Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
swsieber 3 days ago Hobby electronics & robotics. I can make an LED blink on a ESP8266 (it's been a while), but that's it. I'd like to get more familiar with a multimeter, figuring out broken kids toys, etc. but it's a bit daunting. Maybe there's too many options and not enough constraints. I'm not sure.ge96 3 days ago This gotta come up with a project you want for yourself and make it. I remember soldering one of those 2x16 LCD screens and it had a short so it would start smoking to designing/3D printing my own quadruped with an IMU/navigation. I did cheat and not use inverse kinematics, I watched videos on other insect-style quads walking and I programmed it manually.I think main gotcha is power distribution and shared ground eg. using a boost converter or regulator to boost/downgrade voltage and which servos/sensors uses what. Later have to be concerned with too much current being drawn but yeah.
I used these green proto boards you can solder onto as a step up above breadboard but not my own PCB.
theoreticalmal 2 days ago I have produced the magical blue smoke multiple times out of my own mistakes. It’s part of the process!
rramadass 3 days ago See my previous comment here for how to get started - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33628025I highly recommend downloading Understanding Signals with the Propscope from Parallax (available for free online) and following the tutorials from it with an Arduino+Analog Discovery 2/3 device. You can use the Digilent "Real Analog" learning course along with it - https://digilent.com/reference/learn/courses/real-analog/sta...
The real motivation in Electronics comes from understanding in visual form (using a Oscilloscope/Multimeter etc.) how things work in a circuit and how your calculations match up to what you see on the screen. Even as simple as the beginner LED circuit can teach you a lot when you use a potentiometer and see how voltage/current graphs change.
agnosticmantis 2 days ago Thanks a lot for the recommendations.Would you recommend the Real Analog course independently?
What does the Propscope one offer that Real Analog doesn’t? The Propscope one looks kinda old so I was wondering what I’d miss if I only used Real Analog.
Also not sure if there’s a parts kit for the Propscope one that I can buy.
rramadass 2 days ago Sure, you can do the "Real Analog" course independently. Study it with a Parts Kit from Digilent+Analog Discovery 2/3 device(AD2/AD3)+Arduino board. That would be a nice entry point into Electronics+Embedded Systems.I was referring to the tutorial pdf of Understanding Signals with Propscope containing very nice step-by-step lessons in using a USB Oscilloscope for measuring various circuit parameters. The Propscope itself is very old/underpowered (not being sold anymore) and not needed. You just use AD2/AD3 with its Waveforms software to do the same experiments with any board.
Note that if you use a AVR-based Arduino you can learn to program at the higher Arduino API/library level and then at the lower direct AVR level both with the same board. For learning Arduino Programming see Exploring Arduino by Jeremy Blum and for direct AVR programming see Make: AVR Programming by Elliot Williams.
agnosticmantis 2 days ago Thanks for the tips.I placed an order for the AD3+Parts Kit and excited to dive in!
rramadass 2 days ago Nice. You also need to get the BNC Adapter board and probes for AD3 (available separately or as part of the pro bundle). Might also want to take a look at other available adapters for AD3.AD3 resources (docs/tutorials/accessories/books etc.) - https://digilent.com/reference/test-and-measurement/analog-d...
tumidpandora 1 days ago I'm starting out as well. If you prefer coding in python, raspberry pi or anything adafruit is a good place to start. If you're cool with c/c++ Arduino ecosystem is quite mature . I decided to stick to the former so it's a less steeper learning curve for me and my little one. Get a BBC Micro:bit v2 and/or a CircuitPlayground Express. Both have a ton of sensors on board (temp, tilt, light, humidity etc) and some leds/neo-pixels to play around. Once you play with some of that, and want to get your hands dirty with breadboarding and soldering, get a basic kit (e.g. raspberry pi pico etc) and use MakeCode to try out some simple circuits with your microbit or circuitplayground express as the signal provider, play with servos, hobby motors, do some basic projects. Once you feel you're a bit proficient, might one to check out LeRobot for an open source robotic arm that you could train with reinfocement learning.. this is not exhaustive or the only path, there's many others, this is just my 2cents. Hope this helps!drabadur 3 days ago For robotics, I recently came across this course to learn the basics: https://github.com/henki-robotics/robotics_essentials_ros2. Haven't started it yet though.mlsu 3 days ago For this, what takes a while is to just tinker and fry components several times. Get a breadboard, get several sensors, try to design something and iterate on your design. Plan to fry sensors and IC's. Also helps to read some basic electrical theory and know what the role of different components are.The way I got proficient is with hobbyist PCB design. What helped me is starting with schematics and datasheets and planning to finish with an assembled board. I started designing PCB's and having them assembled with JLCPCB (quite cheap: $20 or so for a run of 5 boards; $120-$150 fully assembled). I fried 2 boards before the 3rd rev booted up, then from there it's optimization. I consider the $200/mo or so in PCBA, whether boards work or not, to be my "EE education" -- cost efficient compared to university fees! And $200 is sort of like the "exam," it's costly enough to make me really think twice about component selection/placement/etc.
