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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?

#171

Post by noisy_boy »

fb03 wrote: post #65
pigcat wrote: post #38

Making electronic music. Any recommendations for where to start?

My time to shine! I'm a computer programmer but I've been making music digitally for about 15 years now The software you want is called a DAW - Digital Audio Workstation. There are 300 DAWs, you need to find the one that fits your 'style' or 'workflow'. There are a multitude of paradigms, as making music is not a single technique. Once you find your DAW, my recommendation is to just make lots of music. Make the music…

Your enthusiasm is shining through. For someone wanting to do exactly what you said "just make lots of music. Make the music you imagine in your head." and faced with the issue of "There are 300 DAWs, you need to find the one that fits your 'style' or 'workflow'.", how do I choose? I am not a music maker, I have never made music - I would like to though. I don't even have a style or workflow. I don't know how to start.

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

#172

Post by igouy »

letitbeirie wrote: post #166
monarchwadia wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Before land line phones, in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever answered the door first.

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

#174

Post by mixmastamyk »

giantg2 wrote: post #156

"What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?" A job where I can support my family and feel valued/respected. I think that would be cool.

Yes. I could theoretically do just about anything, with a reasonable amount of ramp up time. And am interested in many things. Even willing to study ahead of time for free.

Yet, my main obstacle these days is gatekeeping by others. People won’t let you work in a field without previous experience (in the exact thing) or significant credentials. Seems to have gotten worse over time, although ageism may contribute.

Not to mention the more interesting, the more popular, and less likely you can get in the club—inversely proportional. Hobbies are fun though.

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

#175

Post by joshavant »

I want to build a large format, real-time, physical music visualizer that could orchestrate an artistic light symphony for any song.

I'm imagining physical visualizers that are columns of multiple, discrete light nodes, each able to have variable brightness and color.

The real-time music processing is the hard part (for me) to crack.

There's some standard tricks here: FFTs, bandpass filters, etc.

But I want to do more: Real-time stem separation, time signature and downbeat tracking, etc.

Imagine hearing Sweet Caroline and, when the horns kick in, the whole installation 'focuses' on the horns and bright yellow light jumps between each column on each horn note, before returning to tracking the bass line or something.

I've been noodling on this idea for a long time and slowly digging into the music and CS fundamentals. The rise of LLMs might finally be the piece that enables me to close my intelligence gap and finally build this thing...

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

#177

Post by agnosticmantis »

rramadass wrote: post #106
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.

See my previous comment here for how to get started - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33628025 I highly recommend downloading Understanding Signals with the Propscope from Parallax (available for free online) and following the tutorials from it with an Arduino+Analog Discovery 2/3 device. You can use the Digilent "Real Analog" learning course along with it - https://digilent.com/reference/learn/courses/real-anal…

Thanks a lot for the recommendations.

Would you recommend the Real Analog course independently?

What does the Propscope one offer that Real Analog doesn’t? The Propscope one looks kinda old so I was wondering what I’d miss if I only used Real Analog.

Also not sure if there’s a parts kit for the Propscope one that I can buy.

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

#178

Post by bespokedevelopr »

What is out of reach for me is space to perform the hobbies.

I have welders, metal and woodworking equipment, 3d printers, auto mechanic tools, etc and years of experience and knowledge and interest in building stuff. But I have only a tiny garage to work from. I don’t really have room to do much so it feels like waste.

I’ve looked into renting a small shop but Seattle is so expensive that renting even a one car sized shop space is prohibitively expensive for a hobby (for my income level).

I’m sure I could turn a profit with my work on the side but then it’s a job and you have monthly overhead expenses to cover and all the stresses that come from that.

What is even the actionable step to take? Make more money? That usually comes with less time unfortunately. Moving away to somewhere I can afford a larger workshop at home was the plan until return to office happened for me.

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

#180

Post by almostgotcaught »

guywithahat wrote: post #18
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

Lol where are people getting such ideas. First of all there are probably like 10 QC people graduating a year in the whole world (okay maybe 20). Second of all y'all people have no idea how far off usable QC is. It's like 50 years at best.
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