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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?

#31

Post by iSloth »

wjholden wrote: post #20

Cellular networks. I specialize in computer networking in my day job. Most of what I do is Cisco routers, Cisco switches, and Cisco firewalls. I would be interested in learning more about cellular networks. I haven't put any effort into exploring this for myself. If there is a track similar to CCNA → CCNP → CCIE then it isn't well-known (well, not known to me).

Same background as me, however I moved into cellular/mobile - not really any official routes I know of in the industry, certainly not like a Cisco track.

Typical route is work at a Telco or IoT company as Network Eng or Developer and naturally pivot into telco learning on the job.

Vendors will run training courses when you buy their kit which helps a little, but it’s mostly self learning or on the job.

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

#32

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

jesol wrote: post #7

I don't know anything about electronics design, but I'm really into backpacking so a high efficiency battery system with a solar panel is really interesting to me. I came across this project[1], and wanted to improve upon it for my usecase. I want to add the ability to have multiple 21700 cells in a lightweight charger, instead of a single cell with a builtin USB charger. I want to learn more electronics, but it defi…

Learning just enough for your needs is a valid approach to learning electronics design, unless you're planning on becoming an actual EE.

It provides a huge amount of self-motivation and as much as I hate to admit it (as a one-time electronics design engineer), you can skip a lot of the middle-layer concepts. Sure, you should understand Ohm's law and what basic components (resistors, capacitors, transistors) do, but you can jump from that right into understanding how a battery charger works without having to understand how the components actually work.

The hard part is finding good tutorial material that starts at the right level: most of the professionally written stuff presupposes that you're either already an EE, or have one at your disposal to translate things for you.

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

#33

Post by hbartab »

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…

You might benefit from this overview: https://ianreppel.org/a-review-of-quantum-computing-courses/

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

#34

Post by addaon »

I've wanted for years to take the research paper "Coq: The World's Best Macro Assembler" through several of its more and less obvious next steps, including re-implementing it on top of a formal specification of ARM (or RISC-V) machine code, and introducing a concept of virtual registers on top of a (light weight) register allocator. I really feel like there's a path here to a system in which low-level non-portable code can be written comfortably (if perhaps at a somewhat slower pace than C), with arbitrary correctness properties proven on it; but the learning curve to get there (through Coq, etc) has been a struggle. Every few years I set myself the goal of a proven-correct implementation of a min/max heap in assembly built on this approach, and every few years I give up.

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

#35

Post by ryandrake »

arzke wrote: post #23

Debugging electronics to fix stuff. Some people seem to be able to repair whatever broken electronic devices we give them, which I find fascinating.

Same! There is a huge knowledge and skill gap between knowing how resistors, capacitors, and transistors work to the point where you can build a little light blinker, which I can do, and actually troubleshooting a (even 1980s through-hole technology) device to find the component that is broken, which is way beyond me.

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

#36

Post by ge96 »

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. using a boost converter or regulator to boost/downgrade voltage and which servos/sensors uses what. Later have to be concerned with too much current being drawn but yeah.

I used these green proto boards you can solder onto as a step up above breadboard but not my own PCB.

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

#37

Post by 65 »

spiffytech wrote: post #26

I 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.

I've looked into this before. You might be able to pull this off with the YouTube API and Stream Rip using Deezer. Would require a bit of hacking but it could work.

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

#39

Post by joshdavham »

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 there are number of smaller projects that I plan on working on!

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

#40

Post by 3D30497420 »

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.

Check out the Arduino starter kit. This is how I started with electrics. It comes with everything you need including a great book which walks you through everything. Very much worth the money.

https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-mu...

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