Not saying that's the approach you want to take because that might be hardcore / not someplace you want to get to. But I spent a long long time really wondering how electricity really works and like why you need capacitors, inductors, op-amps, etc. It never made sense to me until I created my own schematic, chose my own parts, and understood why I chose the parts I did and connected them the way I did.
iLoveOncall 3 days ago This just reinforces the fact that it's inaccessible. There's no way I'm literally throwing $200 a month in the trash on a hobby.yetihehe 3 days ago $200 is for assembled boards. I learned electronics and spent about $200 on it in two years, that includes cheapest soldering iron. Don't order assembled boards when you are starting. Order cheapest bluepill (STM32F103C8T6) or non-original arduino clone and start on breadboard with that. Make pcb's only when you're ready to learn more. Expect that your first one will not work or will require some "rewiring", but second one may already work. You might start with some cheap through-hole components, they are a little easier to re-wire or re-solder, it's a good idea to put your first microcontroller in socket.iLoveOncall 3 days ago Ah alright that makes more sense, I missed that part, my bad.
jocaal 3 days ago I'm a EE masters student and I also want to reinforce how inaccessible EE is and that I don't really recommend it as a hobby. EE is a very mature field and it's very math heavy for a reason. The second you move past the hobby boards, stuff becomes really difficult and really expensive really fast. If your end goal is to create toys for kids, then it's fine as a hobby. But without the formal training and lab access you are going to struggle to get past that point so it's pretty much impossible to turn the hobby into something more. Unlike software, where tinkering genuinely has the possibility of turning your side projects into careers. Hell, if you don't live in EE hotspot locations, I wouldn't even recommend it as a career anymore. Software is where it's at, even in the age of AI.eternityforest 2 days ago That's only for the heavy analog stuff. If you're into the more modern digital stuff, you basically never for any reason need to breadboard prototype, everything can be done with I2C modules and the like.Burning a part is incredibly rare with this kind of stuff, if you're willing to put in the time to learn about it before actually building it.
blankx32 3 days ago did you understand theory deeply first like Kirchhoff , node analysis
3D30497420 3 days ago Check out the Arduino starter kit. This is how I started with electrics. It comes with everything you need including a great book which walks you through everything. Very much worth the money.https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-mu...
thoughtpalette 3 days ago Thanks for the link! This looks perfect for what I'm looking for.
i_don_t_know 3 days ago I have found the Make: Electronics series of books by Charles Platt to be a good mix of basics / fundamentals and fun projects.cweagans 2 days ago You should check out Ben Eater's channel on YouTube. He has a series about building an 8 bit computer from scratch + another one about building a 6502-based computer. It's very very accessible if you know some really basic hardware stuff (and for the things that you don't know already, he gives enough context to start googling).cgreerrun 3 days ago Highly recommend LeRobot.
noisy_boy 2 days ago I want to help small businesses in my area, those who want it, with technology solutions that can improve things (and in-turn learn about the needs of real small businesses). I can pretty much do full-stack (ranging from something basic that improves things for them to something elaborate like backend, UI, AWS, K8S etc). However, I don't have any idea how to identify customers, approach them, price my work fairly, deal with wiring/hardware, deal with the local laws regarding running a non-full-time business etc. I guess what I'm after is that end-of-the-tunnel satisfaction in helping others using technology but a pretty long tunnel is getting in the way :)fakedang 2 days ago What I've learnt is that it's for businesses to productize SME solutions unless they're dirt cheap or free, but getting hired as a consultant (who actually adds value) is always an option. It need not be done for compensation either initially - you just want to build trust with the folks, advise them, maybe sit with them and evaluate already existing technical solutions on the market (instead of building your own!).If you're in the US, you could just set up an LLC if you find some potential customers through the above method, very straightforward. Or you could set up the equivalent of a sole proprietorship in Europe if you're based here.
noisy_boy 2 days ago Got it, thanks!
abhiyerra 1 days ago Most small businesses don’t need UI, etc. They need lots of integration work though. Like my friend who has a jewelry business needed help integrating Etsy orders to Asana which we did using Zapier.So lot less custom code and more linking things software focused on their specific needs.
noisy_boy 13 hours ago Thats good to know - I love integration. The most fun I had was to design and build a ci/cd setup for my team (which spread to other teams). I guess I am a plumber at heart.
sandreas 24 hours ago For years I had a little project here to rebuild the iPod Nano 7g in Open Source Hardware and software. Not that small, but at least in the same size category (a lot smaller than the smallest smartphone).The iPod nano 7g is not designed to last forever... it is hard to repair - the battery can be replaced but the internal 16GB flash memory is a job for professionals.
There are lots of <= 4 inch Android players which could simply run an app, but these are draining a battery so fast after a while it isn't even close to the experience of a specific device.
The main pain point is controlling the device via headphone remote. The iPod supports play/pause, next, prev, vol+, vol- and fast-forward as well as rewind. Nothing comes close to this in android.
However, I was aiming to take one of the newer RISC-V boards with USB-C (like LicheeRV Nano or Luckfox Lyra), add a 2.4 inch display and a battery + gauge to it and 3D print a case, work out a UI via LVGL, but having 2 children is just too time consuming for such a project.
Sticking to my iPod Nano 7g hopefully lasts another 5 years until I can focus on it again :-)
clx75 3 days ago I am fascinated by the idea of building something like the Lisp Machines or Smalltalk 80 from scratch. Build a Forth in assembly, build a Lisp in Forth, build an OS and computing environment in Lisp. AOT-compile only the Forth interpreter, load and compile the rest from source during system boot, maybe with later stages optimizing the previous stages as the system is assembling itself.I imagine two languages - Langsam and Schnell - intertwined in some sort of yin-yang fashion. Langsam is slow, dynamic, interpreted, Schnell is fast, static, compiled. Both would be LISPs. Schnell would be implemented as a library in Langsam. If you said (define (add x y) (+ x y)) in Langsam, you would get a Langsam function. If you said (s:define (add (x int) (y int)) (+ x y)) in Langsam, you would get a Langsam function which is a wrapper over a JIT-compiled Schnell function. If you invoke it, the wrapper takes care of the FFI, execution happens at C speed. Most of the complexity typical of a low-level compiled language could be moved into Langsam. I could have sophisticated type systems and C++ template like code generation implemented in a comfortable high level language.
