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Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

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Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#731

Post by shivekkhurana »

MezzoDelCammin wrote: post #656
shivekkhurana wrote: post #27

I started designing my own clothes. The insight was that I spend 80% money on suits that I wear 2 times a year, and the rest was low quality clothing I actually wore. I flipped it, and made suits and pants that I could wear everyday. The fast fashion stores were crap quality, my body is not a template size and I care about fabric and comfort. The process was to learn how to sketch, to determine fabrics, colors and fi…

OK, fairly specific question - how did You get to that pants silouhete? It seems from the pics You went for something like a straight leg plus some extra room and fairly fitted waist / butt. Is that a response to a trend (oversized work clothes seem to be the thing these past few years), or is there some practical reason too (mainly for the extra room in the leg shape)?

Two reasons: 1. My thighs are bigger than usual for my waist size, so I adapted. 2. Indians (Bharat) have a culture of wearing lose clothes, and I also like lose clothes. They are more comfortable.

The waist is fitted, but with elastic bands on the side for added comfort (my belly gets bigger during evening, when I sit down and after I eat).

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#732

Post by jolt42 »

bulte-rs wrote: post #120

I'm a football/soccer coach (youth, U12 and U19). Got started as a "temp" for my sons mini-team (back when he was 5). Temporary turns into UEFA certified youth trainer/coach real fast. It's no longer just about the kids (sorry guys), but a really awesome hobby with lots of personal development paths.

I've been meaning to get back into that, but now I'm curious about lots of personal development paths?

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#734

Post by davis »

tombert wrote: post #137

I have been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find the owners of the old Digital Research "Concurrent DOS" operating system. There's a lot of interesting turns in the search and it's been fun to document. I've written a blog post about it [1] though there have been a few updates since I've written that. I honestly think it might be a fun thing for me to keep doing, whether or not I'm successful with my…

Damn, this is really cool man. I'm a big fan of Gary Kildall, he's one of my heroes so this is great to read.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#736

Post by rbanffy »

eru wrote: post #523
rbanffy wrote: post #89

How niche is retrocomputing? I absolutely love my ancient machines, and I use them to explore period applications, much more than games. I also love to restore and preserve them. There’s something magical about a Sun workstation Solaris 2 a Frog Design Trinitron monitor. or a Microvax running VMS and DECWindows. Or a multi-user Altair Z80. I think it’s sad a lot of software was lost and some platforms were denied the…

You call that retro? ;) I have a Curta sitting on my desk. Not as fun to toy around with as the electronic computers from a few decades later, though.

I only learned to use slide rules, and already forgot everything about them.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#737

Post by narag »

I glanced at this question at work, now reading it to find interesting ideas, but also want to share something: six months ago I bought a motorcycle. It was a no-brainer, commuting time is now half compared to the subway and after decades it's invigorating to be back to two wheels, not only physically but also mentally.

Maybe not very niche, but you'll quickly find there are many sub-cultures around biking (some of them very friendly) and an endless variety of interesting tech: engines, suspensions, electronics, injection mapping, IMUs, gear materials, GPS... routing is its own rabbit hole.

It's not necessarily very expensive. A middleweight bike that will take you everywhere can be bought for less than 10k. Add a grand more for gear and insurance.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#738

Post by biotinker »

lostworld wrote: post #710
biotinker wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's definitely a thing you can do!

We haven't been doing that for now. The success rate doing so is somewhat less than directly grafting the whole top of the tree onto rootstock, for a few reasons. Since our primary goal is preservation and a lot of these trees have zero clones and could be wiped out by wildfire on any given year, our first priority is to get clones of every tree.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#739

Post by rainrat »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #715
rainrat wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Belzedar94 made a prototype that plays Spell chess about 6 months ago: https://github.com/Belzedar94/Fairy-Stockfish/pull/37

This is pretty cool, I haven't looked into it much but I would appreciate if you can tell me what is the best playing strategy according to the fairy stockfish?

I think it's too early for that. There's still some edge-case issues in Belzedar's code, then it would need a specific NNUE for optimal play, because of the high branching factor.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#740

Post by e-topy »

biotinker wrote: post #181

I got myself involved with a nonprofit local group preserving local pioneer era apple trees. They've been DNA testing and cataloging the trees, and had all the info stashed away in google drive and onedrive folders. The founder was looking to step back so they asked me if I wanted to step up as project lead, which I did. I took the info and organized it into a nice wiki-style site with maps and descriptions so everyo…

This sounds like a cool mix of genetics and gardening, I like that. Maybe I should ask some local non profits whether they need help with IT infra, because I don't exactly think "google drive and onedrive folders" is going to be an outlier.

also I came back here after three days, how did this get 713 comments all of a sudden???

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