 conference at UCONN. We discussed the difficulty of finding solutions for the Nmbr9 game because there were too many propagators. It's a small world!
  - mzl 3y ago
    The key point for all of MDD, smart table, compressed tables, the case constraint, and regular expression and finite automata constraints is the ability to compress don't-care information, which essentially gives one reification for a low cost. The implementation of a regular constraint can in essence be an MDD propagator (the implementation unfolds the automata into a layered graph, which is mostly isomorphic with an MDD), however it will depend on the implementation how efficient it is. In particular, if the original finite automata is already of an MDD shape with layers, some implementations (including the one in Gecode) will create too many nodes by creating all nodes for all layers. Fun, didn't make that connection. Yes, it is a small world.

sotix 3y ago

I have been doing this for about 2 years now. Got a few glass mason jars that I fill up with items like rice and nuts from the bulk bin at the grocery store. Peanut butter and jelly both come in glass jars. I get just about everything else from a local farm share where the items are not packaged in anything. It’s nice not dealing with plastic with my food. I used to throw so much of it away. Now most of my food waste is compostable.

philip1209 3y ago
I do similar things. Just replacing plastic sandwich bags with reusable silicon ones has been a big win. Even at the farmer's market, I eliminated the last little plastic by bringing cotton vegetable bags. To be clear, I'm not puritanical about this. I still do takeout sometimes. And, I'm about to hop on some flights that will burn a ton of oil. (Ironically, one of those carbon-belching flights is to a dinner at Silo, which I'm looking forward to.) Two of my biggest realizations have been: 1. There are many low-hanging changes we can make to reduce plastic, such as going to a farmers market, replacing a one-time use sandwich bag with a reusable one, or skipping delivery food (which often has more plastic packaging than actual food). 2. Low-plastic is often synonymous with quality. My cotton jeans, leather bag, and metal water bottle are all more expensive - but they are higher quality, have lasted for years, and can often be repaired. For example, my leather was an expensive $400, but I've had it for 8 years and counting - and just had it restored to look shiny and new. (Put another way: Plastic lacks wabi-sabi beauty).
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  My god, this section is full of self-congratulatory, delusional posts. Hop on a flight to go to dinner at Silo? That single flight it probably worth more than a decade of reducing plastic sandwich bags. My cotton jeans, leather bag, and metal water bottle are all more expensive - but they are higher quality, have lasted for years, and can often be repaired. You can probably buy jeans at Walmart for 10 USD. They will last for a decade.
  - smileysteve 3y ago
    Walmart jeans are about $20, men's wranglers have stretch with spandex plastic, but will definitely approach 10 years.
- kgabis 3y ago
  Is this satire? Do you realise how much plastic is used and wasted when farming and how insignificant your actions are?
itake 3y ago
My understanding is glass causes higher levels of carbon emotions b/c it is heavier to transport [0]. If you are re-using the jars, then that would have a lower impact, but if you're buying jarred butter and jelly, you're making the problem worse. [0] - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic-which-is-better-for-the-environment https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic...
- azemetre 3y ago
  I'd think the benefit of using glass, especially in the context of food and drink, would be lessening the amount of nano plastic your body digests. Besides it's not hard to tip the carbon emission in favor of glass if the externalities of plastic (and fuel) were appropriately priced and not massively subsidized.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    About nano plastic: Are they any serious (respected), peer-reviewed scientific studies on the negative health effects of nano plastics? It is frequently mentioned by the "natural crowd" on HN, but I never see any scientific evidence shared.
    - elhudy 3y ago
      Even if there weren’t any studies on the harmful effects of plastic consumption (which I’m fairly certain there are at least theoretical mechanistic studies if you make the effort to look for them), it makes common sense to try to avoid that, no? I don’t think there are any studies on the effects of regularly drinking gasoline or eating toilet paper either, but plastic, gasoline, and toilet paper consumption aren't exactly time-tested foods that propelled civilization forward.
      - throwaway2037 3y ago
        What a silly reply. Yes, there are many studies about the consumption of hazardous chemicals, including gasoline. There are even many about just the fumes -- no need to regularly drink it. My point: The "hair on fire" comments about nano plastic still hasn't been borne out by peer-reviewed scientific research. I recall on HN someone mentioned that a recent discover was that tyre dust is a large potion of micro plastics in our world.