This latter part I managed to partially implement in Clojure and it works (via LLVM), it would be just too much effort to get it completed.
vdupras 3 days ago > Build a Forth in assembly, build a Lisp in ForthYou might already know it, but Dusk OS[1], which is a Forth, has a Lisp implementation[2] which includes a native code compiler for i386, amd64, arm, risc-v and m68k. You might consider it a good starting point for your project.
[1]: http://duskos.org/
[2]: https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/item/fs/doc/co...
igouy 2 days ago NuclearPM 2 days ago I don’t like the language names but I get why you chose them.
yu3zhou4 3 days ago Being able to spontaneously speak with people and slow thinking. I am ok at writing with people, because it gives me time to think and refine my message. But I really suck at live events and talking to people in real life. Did anyone overcome it? And how?nicbou 2 days ago For very clear, very specific advice, succeedsocially.com is the best website I’ve ever seen.Besides that, you just need practice and if applicable a bit of therapy. Practice comes with interacting with a lot of people until it seems easy. Therapy clears some of the roadblocks that might hamper you.
monarchwadia 3 days ago For me, it was a skill issue.Most people learn it when very young. Just repeated practice helped... and someone close to me coached me on things that seemed common sense to others, but were counterintuitive to me. But over time, my neurons rewired themselves. I'm fairly good at small talk now. People dont believe me when I say I couldn't even order pizza over the phone at one point.letitbeirie 2 days ago Are you young enough to have grown up in a house without a land line by chance?I think land lines are where many current adults (who grew up before cell phones were ubiquitous) learned a lot of that common sense, because in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever picked up the phone first - chatty mothers, asshole brothers, mostly-deaf grandfathers, etc.
igouy 2 days ago Before land line phones, in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever answered the door first.
Yiin 3 days ago can you share some of the things that seemed common sense to others?mkbkn 2 days ago Could you share what you practiced that helped you?
WillAdams 3 days ago The French have a term for this, "the wit of the staircase" where one doesn't think of the clever rejoinder until heading upstairs to bed later that evening.I've found asking folks about themselves, trying to get their story works best as a start, then if they reciprocate, things should flow naturally from there.
atmosx 2 days ago Seriously, make it a habit to say “Good morning” or “Good evening” with a warm smile the first time you make eye contact with another guest at a hotel, whether it’s during check-in or at breakfast. This is especially important if you’re staying more than a few days. Once you’ve crossed paths with someone three times without saying a word, starting a conversation later becomes both unlikely and a bit awkward.paulcole 13 hours ago > But I really suck at live events and talking to people in real life. Did anyone overcome it? And how?Yes. This is a learned skill.
Start by leaving your house every day and don't come home until you talk to 10 people you don't know. Do this every day for a month.
And yes, I did this.
y-curious 3 days ago Any advice you get is going to sound rudimentary, as with much of life advice. Now that I've put a disclaimer, here is what helped me the most:When you are shy, there is sometimes the one kind person that introduces you/breaks the ice to others. You love this person because they lubricated the social interaction. I harness this feeling of being saved by pretending that everyone around me is the shy person waiting for someone to break the ice. I frame this internally as myself doing the shy others a huge favor that they'll appreciate. I want to be "that guy" that helped people feel included and involved.
I used to do this consciously. At this point, I rarely have to invoke this thought as I've now put in the reps and it's easier.
Tldr: pretend you're being a social savior and repeated practice
a_tartaruga 1 days ago Genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Synthesizing DNA and transforming cells. Designing better methodologies to improve efficiency, robustness, cost or scale up of common bio lab processes. Mapping out all bio lab processes used in genetic engineering. Unfortunately without going back to school to PhD options are very limited. The Thought Emporium guy and the 4-6 community bio labs in major US cities are the only counter examples I know of doing this outside of academia / industry.I have a theory that if society could unlock a hobbyist class of synthetic biology tinkerers it could unleash rapid growth similar to the computing industry. I'm not sure if the problem is technology not being low cost and high safety enough or a lack of social institutions supporting people like this.
brailsafe 3 days ago There's a few that come to mind, but none that feel actually as daunting intellectually as much as they are qualified by other factors.I'd like to go from indoor bouldering to rock climbing, but coordinating with a belayer doesn't seem super interesting and otherwise it's just a matter of expense, gear, and a slight pivot in my leisure time to start going at it.
Otherwise, the skill that seems most out of reach is keeping a job for longer than a year. I'm in a decent spot now, after a year and a half prior of being unemployed, and I feel like this might be my last real shot at a career of any kind. Other people seem to handle it fine, but this is the thing that seems most out of reach. Unlike engineering problems that are made up of abstractions with ways to break them down and piece together systems, keeping a job is as opaque of an abstraction as I'm aware of, that doesn't necessarily depend on a measurable skill or even on anything within one's control. I've never once felt stability or been able to bet on money coming in next year, and if I had the money for a mortgage, I'd be stopped by the knowledge I can't count on an income flow at any time in the future. I'm thankful for what I have and what I've learned nonetheless.
jonah 3 days ago I haven't done much climbing at all but I would encourage you to go for it. Being outside is a whole different level and a great excuse to spend time in nature.Start by talking to people at your bouldering gym. If you hear anyone discussing going out climbing, ask if you can tag along and just watch for a few times. Watch some videos about climbing basics to get an overall feel for it and some of the concepts and terminology. I'd say you should start out "top roping" on smaller walls. As for equipment for that you don't need much especially since your partner will probably have a rope and gear to build an anchor, etc. You'll need, shoes, a harness, and a helmet.
