The idea here is to shine a light on these hidden interests and the little (or big!) mental blocks that come with them. If you're already rocking in those specific areas – or 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.
Let's help each other get unstuck!
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.
I 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.
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.
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.
https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-mu...
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.
So lot less custom code and more linking things software focused on their specific needs.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/myog/comments/1k3stln/ultralight_13...
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.
Edit: And EE is genuinely involved.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
You 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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
Outside 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.
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.
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
A job where I can support my family and feel valued/respected. I think that would be cool.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now whether it's worth learning? Eh, maybe it's good to exercise some math skills that have been atrophying.
Are you trying it for anything in particular?
(I'm only getting started in it now in my Master's programme)
cracking crypto. forcing netadmins and sysadmins to update crypto to quantum resistant crypto. Might as well make it a real threat :)
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.
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...
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...
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!
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.
You can get familiar with gcode, with CAD software, making parameterized models, etc.
Recently though, I took the plunge and created a Turkish-language book site: https://kitab-evi.com/. It’s all about literature and reading, and now I’m diving into SEO with the goal of getting it to rank in the top search results. I’m learning step by step — experimenting with keyword research, improving on-page structure, and exploring tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs.
It’s still intimidating sometimes, but I’ve found that the best way to learn is just to start. If anyone has tips or resources for multilingual SEO or ranking content in non-English markets, I’d love your advice!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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...
Edit: Within confidence intervals that is a 22% per year improvement. Way ahead of Proebsting's law. Surprising.
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.
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!
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.
Unfortunately, you can't just sign up for API access to millions of songs. And the streaming apps either don't provide a playback API, or their TOS limits what you can do with it.
Weirdly enough, what helped me break through wasn’t a course or a YouTube tutorial… it was a PDF.
Sounds silly, but I found this open-source project called WFGY, which is basically a semantic reasoning booster for any LLM. You just upload the PDF to ChatGPT (or any model), and it starts interacting in a way that feels like actual understanding — not just parroting surface logic.
No install, no sign-up. Literally a 60-second experiment.
I used it to challenge GPT with questions it usually fumbles (like nested logic, or paradoxes), and it actually got better. The framework even comes with sample questions to test against it. Kind of surreal.
If you’ve ever felt AI prompting is a weird dark art... this made it feel like turning on a light.
I once took a stab at Ladybird browser but had to back out due to the complexity of its build chain. I couldn’t get it run on Xcode/CLion on macOS but would love to give it a try once again.
Does anyone have any tips on getting started again?
the majority of ladybird contributors are probably on linux, so mac support may take some extra effort. consider if you can work with a linux container or VM instead.
i just checked their discord, there is a "build-problems" channel, where you may be able to ask for help.
don't give up. one step at a time. we need more alternative browsers, so i hope you will be able to contribute.
Lynx is where I would start, or see:
since it's all in Java and presumably is straight-forward.
I honestly think it could be as important/useful as Von Neumann's CPU architecture, for AI and other highly parallel compute tasks. Every time I start to work on it, something stops me.
For instance, last week I had a good chat with Github Copilot about it, and it was way too nice and encouraging for comfort[2] Unfortunately, you need a Copilot account to read the chat I shared. 8(
I was hoping to get it into TinyTapeout, but they're now only in Europe. 8(
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] https://github.com/copilot/share/086351a0-0ac0-80a7-9802-144...
* Bayesian statistics: I know the basics and the theory, but I am not able to understand how to use it in a real world problem
Curious to hear what hurdles you ran into.
For machining, I’d start with wood (wood lathe or router, cheaper than a real metal lathe or mill). Very similar concepts as real machining (feeds and speeds, toolpaths, CAM). Up to you if you want to start manual or CNC. The Shapeoko routers are very nice and relatively affordable (in this domain). You can also find used manual machines locally, but it’s hard to know if they’re in good condition if you don’t know anything.
If you want to read, the Machinery’s Handbook, aka the Bible in any shop, is enormous and contains pretty much anything you’d want to know.
Oh, and get a set of Mitutoyo digital calipers. Expensive but the only way to go, in my opinion. Measuring is fundamental to manufacturing.
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
That said, the only 3D CAD tool where I was able to follow the tutorial (after a fashion) was Dune 3D: https://dune3d.org/ --- if you haven't tried that, I'd highly recommend it.
The usual way to get started w/ molding is to make a vacuum molding machine:
https://makezine.com/projects/diy-injection-molding
(I remember one such plan page where the first project was to make a handle to make the machine more comfortable to use...)
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).
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.
Also writing my own dbms, but this one I have at least seriously started reading up on and play around with.
Plasma simulation - I really want to understand how fusion and advanced propulsion systems can be simulated and maybe even contribute in some way. E.g. The fusion propulsion being developed by Helicity Space is very interesting. I wish I knew enough to understand their work and maybe do some simulations myself. I tried doing this "Particle In Cell" course I found online but quickly lost interest after a week or so.
I guess I just have a wide variety of interests that come and go. Some of these just seem to be passing interests. I have sort of learned to live with that.
I specialize in computer networking in my day job. Most of what I do is Cisco routers, Cisco switches, and Cisco firewalls. I would be interested in learning more about cellular networks. I haven't put any effort into exploring this for myself. If there is a track similar to CCNA → CCNP → CCIE then it isn't well-known (well, not known to me).