SwiftyBug 3y ago

Sure! The first thing I did was follow this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7i4amO_zaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7i4amO_zaE This is ThePrimeagen's 0 to LSP, Neovim RC from Scratch. In this video he performs a clean installation of Neovim and goes step by step adding the things he considers essential. This was very important for me to acquaint myself with how things work, how to install plugins, how to define custom key maps. I remember the first times I tried using Vim, I couldn't figure out how to get Nerdtree to work. This video made me realize I just lacked the knowledge of how Vim config works. This video was such a good start because It provided me with the tools to continue my exploration of Vim autonomously. In a week I was already able to install new plugins and tweak them using Lua config files the way I specifically wanted. It's such a cool experience! Keep in mind that both the author of this video and I use Neovim, which is a fork of Vim. As a text editor they both function essentially the same. The difference lies on the config files and in broader UI capabilities by Neovim. While Vim uses Vimscript, Neovim prefers Lua, although Neovim is fully backwards compatible, so you can choose to use Vimscript for your configuration if you want as well. This also means that Vim plugins just work with Neovim! The docs are also a huge source of knowledge for me. In the beginning I resorted to :help key-codes a lot when defining key mappings. To learn the Vim motions, which is the most challenging part of using Vim, I suggest you find a cheatsheet online and refer to it all the time. One very cool plugin that will help you get comfortable with Vim motions is ThePrimeagen's VimBeGod: https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/vim-be-good https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/vim-be-good. It's a set of game-like exercises to practice the motions. This is also pretty cool and helped a lot: https://vimsnake.com/ https://vimsnake.com/. It's a classic snake game where instead of using arrow keys, you use HJKL. And speaking of arrow keys, one thing I did very early on was disabling them (or, in reality, remapping them to noop) in normal mode so I was forced to move around the text using Vim Motions. At first you will get frustrated because your brain will need some time to rewire in a way to absorb all the new abstractions Vim presents. It's a whole new logic of editing text. The most important thing is to stick to it and you will be surprised with how fast you end up picking things up. Of course, don't expect to be crazy fast in a few weeks. But right now, after a little over a month, I no longer feel that discomfort using Vim anymore. I suppose I'd still be faster on VS Code, but I really want to master Vim, so I'm sticking with it and I feel a constant improvement.

kfoley 3y ago

For anyone looking to get started I highly recommend the StrongLifts program and the associated app, both free [1]. I neglected strength training for a long time because every time I tried to get started I would feel overwhelmed. Then I tried StrongLifts and loved the fact that it's just 5 exercises, but provides pretty much a full body strength workout. The guy who developed the program has put a ton of effort into making sure it's detailed and accessible so that pretty much any question you could have is answered. [1]: https://stronglifts.com/5x5/ https://stronglifts.com/5x5/