Going from gym bouldering to outdoor climbing _does_ require being a little more social. It's a minimum 2-person sport usually. But going as a small group and rotating roles and just hanging out watching works too.) You just need to find people you like hanging out with and you can trust. (If you don't find them at your gym, try another or ask around at outdoor stores, your local university rec department, etc.)
About jobs, I can't help you. I tend to stay too long if anything.
brailsafe 1 days ago Thanks for the advice! After re-reading my comment, I should have articulated the thought differently. I've already been taking the path you and the sibling commenter described, all the variables are already more or less in-place, and I already have a strong love of the outdoors, long day hikes with sketchy scrambles, many wall climbers met, invitations received, etc.. So what I meant was, "One of the things I'd like to do is outdoor climbing, but I have a pretty clear path with no particular hurdles in the way of going for it, it's not as abstract as not getting fired or laid off from a job"That said, I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless; more encouragement to get out and do hard, rewarding things, especially social things, should never be frowned upon.
jonah 5 hours ago Motivation and prioritization can be hard!Personally, I love hiking. I like getting out in nature, seeing all the things I can observe along the way, and getting good exercise. That being said, I don't get up and go on my own as often as I'd like. My wife OTOH, also loves hiking but is adamant about going once or twice every weekend if at all possible. So, I take advantage of that extrinsic motivation and am the better for it.
thorin 3 days ago I would encourage you to speak to the wall first in case they run outdoor sessions or see if there are any clubs in your area. This assumes you live in an area with some outdoor climbing. Outdoor bouldering can be done with little equipment, but you need to start way easier than what you'd do at the wall. The ground is surprisingly hard and I've seen someone break their ankle right in front of me a few times and it does not look fun.Outdoor sport climbing is pretty easy to get into if you have bolted climbing in your area, but as you get higher the ground gets even harder so make sure you know what you're doing. Lots of good books and resources available.
If you really want to get into trad climbing be prepared for a longer apprenticeship, take your time and start easy.
brailsafe 1 days ago Yep, this is pretty much the process I had in mind for going about it, and yes all the other variables are conveniently in place. I have a lot of respect for nature, mountains, and difficult potentially dangerous recreational sports, so I don't mean to trivialize the endeavor. I should have articulated the thought in a slightly different way, such that I meant something more akin to "One of the things I'd like to pursue is outdoor climbing, but I have a sense of the path to doing that, it's not as much of a mystery as this other thing"
jesol 3 days ago I don't know anything about electronics design, but I'm really into backpacking so a high efficiency battery system with a solar panel is really interesting to me. I came across this project[1], and wanted to improve upon it for my usecase. I want to add the ability to have multiple 21700 cells in a lightweight charger, instead of a single cell with a builtin USB charger. I want to learn more electronics, but it definitely feels like a multiyear process, and it'd be nice to shortcut it for the projects I'm interested in.1. https://www.reddit.com/r/myog/comments/1k3stln/ultralight_13...
HeyLaughingBoy 3 days ago Learning just enough for your needs is a valid approach to learning electronics design, unless you're planning on becoming an actual EE.It provides a huge amount of self-motivation and as much as I hate to admit it (as a one-time electronics design engineer), you can skip a lot of the middle-layer concepts. Sure, you should understand Ohm's law and what basic components (resistors, capacitors, transistors) do, but you can jump from that right into understanding how a battery charger works without having to understand how the components actually work.
The hard part is finding good tutorial material that starts at the right level: most of the professionally written stuff presupposes that you're either already an EE, or have one at your disposal to translate things for you.
dapperdrake 2 days ago Such is life in STEM.Edit: And EE is genuinely involved.
taylorius 3 days ago There's a certain change of perspective with modern AI (by "modern" I mean Resnet and beyond). When I was deep into neural nets in the 1990s, they weren't that large, and I would think of them in terms of the number of weights and nodes - but modern deep learning seems to have has moved up a few levels of abstraction. (I stepped away from the field for a while). And there's a certain understanding people seem to have now regarding the "gradient flow" through the net and why certain architectures work well (Resnet, Unets etc). I must say I'm finding it tricky to shift into this new level of thinking. Also Transformers - still looking for an intuitive sense of how they work, haha.ckrailo 2 days ago 3Blue1Brown's youtube channel has a lot of visualizations that may help. Transformers are video #6 in his neural networks playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_6700...
seanssel 3 days ago Game development.I’ll admit that part of my problem is chronic depression over a decade+. The idea of gamedev excites me, but I have a hard time feeling passionate about anything these days. You definitely need that for games. Hell, I’m barely able to sit down and even enjoy games anymore.
bemmu 2 days ago Try Roblox (YouTube but for games essentially). You can publish a game just a few clicks, and even quite simple games can get popular enough that you get the satisfaction of seeing others interact with the thing you made, which is very motivating.protocolture 3 days ago Gamedev is weird. I want to do it, and am trained to do it, but the working conditions are horrific.Like half my graduating class ended up in a real estate company making directx based 3d walkthroughs for minimum wage.
