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Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?

#11

Post by dijksterhuis »

digital signal processing for synths and audio stuff.

maths :/ brain hurt.

i did some digital signal processing in my phd but i need to go through and implement a bunch of things from scratch to learn/relearn and it’ll just be a bit of a grind. i’m avoiding doing that by working on data file parsing / project management utils for the elektron octatrack instead, which is useful, but tangential to what i want to do.

long term would be rad to build software for old synth hardware and the like. sort of like midiquest, but without the price tag.

Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?

#15

Post by seanssel »

Game development.

I’ll admit that part of my problem is chronic depression over a decade+. The idea of gamedev excites me, but I have a hard time feeling passionate about anything these days. You definitely need that for games. Hell, I’m barely able to sit down and even enjoy games anymore.

Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?

#18

Post by guywithahat »

incomingpain wrote: post #5

There's 2 big ones that I want to learn. Quantum computer programming. I've dived a couple times into Qiskit from IBM. Also tried to get into dwave and ocean sdk but they never got back to me. Qiskit tutorials are easy to blow through and i think even understand. But when trying to use it for my own purposes, just never get anywhere. The other one for me with no success. Training my own specialized predicting AI mode…

My concern with quantum computing is there's already such an outrageous overabundance of quantum computing PhD's the marked will likely be saturated for decades to come. It would be a ton of fun to learn, but I can't justify the time because there's no career progression

Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?

#19

Post by taylorius »

There's a certain change of perspective with modern AI (by "modern" I mean Resnet and beyond). When I was deep into neural nets in the 1990s, they weren't that large, and I would think of them in terms of the number of weights and nodes - but modern deep learning seems to have has moved up a few levels of abstraction. (I stepped away from the field for a while). And there's a certain understanding people seem to have now regarding the "gradient flow" through the net and why certain architectures work well (Resnet, Unets etc). I must say I'm finding it tricky to shift into this new level of thinking. Also Transformers - still looking for an intuitive sense of how they work, haha.

Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?

#20

Post by wjholden »

Cellular networks.

I specialize in computer networking in my day job. Most of what I do is Cisco routers, Cisco switches, and Cisco firewalls. I would be interested in learning more about cellular networks. I haven't put any effort into exploring this for myself. If there is a track similar to CCNA → CCNP → CCIE then it isn't well-known (well, not known to me).

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