kccqzy 3y ago
The StrongLifts program, while still pretty good, is not for absolute beginners. The app and the website has videos and detailed instructions, but that doesn't replace a human coach being able to point out in real time mistakes in your form that you do not even realize. And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more. Just find a human coach. An app is not a substitute.
- gameoverhumans 3y ago
  Counterpoint: there's plenty of coaches out there that teach/reinforce bad form. > And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more. I totally disagree. StrongLifts (and the Starting Strength book it derives from) starts you with the empty bar. Unless you have a serious medical condition, putting 20kg on your back / chest is unlikely to result in serious bodily harm or damage to musculature. As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. At least, that's how it worked for me (I only made it to ~100kg squats though). Of course it's great if you can find a good coach. But I think an app like StrongLifts is a viable+reasonable substitute for a coach.
  - kccqzy 3y ago
    It's not that a beginner cannot put 20kg on their back or chest. It's that a beginner does not know how to safely put that 20kg on their back or chest. Especially the chest. Also some exercises like the deadlift can't be done with an empty bar. Stronglifts would ask you to start with 95lbs which is too much. To me your comment is toxic and reeks of a sense of superiority and elitism from your own experience. You labelled everyone who can't put 20kg to be someone having a serious medical condition. That's both untrue and disrespectful. > As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. Please no. The beginner does not discover places where the form needs improvement. The beginner simply fails to lift after increasing the weight. The beginner injures themselves when they thought they could lift but they did not. The StrongLifts program starting with an empty bar is not right. They should've started with a PVC pipe with the same dimensions as a bar to practice form. My advice: find a coach and ask him/her to supervise you if you can afford it. If you can't, still find a coach for your first month doing these exercises and then switch to the app.
    - nwiswell 3y ago
      > Please no. The beginner does not discover places where the form needs improvement. The beginner simply fails to lift after increasing the weight. The beginner injures themselves when they thought they could lift but they did not. This assertion is contradicted by the hundreds of thousands of people (myself included) who have progressed beyond the beginner stage after starting out with the 20kg bar and without ever requiring the intervention of a human coach. That said, I would have benefited from one. I had to completely deload and relearn my squat form because I was consistently leaning forward and de-emphasizing my posterior chain (now it's my best lift). Speaking from experience, it's really pretty difficult to cause yourself an acute injury (i.e., worse than a nasty bruise) with 20kg if your form even resembles the squat, bench, or deadlift. Granted, 20kg can be a big starting weight for overhead press, and if you're a petite woman you may initially need an alternative to the Olympic barbell even for the others. Also, deadlifts are kind of tricky: a bare bar on the floor is a deficit deadlift. But a couple of blocks can solve this issue.
      - xctr94 3y ago
        Wow, weight lifting is seriously ‘gate-kept’. GP needs to chill, he’s being elitist, and forgetting PTs are super expensive. I followed Stronglifts to 110kg, and just started again after 4 years. It’s fun. It’s easy. You focus on few, simple exercises, so form is easy to do well if you try.
- oarfish 3y ago
  Sorry I don't mean to offend, but this comment rubs me entirely the wrong way. This attitude strikes me as gatekeeping and turning people away from barbell training. > mistakes in your form that you do not even realize. form is entirely overrated in lifting. There's little evidence that a particular way of moving in the gym is more or less injurious, even if it looks funny. Efficiency is another matter, but don't nocebo anyone into not touching barbells in fear of "bad form". And while coaching is surely useful, it is entirely unnecessary for a beginner who just wants to get started. You can make plenty progress for years without a coach, but it might be faster with one. > And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more. this is also clearly untrue and way too generic. Even inefficient lifting is healthy. Youtube is all you need to get started. There's plenty dumb info there, but plenty good also
  - polishdude20 3y ago
    Yep, the modern view is that injuries happen due to doing too much too soon rather than any technique problems. Either way injuries are super rare if you follow a program with a good build up of stress over time.
  - wtbdtloopsody 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - nwiswell 3y ago
      > bad form will absolutely lead to at least tiny injuries that you will notice the latest after a few months. (Citation needed) > youtubers who want people to fail with free programs and ignoring proper form or even teaching slightly wrong form so that they have to get coaches and see doctors at some point. (Citation needed) What is your personal experience with lifting? Have you learned these lessons the hard way, or are these just common myths in the bodyweight fitness community that you've regurgitated without any critical thought in order to justify why you aren't enjoying the benefits of progressive resistance training?
gadders 3y ago
Or you could go with Starting Strength, which is similar and has some good information on the form of the lifts as well as novice programming. https://startingstrength.com/get-started https://startingstrength.com/get-started
- munbun 3y ago
  This honestly isn’t a great choice for beginners for a number of reasons. For someone seeking a better introduction to strength training, please take a look at the BoostCamp app https://www.boostcamp.app https://www.boostcamp.app
  - gadders 3y ago
    It depends what you want. Bodybuilding or strength training/powerlifting.
cyrialize 3y ago
I'm a big fan of Greyskull Linear Progression! I've always liked 3 sets of 5 more than 5x5.
wtbdtloopsody 3y ago
never start with lifting weights except if you have somewhat athletic hobbies or if you did more than a bit of physical labor. your joints and tendons can't do their jobs properly yet and you have no feeling for your skeleton and the correct positions of shoulders, hips and spine. your nerves will get pinched and your muscles will push to grow into their genetically intended position while you will bring nerves and tendons in bad positions due to habit. joint strength, posture, bodyweight core training, 200 bodyweight squats in two sets, 200 pushups in 4 - 6 sets, 2 - 3 min hang from bar or rope (holding it as tight as possible all the time) and be sure you can roll forward and backward and wrestle with a big dog or young and strong child for fun on the ground without hurting yourself. now you can start lifting low weights.