Even if you are successful, the crunch is oppressive. The bigger firms will make you labor hard for your art, take all the cream off the top and then terminate your contract.
And yet heaps of people, even me when I am bored, want to do it.
nathan_compton 3 days ago We're not depressed, the rest of the world is just stupidly optimistic.yieldcrv 3 days ago Only partial agree!I think there is a group that is nihilistic and follows that with a defeatist view
There is also a group that is nihilistic and extremely content with the state of the world and molding it to their liking. Which is very useful
and then there is everyone else with the optimism
also this is not depression
speakfreely 3 days ago nathan_compton 3 days ago Takes all kinds, I say.
petee 3 days ago Not sure what types of games you're interested in, but the TIC-80 can be fun to explore, and supports quite a few languagesseanssel 2 days ago Ah yeah I love the concept of these small fantasy computers. I’m familiar with them because of Celeste, but never played with one.I’m interested in traditional roguelikes these days (Tales of Maj’Eyal, Qud, Brogue). Ofc the dream is to make something with wider appeal, like Balatro, and get out of the rat race all together.
akktor 5 days ago For me, it's gotta be Asahi Linux development. I've been following the work of Asahi Lina and the team for a long time, watching their progress in awe. It just seems incredibly cool to get macOS hardware running Linux so well. But every time I think about actually diving into it, my brain just screams "super complicated!" and I have no idea where I'd even begin to contribute or understand what's going on under the hood. It's definitely one of those things I admire from a distance because it feels so far beyond my current capabilities.zikani_03 3 days ago On the development side, I feel like I just don't have the "brain" for Rust even though I have built a couple of useful things with it and have also contributed to an open source project (checkout hurl.dev, great tool!) - I would love to get into low level OS development, VMMs and microVMs . It's probably just an issue of effortOutside of programming, I'd like to get into welding so I can make some things. I recently learned to use my angle grinder but welding feels like it's out of reach because of not having the right tools and experience.
jicea 1 days ago Hi, maintainer of Hurl [1] here.We're trying to write "simple" Rust as far as we can, without going into too much optimisation: very little lifetime usage, no async stuff (just classic multi-thread directly from the last sample of the Rust book), liberal usage of clone, no macros, reusing crates for C libcurl and libxml binding, limiting dependencies. We could certainly gain a lot of performances but with this first simple approach, the binary is already "fast"... The only advice I would give for someone going into Rust is to not try to optimise everything from the start to get a first "feeling" of the language.
zikani_03 9 hours ago Hello there, thanks!Hurl is definitely one of the more approachable Rust codebases I have looked at and worked with. The test suite is one of the best I've seen - so thorough! Definitely, one of my fav projects
nathan_douglas 3 days ago Yeah, Rust was... nontrivial for me too. I feel like I understand it now quite well, but it took more effort than I'd expected to expend on anything. Prolog was a similar but distinct mindfuck too.whytevuhuni 2 days ago Do you regret the expended effort? Does it feel wasted, or does it feel useful?
addaon 3 days ago I've wanted for years to take the research paper "Coq: The World's Best Macro Assembler" through several of its more and less obvious next steps, including re-implementing it on top of a formal specification of ARM (or RISC-V) machine code, and introducing a concept of virtual registers on top of a (light weight) register allocator. I really feel like there's a path here to a system in which low-level non-portable code can be written comfortably (if perhaps at a somewhat slower pace than C), with arbitrary correctness properties proven on it; but the learning curve to get there (through Coq, etc) has been a struggle. Every few years I set myself the goal of a proven-correct implementation of a min/max heap in assembly built on this approach, and every few years I give up.ecesena 3 days ago Not in Coq, but you might find this interesting from AWS: https://github.com/awslabs/s2n-bignum?tab=readme-ov-file#tes...addaon 3 days ago I've just taken a quick glance at this, and will explore further -- but at first, it seems like it's really a good application of ad-hoc proofs to assembly code; which is a subset of what I'm interested in, but for me the more interesting thing about the paper was the structured safety proofs for things like memory safety, no read-before-write, no overflow, etc., and thinking about how this can be expanded and generalized. While for something like a bignum library (or a heap) the actual conformance to the behavioral contract will be somewhat ad-hoc, having a lot of safety contracts also proved along the way "for free" (or at slightly reduced cost, anyway) is what really draws my attention. I can see spending 2x the time writing the code, and 10x the time proving things about it, in exchange for not having to spend the 100x (DAL B) or 1000x (DAL A) time testing it.ecesena 2 days ago Yeah, I hear you. Many things are simplified in this crypto code, for example there’s no dynamic allocation. At the same time it’s incredibly difficult to get a realistic model of the hardware instructions because they all have side effects. And it gets incredibly more difficult if you try to prove real world, hand optimized code (vs academic proof of concept code).With all this said, I think this could be a good inspiration and look forward to seeing advancements!
addaon 1 days ago > Many things are simplified in this crypto code, for example there’s no dynamic allocation.That's okay, I haven't worked on code bases with dynamic allocation professionally in years, and even my hobby projects usually avoid it.
giantg2 3 days ago "What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?"A job where I can support my family and feel valued/respected. I think that would be cool.
mixmastamyk 2 days ago Yes. I could theoretically do just about anything, with a reasonable amount of ramp up time. And am interested in many things. Even willing to study ahead of time for free.Yet, my main obstacle these days is gatekeeping by others. People won’t let you work in a field without previous experience (in the exact thing) or significant credentials. Seems to have gotten worse over time, although ageism may contribute.
