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Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

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Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#151

Post by autocorr »

Echoing others, Chess engines certainly aren't a solved problem! In fact there are a lot of niches that are absolutely starving for effort. Ones I'm interested in are related to Chess variants and puzzles.

Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety of tools to train new neural nets for these variants, generate opening books, puzzles, etc. You can play some of them on PyChess (pychess.org). These are projects basically run by a couple people with huge backlogs of bugs and feature requests. An enthusiastic developer can easily get involved! Or just enjoy playing different variants and getting involved with the player community.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#153

Post by MidnightRider39 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #138
allenu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a really cool idea. How do you organize the meetup and promote it to people if it ends up being random people? Do you set it up on meetup.com and have a theme at the minimum? I've been to a lot of meetups and it's definitely hit or miss and obviously depends on the sociability of the people that show up. The better ones I've attended are generally ones where people aren't trying to network for work purpos…

> ones where people aren't trying to network I have literally never been to any kind of organized gathering where this wasn't the objective of most of the people there. Family and children's events excluded (sometimes).

That’s crazy, you’ve never been to a party?

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#154

Post by NoboruWataya »

Hnefatafl, a simple board game that was played by the vikings and others who had frequent contact with them. Or rather, what we play today is an approximation of what they played back then as we don't really know the exact rules they used. It's interesting in that unlike chess and others, it is asymmetrical, and there are a number of different variants each with their own challenges and different balances between attacker and defender.

The main community and learning resource is at http://aagenielsen.dk.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#155

Post by Skidaddle »

I’ve started making what I “joy machines” that I am putting up in or near my neighborhood. They’re some combination of public interactive art (e.g. push a button and it prints out a compliment) and little art on display that I design and 3D print for people to take.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#157

Post by swalberg »

gritspants wrote: post #66

I'm big into anti tech/work related activities. It reminds me that no matter how much I know, or think I know, that I have so much more to learn. I got into scuba diving while living in NC, and it just happens that there's a lot of it off the coast! The other problem is that it's deep. Diving down to 130 feet sounds cool until you experience hours on a boat only to get a few minutes at the bottom. Eventually I got bo…

GUE Fundies is on my bucket list. I don't think I'd be interested in cave diving or deep stuff where I need helium, but the level of skill that tech divers show is something I want to be able to do.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#158

Post by SoftTalker »

MidnightRider39 wrote: post #153
SoftTalker wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ones where people aren't trying to network I have literally never been to any kind of organized gathering where this wasn't the objective of most of the people there. Family and children's events excluded (sometimes).

That’s crazy, you’ve never been to a party?

Sure. Most people are there with an agenda. ABC.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#159

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

autocorr wrote: post #151

Echoing others, Chess engines certainly aren't a solved problem! In fact there are a lot of niches that are absolutely starving for effort. Ones I'm interested in are related to Chess variants and puzzles. Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety…

Ohh about fairy stockfish, I had actually looked into it for something like spell-chess (which is an completely unsolved problem!)

I was playing chess with one of my friends and we played spell-chess which is an clash royale/clash of clans x chess thing where you get two spells of freeze and jump

Freeze allows you to select a tile and have a 3x3 square radius which freezes those pieces

Jump allows you to select any piece (opponent or yours) and it will effectively allow you to jump over that.

When me and my friends were playing, I kept trying to do something wonky to find the most optimal play. I had thoughts for a day or two to find/make fairy stockfish or atleast had the idea to do so but not the experience to do so but I certainly wished even from the end point perspective as to what/if the game was solved. I don't know but these things make me feel as if perhaps, just maybe, the game can be played a certain way where even in the best game, its not draw but rather a particular side wins (effectively solving it),

I felt like these spells were too overpowered so there was an possibility about it, you just made me remember a lot of things about these things that I had thought. It was these thoughts which randomly led me to discover fairy stockfish which is an really interesting project!

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

#160

Post by JKCalhoun »

alexpotato wrote: post #106

Using crooked knives [0] for woodcarving. They're essentially a combination of a plane, spoke-shave, draw-knife and gouge but all in a one handed tool. They were primarily used by Native Americans to build things like canoes, snowshoes, baskets etc. I first found about them from reading John McPhee's Survival of the Bark Canoe [1] but there are lots of uses of them on video on the website below (which I created). If…

That's pretty niche!
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