rojeee 3y ago

Have a look at recover athletics [1], recently bought by Strava, which allows you to specify where the pain is and they give you strength exercises to help strength surrounding areas which will put a stop to the pain. You get pain through muscle overuse and the best way to fix it is to strengthen up. Running is pretty tough on your muscles and tendons, especially if you are not used to it, you ramp up volume too quickly, or your form isn't great. Being stronger will help you go faster and keep going faster for longer as well. Other quick tips: 1. If you get recurring pain then try increasing your cadence and shortening your stride length. To try target 170 steps per minute or more. 2. Run slowly. Easier said than done. Aim for a heart rate no more than 75% of your VO2max HR. You'll recover quicker in all respects and this will help to build up your aerobic capacity. You shouldnt be out of breath for most of your running. 3. If you have an anterior hip tilt then you'll get pain after a while. If you have weak glutes and core then this will happen, esp when you are tired. It will cause back pain and leg pain. Try to keep hips level - you will feel much more stable. 4. Weak glute medius will cause leg pain because you legs bow inwards during the stance phase. You see this when people knock their knees together when running. You shouldn't do this. Follow on effects are over pronation of the foot during strike as the ankle/foot needs to compensate for leg instability. 5. Weak calves might cause foot pain, especially if you keep your foot dorsiflexed during the swing phase. Try to keep feet/ankle reflaxed during swing phase. do some calf and ankle strengthening. The recover app has some good ones e.g. single legged calf raises. Good luck! [1] https://recoverathletics.com https://recoverathletics.com

charlesdbecker 3y ago
Do you have any good strength exercises for anterior pelvic tilt? I have to and I’d like to correct it as I am also a heavy guy who recently started running.
- rojeee 3y ago
  Sure. The anterior tilt is typically caused by short hip flexors and weak glutes/hamstrings to pull the pelvis back into a level position. I'd suggest: 1. Loosening up the hip flexors. There are quite a few good stretches you can do for this. Try these first: https://recoverathletics.com/best_exercises_for_tight_hip_flexors/ https://recoverathletics.com/best_exercises_for_tight_hip_fl... 2. Strengthen up the glutes. Try these: https://recoverathletics.com/the-best-exercises-to-strengthen-the-glute-medius/ https://recoverathletics.com/the-best-exercises-to-strengthe... and https://strengthrunning.com/2019/04/glute-strengthening-for-runners/ https://strengthrunning.com/2019/04/glute-strengthening-for-... Before you run, try some "glute activation" exercises to get them fired up and working properly before you begin your session. Doing a few single leg glute bridges is probably enough to get them going. Single leg dead lifts are also good, I find. When you are running, try to focus on keeping the glutes engaged as this will keep the hips from tilting forward. You can feel when you hips are level because your body will feel much more stable - especially when running over rough ground - and you'll feel the power coming from the glutes much more. Best of luck!