Not to mention the more interesting, the more popular, and less likely you can get in the club—inversely proportional. Hobbies are fun though.
qbpqb 19 hours ago Usually, a good way to start is to try working for just getting experience (directly ask to people who are working in your desired field to till you get one). Maybe work for free for first couple of months and make connection and get an idea how things work...
metabro 1 days ago Without knowing specifics like your current skillset, experience, location, income requirements it’s hard to provide advice.giantg2 1 days ago I've already accepted that it won't happen.metabro 22 hours ago Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right
joshavant 2 days ago I want to build a large format, real-time, physical music visualizer that could orchestrate an artistic light symphony for any song.I'm imagining physical visualizers that are columns of multiple, discrete light nodes, each able to have variable brightness and color.
The real-time music processing is the hard part (for me) to crack.
There's some standard tricks here: FFTs, bandpass filters, etc.
But I want to do more: Real-time stem separation, time signature and downbeat tracking, etc.
Imagine hearing Sweet Caroline and, when the horns kick in, the whole installation 'focuses' on the horns and bright yellow light jumps between each column on each horn note, before returning to tracking the bass line or something.
I've been noodling on this idea for a long time and slowly digging into the music and CS fundamentals. The rise of LLMs might finally be the piece that enables me to close my intelligence gap and finally build this thing...
trealira 2 days ago For a while now, I've had the desire to make an AI that kills enemies and beats levels like a human would in the game Crypt of the Necrodancer. Here's[0] someone doing it as a human without ever taking damage.There's something close called ChoregraphAI[1] on GitHub. It simulates the entire map and does a brute force search for what will get it to the stairs. That doesn't satisfy me because it just skips most of the enemies and takes advantage of things that a human couldn't know, like where a bat will move (bats move randomly, while other enemies are completely deterministic). Also, it can't control the game and is for an old version of it (although those problems themselves seem not that big).
But, I do not know what kind of AI could be written to perform the kind of long term planning and strategizing that a human would do (e.g. isolate each enemy to beat it more easily) and to beat the enemies like a human would (with special, pre-practiced strategies for certain enemies or groups of enemies), and even if I did, I get the sense that this would be really complicated for a first try and that I should gain experience making such an AI for a simpler game, though I don't know what.
It might be a self-constrained challenge. It's just been floating around my head for a while because I don't really know where to start.
nathan_compton 3 days ago Well, I'm have a little guilty bias towards spacetime non-substantivalism and I've always been interested in getting back to physics in this area. I've particularly found the Shape Dynamics program to be at least somewhat interesting and while I have a sort of ok grasp of the language and mathematics of GR translating that to the SD world has been a persistent challenge. If I had time I'd try to figure that out.Briefly, one usually formulates the theory of gravity in terms of a a 4d spacetime with curvature but you can also formulate it as a theory of curved 3d shapes if you allow the lagrangian to carry more structure. This is often performed in GR, in fact, by decomposing the metric into a "spatial" and "temporal" part but shape dynamics kind of runs with this idea in an attempt to formulate a totally relational version of the theory of gravity.
Shape Dynamics apparently produces a reasonable theory of gravity which agrees with GR in many situations but forbids, I believe, closed timelike curves, and may be more amenable to quantization since it re-separates space and time.
Anyway, it all seems very beyond me, maybe even if I had the time, which I do not.
incomingpain 5 days ago There's 2 big ones that I want to learn.Quantum computer programming. I've dived a couple times into Qiskit from IBM. Also tried to get into dwave and ocean sdk but they never got back to me.
Qiskit tutorials are easy to blow through and i think even understand. But when trying to use it for my own purposes, just never get anywhere.
The other one for me with no success. Training my own specialized predicting AI models. Tensorflow, pytorch, and another.
I certainly prefer pytorch. Super simple to build models on simple stuff.
I'm trying to do something that literally nobody else has ever done. My lack of success has probably a lot more to do with that it's not perhaps actually doable.
Flipside, I might be re-approaching this now that i have the pycharm ai to help me in this progress.
>you've been there and figured out how to get past similar hurdles – please chime in! Share some helpful resources, dish out general advice, or just give a nudge of encouragement on how to take that intimidating first step.
Never be afraid to try. Always dare to fail; you only truly learn when failing. The easier you make it to fail, the quicker you learn.
guywithahat 3 days ago My concern with quantum computing is there's already such an outrageous overabundance of quantum computing PhD's the marked will likely be saturated for decades to come. It would be a ton of fun to learn, but I can't justify the time because there's no career progressionalmostgotcaught 2 days ago Lol where are people getting such ideas. First of all there are probably like 10 QC people graduating a year in the whole world (okay maybe 20). Second of all y'all people have no idea how far off usable QC is. It's like 50 years at best.msgodel 2 days ago It's not that hard to learn, you can do it in a few evenings. Grab something like Nielsen and mess around on qirk.Now whether it's worth learning? Eh, maybe it's good to exercise some math skills that have been atrophying.
hbartab 3 days ago You might benefit from this overview: https://ianreppel.org/a-review-of-quantum-computing-courses/pajamasam 3 days ago Totally fair re: quantum computer programming. It's still an open question what exactly it can be useful for.Are you trying it for anything in particular?
