Making enough money to retire
Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
21–30 of 281 posts
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#22I've tried to make my own pair of shoes a few times now, never quite getting to the end. I even took a class but doing it on my own is so much harder.
I'm a software developer with no real reason to be sewing and lasting my own shoes, but god damn it I'd love to wear my own handmade shoes.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#23Debugging electronics to fix stuff. Some people seem to be able to repair whatever broken electronic devices we give them, which I find fascinating.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#24digital 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. lo…
I've heard The Audio Programmer discord is a great resource for this sort of thing. Worth checking out: https://www.theaudioprogrammer.com/
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#25I recently built an optical encoder from scratch, and it was a ton of fun. More recently I've been looking into how force feedback works, and I'm currently gearing up to implement it using a motor/encoder/controller setup and ODrive.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#26I want to make my own music streaming app. Fix all the UI problems, improve discovery, remember all the musical phases I went through.
Unfortunately, you can't just sign up for API access to millions of songs. And the streaming apps either don't provide a playback API, or their TOS limits what you can do with it.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#27Well, I'm have a little guilty bias towards spacetime non-substantivalism and I've always been interested in getting back to physics in this area. I've particularly found the Shape Dynamics program to be at least somewhat interesting and while I have a sort of ok grasp of the language and mathematics of GR translating that to the SD world has been a persistent challenge. If I had time I'd try to figure that out.
Briefly, one usually formulates the theory of gravity in terms of a a 4d spacetime with curvature but you can also formulate it as a theory of curved 3d shapes if you allow the lagrangian to carry more structure. This is often performed in GR, in fact, by decomposing the metric into a "spatial" and "temporal" part but shape dynamics kind of runs with this idea in an attempt to formulate a totally relational version of the theory of gravity.
Shape Dynamics apparently produces a reasonable theory of gravity which agrees with GR in many situations but forbids, I believe, closed timelike curves, and may be more amenable to quantization since it re-separates space and time.
Anyway, it all seems very beyond me, maybe even if I had the time, which I do not.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#28Making enough money to retire
Any realistic strategies that you have considered in order to try achieving that? Genuine question.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#29Not out of reach but I have to put time into it, working with FPGAs and designing my own circuit boards.
Re: Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
#30Hobby 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.
Highly recommend LeRobot.