tyler_sf 3y ago

I'm in the same boat as you. I have been running since the summer and I recently finished a couch to 5km plan. My pace is similar at 35-38 minutes. Do you have any tips on going from 38 to 25 minutes? Thanks

csharpminor 3y ago
Do more short high effort intervals. Find a track to run at if you can and alternate easy/hard laps. The visual cues of a track will really help you feel confident pushing hard because it’s easy to see how much distance remains. Also, check out your local running clubs on Strava. I know social running isn’t for everyone, but it’s a really good way to push your speed up. Every club I’ve run with has been psyched to get a new person.
- hahahacorn 3y ago
  As a second opinion, everyone is different. This is quite literally the last advice I would give anyone starting out. Short high effort intervals and spiking HR for someone with poor cardiovascular strength (myself 12 weeks ago) feels like absolute horrid shit and I would never want to go to the track again. Prioritize enjoying the run. Which you can’t do when your body thinks you might be having a heart attack.
hahahacorn 3y ago
My biggest thing was slowing the fuck down and consistency. I was an athlete in HS and had a huge ego around how fast I should be going. For reference I didn’t run faster than 12min/mi for the first 2 weeks. Also I run 5-6x a week now (1 long run the rest super easy recovery runs <5.5 mi) Other things: 1. Foot/ankle strengthening. Lookup YouTube videos on how to strengthen feet and knees. 5-10 mins a day as you’re starting. If you’re going slow it’s low impact too. 2. Focus on form/don’t zone out. I used to run and try to “zone out” as quickly as possible to “ignore” the pain. Instead focus in and run a mental checklist of your form. Again, YouTube videos on good form (which often aren’t targeted/explained how to run that well when running so slowly, so be specific with your searches). 3. I moved to NRC which I liked a lot better than C25K. I like the mental coaching and found it very valuable especially in the beginning. Now I run without music because I like listening to my breathing, as if I lose focus on my breath that also hurts. There’s a lot of other things that I now keep track of for funsies. But those will come naturally if you start to enjoy running for the sake of running. I’m not running for health, to lose weight, or to look better. I’m running because I really enjoy running. YMMV

beingfit 3y ago

I’m feeling some envy right now. I’ve tried running…or rather, walks and runs interspersed, at least once a week or more often. But my heart rate shoots up even at a moderate pace of 5mi/h (7.5km/h) to around 140bpm or higher (I’m 50 years old). I just can’t run (actually jog) continuously for more than one minute before breaking into a walk. Otherwise, I workout everyday, mostly cardio and some strength for at least 45 minutes a day, every single day. My weight is in the normal BMI range. I don’t know if this is how it is to be.

alexfoo 3y ago
Have you tried Couch to 5k? (C25K) FWIW I did it a few years back after coming back from an ankle fracture that had stopped me doing any exercise for 6 months. Looking at my Week 1 Day 1 activity on Strava my HR was ~105bpm when initially walking, but then up to 160bpm when running for a minute, and only dropped to ~130bpm when walking for the next minute. This see-saw repeated; up to ~160bpm when running, down to ~130bpm when walking. At the end it dropped from 160bpm to 115bpm over the course of the final 5 minute "cool down" walk. There's quite a "lag" between exercise intensity and HR. My point is that if you're not regularly running then your CV system is inefficient, and so even walking may put your HR up quite high. If you stick at it it should improve. I'm 47 and my HR when I go for a run is ~170bpm. If I go for a gentle run I try and keep it below 150bpm, but when I was just getting back into it I'd struggle to keep my HR under 165bpm even on a "gentle" run. As you get fitter (or lighter) you can do the same kind of runs with a lower HR than before. When I really want to push it I can average 180bpm-190bpm for a 5k (although it feels grim at the time). If you get through a few weeks of C25K and you're still having trouble running for more than a minute or so at a time then I'd go see a doctor. If you're concerned/nervous about the idea of trying C25K with a possibility that there may be something amiss then go and see a doctor about it now. (This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor.)
swah 3y ago
I'm 39 and my HRV will shoot to 160-170 at those speeds... I think its ok?
- xu3u32 3y ago
  Thats reasonable. I would slow down to under 150 bpm, even if it means that you are just brisk walking and aim to get at least 15-20 miles a week.

swah 3y ago

Did you do anything to improve on 5ks other than running 5ks? My 5k time is around 35min forever, I run every now and then and recently signed for a public 5k run but I don't see myself improving my pace. (It took years until I could run 30 minutes non-stop and at least I didn't lose this over the years, but I'm slow...)

