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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?

#181

Post by msgodel »

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

It's not that hard to learn, you can do it in a few evenings. Grab something like Nielsen and mess around on qirk.

Now whether it's worth learning? Eh, maybe it's good to exercise some math skills that have been atrophying.

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

#182

Post by msgodel »

incomingpain wrote: post #135
pajamasam wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally fair re: quantum computer programming. It's still an open question what exactly it can be useful for. Are you trying it for anything in particular? (I'm only getting started in it now in my Master's programme)

>Are you trying it for anything in particular? cracking crypto. forcing netadmins and sysadmins to update crypto to quantum resistant crypto. Might as well make it a real threat :)

I'll bet a lot of money PQC becomes commonplace before quantum breaks anything meaningful. (although I'm one of the people paid to work on PQC so maybe I'm biased.)

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

#183

Post by joshdavham »

jononor wrote: post #124
joshdavham wrote: post #39

Python packages written in low-level languages like C/C++ and Rust. There are currently so many cool open source projects in the python ecosystem that involve writing python packages in low-level languages. But unfortunately, I've barely written any low-level code since university, so these projects are effectively out of reach for me at the moment. However, I do plan on learning Rust sometime later this year and the…

pybind11 is your friend. Focus on small self-contained functions first. For numerical functions you can then take it mostly our of a book. See if you can speed up some simple and common operation within your problem domain of interest.

Sounds like solid advice. Thanks!

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

#184

Post by scarface_74 »

noisy_boy wrote: post #169
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…

I work remotely at a cloud consulting company for company context.

First time zone and proximity to the US and more specifically for me, short flights from cities we consider “home” - Orlando where I live and Atlanta where we are from and where many of our friends and adult sons live.

Second it’s safe, they don’t even have a military,they have a good public health system, it’s relatively easy to become a permanent resident and have access to both their public health care system (caja) and private health care.

Nice apartments and AirBnbs in San Jose are really affordable - $1500-$2500 a month.

You aren’t going to find that combination anywhere else in US time zones besides Panama City Panama and from what I read, it is much more urban, crowded and less tranquil than San Jose Costa Rica.

We went to Costa Rica this year on vacation (Manuel Antonio). Next year we are going back twice - once for a week to get a local “relocation” guide to take us around the different neighborhoods and then going back for a month once we know the lay of the land.

For more context on our current life

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159562

So it’s really not lifting and shifting for us. We pack everything we own and put them in suitcases and put our condotel unit in the rental pool to offset our mortgage and HOA fees when we are gone for months. We did that domestically for almost a year between late 2022-late 2023

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

#185

Post by DarmokJalad1701 »

Electronics - I recently bought a decent DSO, the "Pinecil" soldering iron, a whole bunch of components. I had some ideas but then sort of hit a wall and lost interest. So now I have a workbench with tools that I will hopefully get back to some day. I think my starting projects were either too difficult, or not that interesting after I implemented them on a breadboard.

Plasma simulation - I really want to understand how fusion and advanced propulsion systems can be simulated and maybe even contribute in some way. E.g. The fusion propulsion being developed by Helicity Space is very interesting. I wish I knew enough to understand their work and maybe do some simulations myself. I tried doing this "Particle In Cell" course I found online but quickly lost interest after a week or so.

I guess I just have a wide variety of interests that come and go. Some of these just seem to be passing interests. I have sort of learned to live with that.

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

#186

Post by cweagans »

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.

You should check out Ben Eater's channel on YouTube. He has a series about building an 8 bit computer from scratch + another one about building a 6502-based computer. It's very very accessible if you know some really basic hardware stuff (and for the things that you don't know already, he gives enough context to start googling).

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

#187

Post by grep_name »

bespokedevelopr wrote: post #178

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 size…

Surely there is a makerspace in Seattle? The one near me in Atlanta has all the things you mentioned and more, plus an abundance of space, a neat community, and classes for most skills you could use there

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

#189

Post by fakedang »

noisy_boy wrote: post #168

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, de…

What I've learnt is that it's for businesses to productize SME solutions unless they're dirt cheap or free, but getting hired as a consultant (who actually adds value) is always an option. It need not be done for compensation either initially - you just want to build trust with the folks, advise them, maybe sit with them and evaluate already existing technical solutions on the market (instead of building your own!).

If you're in the US, you could just set up an LLC if you find some potential customers through the above method, very straightforward. Or you could set up the equivalent of a sole proprietorship in Europe if you're based here.

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

#190

Post by ckrailo »

taylorius wrote: post #19

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…

3Blue1Brown's youtube channel has a lot of visualizations that may help. Transformers are video #6 in his neural networks playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_6700...
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