(I'm only getting started in it now in my Master's programme)
incomingpain 3 days ago >Are you trying it for anything in particular?cracking crypto. forcing netadmins and sysadmins to update crypto to quantum resistant crypto. Might as well make it a real threat :)
msgodel 2 days ago I'll bet a lot of money PQC becomes commonplace before quantum breaks anything meaningful. (although I'm one of the people paid to work on PQC so maybe I'm biased.)
screaminghawk 3 days ago Anything that involves time. Dance, music, gardening. I have too many existing commitments that when I actually have free time I have no energy leftjononor 3 days ago Are you speedrunning life?em-bee 3 days ago what are you trying to suggest? that they are doing to much already? and if they were to do less they would have time? wouldn't that then lead to the same situation, that they would like to work on some of the things they are working on now but could not because of lack of time?also we don't choose all our commitments. family, work, friends, etc are commitments we can't just give up. it comes down to choice and priorities, and the problem is that we have more things we find interesting than we can focus on.
but i consider that a good thing. i know that whenever i retire or am unable to continue some of my interests there will be others that i can pick up instead. i know that i won't be bored...
jononor 2 days ago Just a quick prompt for reflection. I do not suggest anything how people actually live their lives. But many have said that they got caught up in being too busy to actually enjoy life. Don't fall into that by accident!
65 3 days ago I've tried to make my own pair of shoes a few times now, never quite getting to the end. I even took a class but doing it on my own is so much harder.I'm a software developer with no real reason to be sewing and lasting my own shoes, but god damn it I'd love to wear my own handmade shoes.
jaccarmac 2 days ago Over the past several years I have slowly patched the .NET version of Shen to run on Linux and modern .NET releases. I also learned about Higher-Order Perl the other year and have a dream of going through the book and implementing the exercises in Shen while tuning the compiler.But while I have had a broad interest in compilers for years and years, it feels difficult-to-impossible to actually complete any of it. Part of it's general depression and time management, part is looking at the long story of these projects and the lack of progression: Stuck in a rut of mediocrity.
https://github.com/rkoeninger/ShenSharp https://github.com/jaccarmac/junkcode/tree/79ea647d4ddbe41cf...
dapperdrake 2 days ago No worries. One of my personal compiler projects took over ten years to complete. Still worth it, though. Sped up my programming by at least 20x. (Not kidding.)Edit: Within confidence intervals that is a 22% per year improvement. Way ahead of Proebsting's law. Surprising.
xboxnolifes 3 days ago Manufacturing. I have no idea where one would start with learning it that doesn't begin with having at least $100,000 in machinery and industry knowledge.HeyLaughingBoy 3 days ago Start by asking yourself "manufacturing what?" and go from there. I've worked at companies that did some form of manufacturing my entire career. "Manufacturing" covers even more ground than "software" does. e.g., textile manufacturing has a completely different set of concerns than manufacturing airplane parts does.jolmg 3 days ago 3d printers start around 250 USD. Filament's at 15 USD/kg.You can get familiar with gcode, with CAD software, making parameterized models, etc.
Charon77 3 days ago Something like pcbway allows you to prototype a lot of stuffs, cnc and sheetmetal forming iirc
hiAndrewQuinn 2 days ago I'd like to establish an index fund that jumps through the necessary hoops to allow US expatriate citizens to invest from places like the European Union.Last I checked, there is no fundamental legal barrier preventing this - just an enormous amount of compliance work that has to get done. But as we would be the only real option for 1 or 2 million well-monied people, I imagine we'd be able to start with a very eager customer base provided we could jump through those hoops. And uh, the actual algorithms for index based stock selection are pretty straightforward, too - I'm not Jane Street level clever, so that's an attractive point for me.
If anyone's interested in this hare brained scheme, let me know via the email in my bio. It's been a problem I've been rolling around in my head for a few years now. I have no idea how I would get started, but I'm pretty sure I could do it.
hiAndrewQuinn 2 days ago Another area I'd be interested in is automatic document conversion between the IEEE and EN standards.I know most of you guys have never had to deal with these, but I've spent my professional life in high-regulation fields. Documents which adhere to these standards are table stakes for getting software sold to, say, the freight train industry, but neither is a subset of the other. They're more like parallel universes, one from North America, the other from the EU.
Getting them to play nice in an automated, LLM + human aided review way would unlock an enormous amount of value for software firms looking to work across these two markets. I'm one of only a handful of guys in the world who understands this well enough to see the value add, and I don't know how I would convince anyone to help me go to market with this either. So I broadcast it here, in the hopes that some other capable software engineer with more time on their hands takes it off of my plate. Please build this business!
episteme 2 days ago If it's an index fund, what's the difference between this and a fund run in the EU that tracks a US market? Is it taxed differently?hiAndrewQuinn 2 days ago I'm using 'index fund' broadly to refer to the cost structure - very low management fees, very "dumb" wide market tracking. Plenty of these already exist in the EU, for EU citizens, you are correct.But yes, they are taxed differently. A US-domiciled fund is much easier for US expats to invest in without risking losing over 100% of their return (I am not exaggerating), but only if you can actually find one which will accept money from you while resident in the EU. None do, to my knowledge, An EU-domiciled fund would probably be classed as a PFIC and have to fill out reams of paperwork to avoid messing up people's taxes. One that US expats love is possible in theory, but no one has brought one to market yet because it requires dealing with a lot of US taxation errata.
is_true 15 hours ago What about ETFs in ireland that track the SP and other indexes?