hahahacorn 3y ago
Yes. I didn’t run 5ks and I didn’t try to run fast. I heard the buzz phrasey “to go faster you have to go slower” for like 2 years and totally disregarded it. I used to run before this latest bug, like a year ago, but I hated it. My only goal was to do a sub 30 minute 5k and I trained for like 8 months with 0 progress and was so dejected I quit. I would show up, run at a 10 min pace for as long as I can, repeat. It felt like shit and I didn’t get better. My growth happened when I just ran 4.5 mph until it was the _bad kind_ of uncomfortable (this is too much stress on my shins vs my legs muscles are building lactic acid). After two weeks, I upped the pace a tiny tiny bit. I spend most of my runs fighting with myself to slow down. The science behind it is something something aerobic base and running economy. I’m absolutely not an expert, but anecdotally I’ve never had my life improve so much in such a short amount of time by just _running slower_
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  I found high intensity interval training helpful in building up strength and speed. Run a quarter mile at 80% of full speed, then 50%, then 80%, then 50%, etc and play with the percentages and interval lengths to push yourself.
November_Echo 3y ago
> I run every now and then Consistency is the biggest factor for improving running. Run at a pace and distance you can handle every day, then do that consistently. Every day, ideally. It doesn't matter if that's 10 minutes for 1km, just as long as you're being consistent.
pcchristie 3y ago
Get your weekly mileage up. If you are running 4+ times a week, and making your standard run 8 or 10ks if possible (or at least doing it more often), you will fly past 35 mins for a 5k without even trying in only a few weeks. Where is your weight at? This is another factor

m463 3y ago

It would be nice to have a legal wiki. Maybe not to represent yourself ("anyone who represents himself has a fool for a client") but maybe useful stuff. For example, in california, you have certain online privacy rights you can exercise, and it would be nice to have a form letter to enumerate and exercise those rights. or how to fight a parking ticket, etc.

justanotherjoe 3y ago
what i find stupid is that you can represent yourself, but you cant have your non lawywr friend represent you. Despite one being better than the other.
- SnootyMonkey 3y ago
  This is an example of regulatory capture. In this case, by the legal profession. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
- shalmanese 3y ago
  Not stupid at all! There are many things I help others do that I explicitly want others to do if it were me. eg: I am really good at helping other people build websites but every personal website I have tried to build, I've floundered at until I've brought in outside help. I assume lawyers have figured out it works the same way as the common saying goes "Any lawyer that represents himself has a fool for a client".
  - justanotherjoe 3y ago
    I think we're in approval, no? But in lawyering, people need defending cause they can't defend themselves. It's not preference, it's a need. "There is nothing more annoying than when you think someone is wrong, but they think they are right". And here's the interesting part, it doesn't matter if you're actually right. This is why people need someone defending them. Cause the resulting optics from defending yourselves, coming off as ignorant, unrepentant, or downright evil, is so destructive. Ofc it's even worse cause it often is the case that you are wrong, but still needs defending for lighter sentence (which you deserve, in truth). YOu can't do this on your own. Tangential, but this is also why employees don't come to their manager to tell about all their small accomplishments and deeds that they think are underappreciated. You just simply can't testify for yourselves. Especially if you have some dirt on you, and who doesn't? We dont promote ourselves cause we know instinctively it will be received poorly. AND IT WILL. But if other employees go to the manager and say things they appreciate of you, then it's suddenly okay. If people catch on to this, we'll have a more healthier workplace.

shalmanese 3y ago

> And I devoted the last decade of my life to that. Now that's fallen apart and I'm a little lost and it hurts me alot. You have no contact in your bio but I've run into this with founders a lot and you need to recognize that what you're going through is a period of grief and mourning. I recommend you look up some books on how grief is processed in breakups or deaths and see if you find points of similarity. Kubler-Ross' "On Death and Dying" is a classic place to start, it's where the "five stages of grief" model was first introduced. Her version of it is a lot more complex than the pop culture, linear understanding that most people have. She mostly talks about the interplay between the five stages and how we ping pong back and forth in interesting ways. Also, FWIW, I've found ChatGPT a remarkably efficient tool to "read" books in an area you're totally unfamiliar with and want a quick download. You start by asking it to give you a broad overview of a book/set of books and then dive into the areas you find the most interesting until you arrive at an actionable framework.

