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

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

#161

Post by avmich »

namaria wrote: post #128
avmich wrote: post #74

Presentations, including video ones. The ideas feel pretty clear in the head long before you can describe it in a manner which ideally could be a pleasure to watch. What tooling to use, how to work with all that, how to even plan the layout of words, scenes, images seems pretty puzzling, and solutions are like a slow walk in a dark room.

Storytelling is the skill you're looking for. Visual aids and recording/editing are incidental. What makes presentations, video essays, etc, great is having a great story to tell. It's all about the archetype of the hero, and plot arch (normal life -> problem -> departure -> toll -> return). You have to present people with a reason to embark on the story - which is the reason the 'hero' leaves on their journey; a cle…

I'm pretty good with textual stories. The presentation format is another matter, there is a difference.

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

#162

Post by thorin »

brailsafe wrote: post #77

There's a few that come to mind, but none that feel actually as daunting intellectually as much as they are qualified by other factors. I'd like to go from indoor bouldering to rock climbing, but coordinating with a belayer doesn't seem super interesting and otherwise it's just a matter of expense, gear, and a slight pivot in my leisure time to start going at it. Otherwise, the skill that seems most out of reach is k…

I would encourage you to speak to the wall first in case they run outdoor sessions or see if there are any clubs in your area. This assumes you live in an area with some outdoor climbing. Outdoor bouldering can be done with little equipment, but you need to start way easier than what you'd do at the wall. The ground is surprisingly hard and I've seen someone break their ankle right in front of me a few times and it does not look fun.

Outdoor sport climbing is pretty easy to get into if you have bolted climbing in your area, but as you get higher the ground gets even harder so make sure you know what you're doing. Lots of good books and resources available.

If you really want to get into trad climbing be prepared for a longer apprenticeship, take your time and start easy.

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

#163

Post by JodieBenitez »

WillAdams wrote: post #160
JodieBenitez wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Arguably, 1st Amendment + 2nd Amendment == the right to 3D print firearms Yeah, but no such thing where I live unfortunately. Meanwhile I'll just watch Mark Serbu's fun experiments.

OIC. Maybe do air guns instead? There's a big modding community around them, and PCP weapons can be quite powerful (though maybe also regulated?) Perhaps try an Olympic Match air pistol? Or purchasing a basic model and re-working it to make it match-quality?

Yes, PCPs can be powerful but just because the gas pushing the projectile is different does not mean other laws apply !

I could probably build a 22LR rifle in my garage, but the moment the authorities know that, I lose my shooter license.

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

#164

Post by raudette »

I love reading about projects where someone has taken a combination of used bicycles, bicycle parts, metal tubing, sometimes batteries & electric motors, aerodynamic skins, and built something new: a bike for transport, a recumbent, something aerodynamic, something light, something electric.

I wish I had the project space, the skills (welding, mechanical), and the tools to build human and electric powered bikes.

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

#165

Post by whytevuhuni »

nathan_douglas wrote: post #147
zikani_03 wrote: post #94

On the development side, I feel like I just don't have the "brain" for Rust even though I have built a couple of useful things with it and have also contributed to an open source project (checkout hurl.dev, great tool!) - I would love to get into low level OS development, VMMs and microVMs . It's probably just an issue of effort Outside of programming, I'd like to get into welding so I can make some things. I recentl…

Yeah, Rust was... nontrivial for me too. I feel like I understand it now quite well, but it took more effort than I'd expected to expend on anything. Prolog was a similar but distinct mindfuck too.

Do you regret the expended effort? Does it feel wasted, or does it feel useful?

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

#166

Post by letitbeirie »

monarchwadia wrote: post #125
yu3zhou4 wrote: post #109

Being able to spontaneously speak with people and slow thinking. I am ok at writing with people, because it gives me time to think and refine my message. But I really suck at live events and talking to people in real life. Did anyone overcome it? And how?

For me, it was a skill issue.Most people learn it when very young. Just repeated practice helped... and someone close to me coached me on things that seemed common sense to others, but were counterintuitive to me. But over time, my neurons rewired themselves. I'm fairly good at small talk now. People dont believe me when I say I couldn't even order pizza over the phone at one point.

Are you young enough to have grown up in a house without a land line by chance?

I think land lines are where many current adults (who grew up before cell phones were ubiquitous) learned a lot of that common sense, because in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever picked up the phone first - chatty mothers, asshole brothers, mostly-deaf grandfathers, etc.

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

#167

Post by theoreticalmal »

ge96 wrote: post #36
swsieber wrote: post #6

Hobby electronics & robotics. I can make an LED blink on a ESP8266 (it's been a while), but that's it. I'd like to get more familiar with a multimeter, figuring out broken kids toys, etc. but it's a bit daunting. Maybe there's too many options and not enough constraints. I'm not sure.

This gotta come up with a project you want for yourself and make it. I remember soldering one of those 2x16 LCD screens and it had a short so it would start smoking to designing/3D printing my own quadruped with an IMU/navigation. I did cheat and not use inverse kinematics, I watched videos on other insect-style quads walking and I programmed it manually. I think main gotcha is power distribution and shared ground eg…

I have produced the magical blue smoke multiple times out of my own mistakes. It’s part of the process!

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

#168

Post by noisy_boy »

I want to help small businesses in my area, those who want it, with technology solutions that can improve things (and in-turn learn about the needs of real small businesses). I can pretty much do full-stack (ranging from something basic that improves things for them to something elaborate like backend, UI, AWS, K8S etc). However, I don't have any idea how to identify customers, approach them, price my work fairly, deal with wiring/hardware, deal with the local laws regarding running a non-full-time business etc. I guess what I'm after is that end-of-the-tunnel satisfaction in helping others using technology but a pretty long tunnel is getting in the way :)

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

#169

Post by noisy_boy »

scarface_74 wrote: post #158

Two things and they are both grinds more than anything else and hard to squeeze time in with work, travel, exercise and just spending time with my wife. The first is traditional machine learning - not “AI”. I know what I don’t know and I can fake it well enough to talk to a subject matter expert when leading projects and I have a dual math/cs major from three decades ago. But it would take years to be good enough to…

> But my wife and I are going to start living in Costa Rica during the winter and I want to actually learn it to embrace being thier.

Tangential thing: years ago, a guy in a hedge fund I was working at left this very high-paying job and lifted and shifted his family to Costa Rica. He shared that his motivation was being able to spend more time with his kids (which is a absolutely fantastic goal). I think I have heard a few more examples of this and your comment is an addition. What is it about Costa Rica? I can obviously google the pros and cons of Costa Rica from a blog or whatever, but I want to directly hear from someone who presumably has been on the ground and shares the HN mindset, whatever that might be.

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

#170

Post by igouy »

clx75 wrote: post #140

I am fascinated by the idea of building something like the Lisp Machines or Smalltalk 80 from scratch. Build a Forth in assembly, build a Lisp in Forth, build an OS and computing environment in Lisp. AOT-compile only the Forth interpreter, load and compile the rest from source during system boot, maybe with later stages optimizing the previous stages as the system is assembling itself. I imagine two languages - Langs…

fyi

http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/TopicsReflection.html

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