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Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

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Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#701

Post by bokohut »

s3tt3mbr1n1 wrote: post #273
bokohut wrote: post #194

Walking and finding history if your location has such history to offer to find. People pay vast accruing cumulative sums over time to go to the gym and my exercise pays me with every single walk. Some of that modern human history I have found dates back hundreds of years in the form of coins and bottles while some of the native human history I have found dates back 10 thousand years. I cannot neglect the fossils eith…

Very interested to hear more. Do you live in an (old) city or more rurally?

A town along the water in Maryland founded in 1694 that has documented colonial roots as well with being present in water way form on the only known Native American Chesapeake Bay hand drawn deer hide map, 1590-1620, which still exists in a British museum.

The history here over time is extremely vast and I have been very fortunate in my walks to have located many items related to that history. Speaking only to the Native American finds I have located hundreds of points of vast variety, many hundreds of tools large and small along with objects no expert can explain yet they know to be Native American from their workings. With each tide change the shoreline is manipulated thus revealing more while covering the things missed until another tide change.

One's mind may be curious to ask also of what other things I have found and foregoing specifics I can say as a lead on to those curious that one of the first railroads in the US terminated at the waters edge behind my location. And on that railroad it has been documented that U.S. Presidents, Kings and Queens, Daniel Boone, Benjamin Latrobe, Lafayette and more road those rails and therefore stood on this ground I now walk. Not to far from that railroad was the county's first tavern which hosted those riding the rails and served them libations in bottles while along that journey.

The British landed behind my location too during the War of 1812 and burnt a small supporting outpost town and many boats very near that railroad. In 1999 a water based archeological dig was conducted where a British boat was discovered along with many items in the vessels hull from that era.

I left much out but this alone should reflect the quantity and quality of the items I have found. I have literal buckets of finds and even more buckets of items I have yet to sort.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#702

Post by vishkk »

dyauspitr wrote: post #662
vishkk wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, and absolutely! I have been trying to get more people to try — my friend and i host a Zoom listening session every 3 months or so where he curates a playlist to introduce new artists.

I would love a link if you’re willing to publicly share it!

sure thing —- feel free to share with anyone else interested. It starts at 1PM EST, and goes on for roughly 8 hours so drop by/tune in anytime you want: https://luma.com/823kzuci?tk=IiDKu2

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#704

Post by herefortechnews »

deviation wrote: post #557
nathan_douglas wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FSRS is really cool. I'm trying to use it and a modified flashcard system to learn more abstract computer science and higher math. I hadn't considered it as a way of learning Chess - that's really interesting. I'm thinking about expanding my system to cover ear-training, birdsong recognition, a few other things like that.

I never thought about ear-training! My listening comprehension for Piano has always been lacking. A deck of piano sounds that map to actual notes (or even chords) might do wonders for it... My current decks are as follows - I spend about an hour in total reviewing/learning them all, daily: - 5000 most common French words - 5000 most common French sentences (following the Alex Crompton method: https://www.alexcrompton…

Are all your decks from Anki's shared decks library? Are you making your own as well? If so, what's that process?

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#705

Post by 101008 »

neves wrote: post #429
101008 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if this is not the place to do it. I live in a city that has bat at nights, so if you live above 6th floor and you leave your windows open, there are chances some confused bats go into your apartment. Even worse, they can go into the blind box of your rollover. After two traumatic events where I had bats going into my apartment (and it took me 5 days/nights where I didnt sleep at all to take them out alive), I…

Mosquito sound repellents are useless for insects, but solved my bat problem. A bat loved to defecate in my son's bathroom. The most internal room of the house. I've put a sound repellent in the bathroom and it stopped happening

Interesting. What's the brand that worked for you?

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#706

Post by trick-or-treat »

komali2 wrote: post #654
trick-or-treat wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagined everyone at these events independently classifying everyone else and just sort of nodding knowingly at each other about who the weirdos are. And so the fact that I don't do that must mean that I'm one of the weirdos. And sure, it doesn't really matter other than it's a reason to avoid events.