yoko888 3 days ago Speaking of which, I've always been fascinated by audio signal processing especially the idea of writing code to synthesize sounds or emulate vintage synthesizers. It feels like magic to turn mathematical formulas into actual audible melodies. But every time I look at a tutorial, I get intimidated by all the Fourier transforms and equations. Maybe I just need that one real opportunity to get started from scratch.JodieBenitez 3 days ago Libraries can abstract much of this. At least enough to get you started.
dijksterhuis 3 days ago digital signal processing for synths and audio stuff.maths :/ brain hurt.
i did some digital signal processing in my phd but i need to go through and implement a bunch of things from scratch to learn/relearn and it’ll just be a bit of a grind. i’m avoiding doing that by working on data file parsing / project management utils for the elektron octatrack instead, which is useful, but tangential to what i want to do.
long term would be rad to build software for old synth hardware and the like. sort of like midiquest, but without the price tag.
rented_mule 3 days ago Will Pirkle has a couple of books that go through this. I've found them quite helpful. https://www.willpirkle.com/net_ 3 days ago I've heard The Audio Programmer discord is a great resource for this sort of thing. Worth checking out: https://www.theaudioprogrammer.com/dijksterhuis 3 days ago thanks, although i’m a member already. it’s not really resources that’s the issue. i’ve read Julius Smith’s books in the past etc. in the rust audio discord etc.i just have a mental block similar to the one i had with rust. avoided learning it for a long while until i made a decision to finally to do it.
i just keep avoiding making the same decision here for some reason. not sure why. probably the old “it’s going to be really hard” thing i had with rust (which turned out to be rubbish, it just took time and repeating stuff over and over and learning from mistakes over and over).
protocolture 3 days ago Electronics. Have a hard time thinking about it conceptually. I tend to always take a step out and just find components from other projects and tie them together with code. Would love to design my own PCB.Creative Writing - Although LLMs seem to be a good help with replacing whatever I am missing. Mostly organizational issues. I enjoy the meat, writing certain scenarios. But fleshing out a whole book I fail from both top down and bottom up methods.
brysonreece 3 days ago Arduino and, specifically, the ESP8226 (basically an Arduino+Wifi) and ESP32 (Arduino+Wifi+BT) development boards are a fantastic place to start!For most hobbyist-level electronics, it’s just a matter of becoming familiar enough with using the Arduino IDE to flash your C(-like) code to your board, or using something like MicroPython, then following the wiring instructions freely available online for common parts like servos, LEDs, displays, etc. Every once in a while you may have to reach for something like a transistor, capacitor, or resistor, but those can also be learned in an afternoon.
Google really is your friend! I taught myself hobby electronics over 15 years ago using the same, and they still hold up!
protocolture 3 days ago Yep I am drowning in them.Its just like, in terms of my abilities, I find it easier to grab Arduino + wifi and arduino + ledmatrix and get them speaking together in code, when I should be able to create a simpler, and cheaper circuit of LED's and just use electronic signals to do the work for me.
joshdavham 3 days ago Python packages written in low-level languages like C/C++ and Rust.There are currently so many cool open source projects in the python ecosystem that involve writing python packages in low-level languages. But unfortunately, I've barely written any low-level code since university, so these projects are effectively out of reach for me at the moment.
However, I do plan on learning Rust sometime later this year and there are number of smaller projects that I plan on working on!
tuveson 3 days ago C is not as hard to get into as you might think, and probably necessary to be at least a little bit comfortable with if you want to write Python libraries or understand Python internals. I would suggest Beej’s guide, if you’re looking for a place to start!joshdavham 3 days ago Many thanks for the resource!I did do some C in uni and I remember not finding it too terrible and actually pretty fun, but yeah, it does feel intimidating to come back to.
karmakurtisaani 3 days ago Do you have examples of such projects? I have some low-level language knowledge and might be interested in giving it a shot.joshdavham 3 days ago Yeah I have quite a few examples. However, they're pretty niche projects that require a bunch of non-programming domain knowledge such as Japanese linguistics or using a Rust-based machine learning framework to optimize the parameters of a spaced repetition model.
jononor 3 days ago pybind11 is your friend. Focus on small self-contained functions first. For numerical functions you can then take it mostly our of a book. See if you can speed up some simple and common operation within your problem domain of interest.joshdavham 2 days ago Sounds like solid advice. Thanks!
ManlyBread 2 days ago Reverse engineering. Each time I start I seem to get overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge required, then I decide to check if these skills might be useful in getting a better paid job... and there just doesn't seem to be that much jobs involving these skills, neither in my area nor remotely. And my motivation instantly evaporates because learning all that stuff just to sometimes poke around in some weird program.wrboyce 1 days ago I love reverse engineering, but it is strictly a hobby (fortunately? Unfortunately? Honestly I’m not sure!).Anyway, I’d heartily recommend Microcorruption[1]. It’s really good fun, uses a fairly simply assembly flavour (msp430), and introduces new concepts at a nice cadence.
Shameless plug: I’ve written up a bunch of the solutions in “tutorial form” on my blog[2], but I am incredibly slow at getting new posts out (although I do have the next ~4 levels in nearly-complete drafts).
winternewt 2 days ago Two projects:1. Training my own LLM and other kinds of neural networks, e.g. a network for discriminating cheaters in an online game. I feel like it's very hard for an amateur to get their hands on enough training data.
2. Building my own weather prediction engine. Again, accurate prediction requires highly detailed and accurate data to start from and as far as I can tell that's not publicly available.