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Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
751–760 of 769 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#752I 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…
This is super cool. I also find it hard to the right fit for me so I usually end up at a tailor or wear baggy clothes(which are in trend) however the comfort of having the clothes fit you right and you feeling really good about is missing and fast fashion sucks too lot of poorly designed clothes and cheap materials that becomes generic quite fast.
Kudos for living this lifestyle, those pants look really sick..
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#753I 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…
hell yeah, I have tailed my T-shirts before but nothing else, making my own sound like a nice challenge. How do you source materials? I'm usually very picky about the material, especially if it touches my skin, and usually the heavier the better. The best T-shirts I ever owned was a military surplus made from organic cotton, and was more than twice the weight of my other T-shirts, but I couldn't find anything like it…
My home country of Bharat is a major textile producer and exporter. I can find anything here.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#754Not sure if it is niche, but focused on one South Asian music genre -- been working on this personal project to compile, and collect resources from reliable sources along with mapping lineages of people. Also, I archive a lot of music for this genre from different sources before it vanishes from internet! https://www.qavvali.com/ EDIT: I have one more page but that is not in navigation yet for people not familiar wit…
Qawalli is great and thank you for spreading more of this and keeping it alive.
Farid Ayaz & Abu Mohammad Qawalls is one of the greatest qawalls of all time in his dedication to music, they never sold out to commercial terms while making quality music.
Farid Ayaz also carries an aura around him and the music he creates. If anyone is interested in getting to more into qawalli they should check out this documentary called "Had Anhad"[0], I'm linking a section where Farid Ayaz is interviewed below(cause I'm such a fanboy ;)
To OP, Great work, for keeping the verbal poetry alive. PEACE
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#755Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Slide rules are conceptual marvels in their mechanical simplicity. The Curta is a marvelous gadget, but it has lots and lots of moving parts.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#756[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
While there is often a "normal" (bell-curve fitting) distribution for individual factors, putting them together can be counter-intuitive. > Even when considering just three dimensions, fewer than 5% of pilots were “average” in all. [1] I would guess many/most people probably think they fall into either (1) the normal bucket or (変) the weird/fringe bucket. Either "I am pretty normal" or "I am an outsider". How many th…
I think it should be fairly easy to determine if atheists really are outsiders in parts of the US or if it's just perception: just look at voting results, and church attendance for any given area. I don't think it's merely perception at all; visit any rural area and you'll likely see a surprising number of churches relative to the population. Also, seeing people walking around in public doesn't tell you anything abou…
> just look at voting results
"Just"? How would you build a predictive model that inferred aggregate individual qualities such as "% atheists" based on voting results? That would be a rather indirect and distorted path for estimation. There are better ways.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#758Chess engine is already a solved problem, yes, but Baghchal would love some attention. I have been maintaining https://www.baghchal.net for more than a decade now and I dream of the day I could integrate Stockfish like Engine for Baghchal one day. I haven't gotten chance to dive deep into this myself because of work and personal reasons but it could be a great niche to explore since you mentioned about Chess. Look into it.
Also, check this: https://github.com/bhu1st/obx
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#759Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it should be fairly easy to determine if atheists really are outsiders in parts of the US or if it's just perception: just look at voting results, and church attendance for any given area. I don't think it's merely perception at all; visit any rural area and you'll likely see a surprising number of churches relative to the population. Also, seeing people walking around in public doesn't tell you anything abou…
> just look at voting results "Just"? How would you build a predictive model that inferred aggregate individual qualities such as "% atheists" based on voting results? That would be a rather indirect and distorted path for estimation. There are better ways.
It's not a great way, admittedly, but there is a very high correlation between Republican voters and religiosity. Very high turnout for Republican candidates plus lots of active churches in an economically-poor area I think is a reliable indication that atheism in that area is low.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#760Watchmaker in training here - after 20 years in startups I am now in my first semester of watchmaking school. It is one of the hardest things I've done in my 47 years, and I am loving every minute of it. It is training my brain, hands, and eyes to see and do things I never thought possible. Repairing a watch feels similar to dealing with code to me: - observing to see how/why certain watch components/chunks of code w…
Are you going there as a hobby or plan to work as a watch repairman/watchmaker? if the latter, how big is the market these days for analog watches? I feel like everyone is wearing electronic watches.
I have been thinking of also learning horology as an entry to building automata machines