> And sure, it doesn't really matter other than it's a reason to avoid events. I guess it's this part I'm not really understanding - what harm are you avoiding?

Attending events that I'm not welcome at / are hostile to weirdos.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#707

Post by pkghost »

polishdude20 wrote: post #470
pkghost wrote: post #462

Get a microscope and help me explore the role of structured water in rouleaux formation. Rouleaux formations are clumps of red blood cells, and they're bad because 90% of our circulatory system is I did an n=5 study on sauna and rouleaux (positive result; draft report: https://thespacebetween.xyz/p/sangre-y-sauna/ ), and some n=1 observations of myself with grounding and wifi. Blog post: https://thespacebetweenx.subs…

What is structured water?

A so-called fourth phase of water (liquid, but with some crystalline organization) that grows on hydrophilic surfaces by absorbing ultraviolet and infrared light, and organizes into a honeycomb-like lattice similar to ice, but lacking the H+ binding layers to make it rigid. It has higher viscosity than bulk water, and a net-negative charge.

Yes, it's a relatively recent concept (decades) pursued mostly by Gerald Pollack at University of Washington and not widely replicated, though there is some replication that has prompted critical review (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7404113/). It's also downstream of work by Albert Szent-Györgyi (Nobel prize for vitamin C) and Gilbert Ling. And, of course, there are a bunch of folks Pollack distances himself from commercializing the concept.

From the horse's mouth: https://www.pollacklab.org/research

If I had a coloring book for every person who cited wikipedia as a reliable source on cutting-edge science... I'd have Christmas presents for a bunch of people I don't know!

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#708

Post by binarysolo »

Notatheist wrote: post #596
binarysolo wrote: post #571

Social dancer here -- without hyperbole this was a lifechanging hobby for the better, and while I haven't been able to "meaningfully contribute to" as a criteria, I am a much better person for it. I'm primarily a salsa dancer (~18 years), but spent a few years doing a buncha other dances to get an understanding of the music and movement so I'm pretty much beginner-intermediate in a buncha other dances (equiv of 1-2 y…

I want to put extra emphasis on how technically demanding salsa is and how appealing it can be to autists (and how many of them you'll find at the average social/class). Your body, the music, and the people are all puzzles you could spend lifetimes learning to solve. I think about salsa almost as much as I think about software. How to make a lead work, how to improve my alignment, how to interpret instruments. Highly…

"I think about salsa almost as much as I think about software."

I feel you on this. :)

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#709

Post by eru »

srean wrote: post #623
eru wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I helped the wife write her own Haskell software to help her generate her knitting patterns in LaTeX. Fun times. Should be much easier these days with all the AI help available.

Please consider writing a blog about this. Would love to know more.

Sorry, I don't have time. See https://www.mathemaknitter.com/ for her (sadly neglected) blog that also links to her ravelry account and patterns.

Mostly the conceptual evolution was:

Knitting patterns have a lot of numbers with mathematical relations between them. You could keep track of them by hand, but spreadsheets are already an improvement. Especially when you want to make edits to earlier parts of the pattern. Well, spreadsheets aren't too bad to write, but they are basically write-only software, impossible to audit. She'd already learned programming in Haskell before, so going from there to using Haskell for making the numbers work out was a small step, conceptually.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#710

Post by lostworld »

biotinker wrote: post #677
hopinhopout wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to ask, how often is tissue culture used? I'm not sure of it's exact usecases like respawning old tree samples but it does seem very related.

It isn't, really, at least not by us. Apple trees are pretty easy to propagate if they're alive. Snip off a twig, graft it onto another tree, and away it goes. Some poor-condition trees can certainly present a challenge in terms of finding ideal graftable wood, but even a poor-quality scion is a lot easier to propagate via grafting than trying to culture in a petri dish.

I've never done it but apparently if you graft branches of different varieties on one tree, you can produce a number of different varieties of apples on one tree. This would be especially good if you could get some of the tastiest heirloom varieties.
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