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Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

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Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#141

Post by cadr »

I don’t know how niche they are, but a few I’ve done in the past

- 3D printed musical instruments. Print other designs or contribute your own

- lock picking. When you really get into it, you modify locks to make them more of a challenge and mail them to people

- Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat. I’m currently mainly interested in linearizing switch-mode amplifiers, but was doing fox hunting for a bit (radio direction finding), and periodically do POTA (transmitting from parks)

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#142

Post by SoftTalker »

Triphibian wrote: post #81
ngokevin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Blood on the Clocktower to do this, it's a social deduction game (that's just not randomly accusing each other) so it gets everyone talking easily

It has been my experience that social deduction games are very attractive to folks who have problems socializing in day-to-day life. You can see them almost come alive when they are given the permission.

I think a lot of people need prompting for something to talk about. They have no confidence that topics they bring up will be interesting to anyone else. So any kind of gathering that takes that pressure off will be attractive.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#143

Post by switchbak »

serf wrote: post #71

FDM 3d printing is still a wild-west and there are plenty of avenues to explore. Not sure what else to say about that other than as someone with daily and close personal proximity to the 'industry' that cropped up I am well aware that there is plenty of work to be done by enthusiasts and niche-people. Engineering and machinery is still a place full of exploration if you have the chops. If you don't have them yet then…

I knew a guy who found an interesting 3d printing niche: 2 way radios for professionals (mainly SAR crews) are always getting fetched up on clothing, and you're often finding the radio turned off because the knobs got moved. Dumb problem, should have been solved by fundamental engineering years ago - but whatever. He built a 3d printed shroud for a variety of popular radios, and now makes a living selling these.

He's a tech guy, but no engineer. He saw the need (he works on a SAR team), saw the solution and made it happen. Inspiring, really.

I do a bit of 3d printing stuff myself. Personally, I'm attracted that it's getting more professional. I can use it as the impetus to learn real engineering/CAD, etc. Not in an "I'm an engineer" way, but still using real principles to make better things. You don't have to be intimidated if you keep your identity small and let it inspire you instead.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#144

Post by JimBlackwood »

embwbam wrote: post #74

Not sure if you were looking only for indoor hobbies, but I picked up Kiteboarding recently, and it is the most outrageously fun thing I've ever done. It's like being a kid and jumping off the house with a bedsheet, except it works. Most mistakes are laughed off by splashing in the water. I'm 3 years in and I can jump 7-10m then fly like a bird for 5-10 seconds without consequences. Even as a beginner, sailing around…

Really fun! I used to do it too, and I miss it.

How do you combine it with work? Where I live in NL, there are few days where I’m able to go kiteboarding and I probably won’t know until the day off if it’s possible or not.

Very hard to schedule!

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#146

Post by mkjs »

ggregoire wrote: post #93

I've been playing exclusively CRPGs for the last 12 months or so, which was kinda a niche genre before the success of BG3. There are tons of way to beat those games and optimizing how you build your party and characters (what players call "min-maxing") while following a highly narrative story is a lot of fun. Most of them are quite old and often on sales for like 5 bucks on Steam, for which you get hundreds of hours…

Nice to see people discovering these games. I wouldn't really say it was niche until BG3 though, there were plenty of highly acclaimed games long before that.

You might like this blog, the author plays through CRPGs in chronological order. Currently they're at the mid 90s. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#147

Post by mcnnowak »

Try playing Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder (or any number of other systems.) Pathfinder is super deep and complex.

There's also an entire community of people who play Table Top Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) solo and use the outcomes of their play reports to blog or write fiction.

Also, the tooling around these games is very interesting if you want to build an app: Crafting calculator? Generative hexcrawl maps? Random tables? Statistics tools for dice rolls?

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#148

Post by chromacity »

Almost everything you can do on your own is a "solved problem". Why go into woodworking if you can buy an Ikea stool? The point of hobbies isn't to solve problems - that's called a job - but to learn and have fun.

Find a niche where you can resist the temptation to constantly compare yourself to eight billion other people on the internet. Something where success isn't measured in Github stars, Youtube likes, or Reddit upvotes. Once you get in that mindset, almost anything goes. I know people who collect RPN calculators and are having a blast. All kinds of hands-on crafts are great too. I like making electronic music and I'm pretty bad at it.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#149

Post by jedberg »

I make holiday light shows with an open source program called XLights[0]. I'm sure you've seen the videos[1] of what people[2] can do. Usually the top comment is "man that is cool but I wouldn't want to be their neighbor!" followed by "my neighbors love my light shows".

Creating the sequences is time consuming, and lot of people end up buying them or sharing them, but those are rarely as good as the ones you make for yourself.

Some folks have dabbled with using AI to create the sequences. I think the biggest issues are lack of training data and it's a very visual art, so there needs to be a better feedback between the text representation and the visual manifestation.

So if you're into using AI to make physical world things better, that would be a good place to look!

[0] https://xlights.org

[1] https://youtu.be/enhhtPZMwCE?t=119

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5dfpe_-Lgg

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#150

Post by JimBlackwood »

davenporten wrote: post #37

Animal tracking. I picked it up in college and it has been a real source of joy and a true challenge. It's also something you can do almost anywhere: urban, suburban, rural, out in "the wild." A lot of people think of it as looking for paw/hoof marks in the mud, but tracking can actually be quite involved, requiring you to understand the environment and ecology as a whole. For example, tracking birds is outrageously…

Sounds fun! Do you have resources to get started?

I do gundog work, it would be fun to do the tracking together with the dog. (I don’t hunt, it would just be to make some walks more interesting)

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