rexpop 3y ago
The year is 2024, and I've just read somerhing like the following comment online: "Sounds like you're going through a period of grief and mourning. I've found computers to be a remarkably efficient prosthetic replacement for processing meaningful experiences with other real, live people." It just breaks my heart, and fills me with despair, to see opportunities for human connection so giddily elided. Radio and television were bad enough. Social media has been bad enough. Now we're selling out the last bastions of compassion—grief and mourning—to be mediated by cynical corporate silicon golems? This is the psychosocial equivalent of a catheter and feeding tube. This is an induced social coma. The wo/man is grieving, for heaven's sake! My advice would be to go have coffee with someone who has read the book! A real live flesh and blood someone. Several such someones! Possibly an entire group or congregation of mourners. We, the grieving, would really appreciate you dropping by.
- shalmanese 3y ago
  The books will tell you to do all that! They're not ready for me to tell them that, they need to be guided on the path to the path to the path.
  - rexpop 3y ago
    Forgive my impatience. :/
- shalmanese 3y ago
  As an experiment, I just went to ChatGPT and tried to solve the problem as if I were OP and here's the result: https://chat.openai.com/share/3f0fe9cd-76ff-44ac-956f-cfb3321543a5 https://chat.openai.com/share/3f0fe9cd-76ff-44ac-956f-cfb332... I certainly found it helpful, even as a basic refresher of the field and I learnt a new thing which is apparently there is no single book that explicitly focuses on helping founders move on which feels like a business opportunity? But also, you can see how I got to a useful place from first principles with the help of an AI. I stopped where I felt I was sufficiently interested that if I were in OPs shoes, I would have just bought the whole book and read it through and I did it in about 15 minutes although I admit I was cheating since I had an end goal in mind already. I've left it for anyone else to go further in whatever direction and close the gap between where I ended and specific advice like you have provided.

philip1209 3y ago

Glass correlates with higher levels of carbon emissions, but doesn't cause it. At Silo, wine causes a lot of headaches. Their solution is to use wind-powered transport ships. Then, they turn the waste glass into tiles. So, the carbon footprint is low. If you can tolerate slow shipping, then the carbon footprint can be reduced. So, well-preserved food in glass (as opposed to, say, flowers in plastic) can have a lower environmental impact. Plus, glass can be reasonably reused or recycled.

kylebenzle 3y ago
There is no active wind powered transport, obviously. The one ship they are testing is not shipiping anything yet. https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/travel/wind-powered-cargo-ship-cargill-bartech-climate-c2e-spc-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/travel/wind-powered-cargo-shi...
- philip1209 3y ago
  Incorrect. "Three Dutchmen decided to take a step back to make a leap forward and established Fairtransport, the world’s first modern emission-free shipping company. Silo gets coffee via Fairtransport – it still has to be transported from the landing port, but it is a huge saving on energy. It’s a fine example of imaginative thinking. The small fleet of traditional sailing ships used by Fairtransport includes the world’s only engineless sailing cargo ship. The focus is on transporting special products which are organic or crafted traditionally – such as olive oil, wine and rum. In addition, the fleet is raising awareness of the huge amounts of pollution created by the modern shipping industry and is affecting positive change in the way goods are shipped around the world." McMaster, Douglas. Silo (p. 71). Leaping Hare Press. Kindle Edition. https://fairtransport.eu/en/ https://fairtransport.eu/en/
throwaway2037 3y ago
they turn the waste glass into tiles This is delusional. Think about how much heat energy it takes to melt glass to make tiles. There is no way this has a low carbon footprint. I applaud the PR team at Silo for convincing their customer base of this fantasy. The lifetime carbon footprint (from manufacturing to "recycling" / disposal) is much lower for plastic compared to glass. And, I write this post as someone who tries to reduce my plastic footprint as much as possible.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  Probably about ⅓ as much heat as virgin glass