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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?

#191

Post by eternityforest »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #110
mlsu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this, what takes a while is to just tinker and fry components several times. Get a breadboard, get several sensors, try to design something and iterate on your design. Plan to fry sensors and IC's. Also helps to read some basic electrical theory and know what the role of different components are. The way I got proficient is with hobbyist PCB design. What helped me is starting with schematics and datasheets and pl…

This just reinforces the fact that it's inaccessible. There's no way I'm literally throwing $200 a month in the trash on a hobby.

That's only for the heavy analog stuff. If you're into the more modern digital stuff, you basically never for any reason need to breadboard prototype, everything can be done with I2C modules and the like.

Burning a part is incredibly rare with this kind of stuff, if you're willing to put in the time to learn about it before actually building it.

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

#192

Post by valgor »

I love the idea of computational experiments that replace testing on animals. Reading about what we do to animals in the name of science is heart breaking, but learning there are computational models and experiments being developed to take place of animal cruelty is exciting. However, such projects feel overwhelming given I know next to nothing about biology, and I'm not sure spending the time learning is worth the payout given my age and other areas of expertise.

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

#193

Post by rickydroll »

petronio wrote: post #69
rickydroll wrote: post #58

1) Revisiting one of my past projects, using Hashcash as a rate limiter. The original one I worked with was Camram/2 Penny Blue, which embedded proof-of-work tokens in an email message as an anti-spam method. It was the wrong solution, and proof-of-work tokens should be embedded in the protocol itself, which would enable dynamic pricing based on reputation. Why I'm not doing it: I'm not sure it would be accepted. I t…

Interestingly, just yesterday I found out 4 already exists, but it's inverse of what you're thinking: top up excess battery capacity overnight, when grid prices are low, and then resell during the day when purchase prices are high. I think the economic problem is that while there /may/ be overproduction during the day, the day is the only time other than early-mid evening when there is significant demand. You would e…

Yes, item 4 does exist. Tesla and Sunrun both have virtual power plants. Tesla operates as a peaker plant, while Sunrun is a base-load plant.

What I want is different in terms of its organization. The intention is to establish a local community microgrid that anyone with the necessary equipment can participate in. I think the biggest problem will be the accounting, but that's my blind spot

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

#194

Post by directevolve »

valgor wrote: post #192

I love the idea of computational experiments that replace testing on animals. Reading about what we do to animals in the name of science is heart breaking, but learning there are computational models and experiments being developed to take place of animal cruelty is exciting. However, such projects feel overwhelming given I know next to nothing about biology, and I'm not sure spending the time learning is worth the p…

The reason we use animal models is that we don’t know enough about animal biology to be confident we can simulate it accurately.

However, computational tools that help biologists “replace, reduce, and refine” animal experiments are helpful. That catchphrase is a good one to Google to look for previous efforts.

Building computational tools to help scientists improve the design of necessary animal experiments is certainly worth working on.

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

#195

Post by ddelnano »

lormayna wrote: post #116

* Kernel development and eBPF: I tried many time to go deep on those topics, but never became proficient * Bayesian statistics: I know the basics and the theory, but I am not able to understand how to use it in a real world problem

For kernel dev and eBPF, what kinds of resources or tutorials have you tried in the past? Have you ever tried building something small or contributing to an existing project?

Curious to hear what hurdles you ran into.

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

#196

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

I'd like to establish an index fund that jumps through the necessary hoops to allow US expatriate citizens to invest from places like the European Union.

Last I checked, there is no fundamental legal barrier preventing this - just an enormous amount of compliance work that has to get done. But as we would be the only real option for 1 or 2 million well-monied people, I imagine we'd be able to start with a very eager customer base provided we could jump through those hoops. And uh, the actual algorithms for index based stock selection are pretty straightforward, too - I'm not Jane Street level clever, so that's an attractive point for me.

If anyone's interested in this hare brained scheme, let me know via the email in my bio. It's been a problem I've been rolling around in my head for a few years now. I have no idea how I would get started, but I'm pretty sure I could do it.

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

#197

Post by directevolve »

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.

One option is to put your thoughts down in great detail on paper, then feed it into AI and ask it to design you a slideshow with text and suggestions for visuals.

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

#198

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #196

I'd like to establish an index fund that jumps through the necessary hoops to allow US expatriate citizens to invest from places like the European Union. Last I checked, there is no fundamental legal barrier preventing this - just an enormous amount of compliance work that has to get done. But as we would be the only real option for 1 or 2 million well-monied people, I imagine we'd be able to start with a very eager…

Another area I'd be interested in is automatic document conversion between the IEEE and EN standards.

I know most of you guys have never had to deal with these, but I've spent my professional life in high-regulation fields. Documents which adhere to these standards are table stakes for getting software sold to, say, the freight train industry, but neither is a subset of the other. They're more like parallel universes, one from North America, the other from the EU.

Getting them to play nice in an automated, LLM + human aided review way would unlock an enormous amount of value for software firms looking to work across these two markets. I'm one of only a handful of guys in the world who understands this well enough to see the value add, and I don't know how I would convince anyone to help me go to market with this either. So I broadcast it here, in the hopes that some other capable software engineer with more time on their hands takes it off of my plate. Please build this business!

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

#199

Post by egberts1 »

Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell University.

I like to see that with known drone sounds, maybe missiles and rockets too.

But that is closed-source.

One viable open-source alternatives is written in Python and uses CNN algorithm.

https://github.com/LonesX/Bird-Song-Recognition

That LoneX lets you add new sounds

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

#200

Post by jaccarmac »

Over the past several years I have slowly patched the .NET version of Shen to run on Linux and modern .NET releases. I also learned about Higher-Order Perl the other year and have a dream of going through the book and implementing the exercises in Shen while tuning the compiler.

But while I have had a broad interest in compilers for years and years, it feels difficult-to-impossible to actually complete any of it. Part of it's general depression and time management, part is looking at the long story of these projects and the lack of progression: Stuck in a rut of mediocrity.

https://github.com/rkoeninger/ShenSharp https://github.com/jaccarmac/junkcode/tree/79ea647d4ddbe41cf...

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