Typical route is work at a Telco or IoT company as Network Eng or Developer and naturally pivot into telco learning on the job.
Vendors will run training courses when you buy their kit which helps a little, but it’s mostly self learning or on the job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds
and I've been trying to read through _METAFONT: The Program_ and https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/ and I keep wondering if I shouldn't just try scripting Inkscape....
I want to do a couple of different things, and not sure if they all fit in one project or no:
- implement a single line font in my current project: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
- implement a way to convert arbitrary curves into smooth arcs (for DXFs or G2/G3 arcs for G-code)
- work up an interactive version of METAFONT/METAPOST which allows both programming and drawing
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/B-Spline.html
Also easier for my brain to use in practice, when implemented, than Béziers, if they can work for you.
(Edit to add - great video you linked!)
I have welders, metal and woodworking equipment, 3d printers, auto mechanic tools, etc and years of experience and knowledge and interest in building stuff. But I have only a tiny garage to work from. I don’t really have room to do much so it feels like waste.
I’ve looked into renting a small shop but Seattle is so expensive that renting even a one car sized shop space is prohibitively expensive for a hobby (for my income level).
I’m sure I could turn a profit with my work on the side but then it’s a job and you have monthly overhead expenses to cover and all the stresses that come from that.
What is even the actionable step to take? Make more money? That usually comes with less time unfortunately. Moving away to somewhere I can afford a larger workshop at home was the plan until return to office happened for me.
The first is traditional machine learning - not “AI”. I know what I don’t know and I can fake it well enough to talk to a subject matter expert when leading projects and I have a dual math/cs major from three decades ago. But it would take years to be good enough to be at the same level of seniority I am in my existing niche.
The second is more important for my life is learn Spanish well enough to be conversationally fluent. I know some. But my wife and I are going to start living in Costa Rica during the winter and I want to actually learn it to embrace being thier.
Tangential thing: years ago, a guy in a hedge fund I was working at left this very high-paying job and lifted and shifted his family to Costa Rica. He shared that his motivation was being able to spend more time with his kids (which is a absolutely fantastic goal). I think I have heard a few more examples of this and your comment is an addition. What is it about Costa Rica? I can obviously google the pros and cons of Costa Rica from a blog or whatever, but I want to directly hear from someone who presumably has been on the ground and shares the HN mindset, whatever that might be.
First time zone and proximity to the US and more specifically for me, short flights from cities we consider “home” - Orlando where I live and Atlanta where we are from and where many of our friends and adult sons live.
Second it’s safe, they don’t even have a military,they have a good public health system, it’s relatively easy to become a permanent resident and have access to both their public health care system (caja) and private health care.
Nice apartments and AirBnbs in San Jose are really affordable - $1500-$2500 a month.
You aren’t going to find that combination anywhere else in US time zones besides Panama City Panama and from what I read, it is much more urban, crowded and less tranquil than San Jose Costa Rica.
We went to Costa Rica this year on vacation (Manuel Antonio). Next year we are going back twice - once for a week to get a local “relocation” guide to take us around the different neighborhoods and then going back for a month once we know the lay of the land.
For more context on our current life
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159562
So it’s really not lifting and shifting for us. We pack everything we own and put them in suitcases and put our condotel unit in the rental pool to offset our mortgage and HOA fees when we are gone for months. We did that domestically for almost a year between late 2022-late 2023
E.g. be able to measure distances over a 50cm range to a resolution of ±500nm. Easy for a coordinate measuring machine, very challenging and expensive to DIY.
Validating anything I build means finding a calibration lab willing to check it, which is also rather pricey. I don't have the space, the time, or the money to do this.
Nothing special, prob will be a todo app, but such a steep learning curve to wrap my head around the jargon with everything hosting and docker related.
Wish me luck!
However, computational tools that help biologists “replace, reduce, and refine” animal experiments are helpful. That catchphrase is a good one to Google to look for previous efforts.
Building computational tools to help scientists improve the design of necessary animal experiments is certainly worth working on.
But, there are things I truly have dream but have dedicated almost not effort trying:
* Play (rock) bass
* Draw comic/manga style. I wish to make histories and think I could do it but refuse to write plain words (idiot!).
Basically, art is my unreachable goal
I wish I had the project space, the skills (welding, mechanical), and the tools to build human and electric powered bikes.
I like to see that with known drone sounds, maybe missiles and rockets too.
But that is closed-source.
One viable open-source alternatives is written in Python and uses CNN algorithm.
https://github.com/LonesX/Bird-Song-Recognition
That LoneX lets you add new sounds
As far as career upgrades, this book was decisive for me in making the lightbulb go off so I could share my vision with others and have them see it, too.
What makes presentations, video essays, etc, great is having a great story to tell.
It's all about the archetype of the hero, and plot arch (normal life -> problem -> departure -> toll -> return).
You have to present people with a reason to embark on the story - which is the reason the 'hero' leaves on their journey; a clear understanding of what's at stake, the price to be paid, the confrontation and the return to a new, better normal.
My difficulty here is if this problem is interesting or unique, and where to go from here. AI says so (but how much is that worth?)
Fun problems to have! It’s pretty amazing that we can Just Do Things, what a time.
Another way, can be to record ATC conversations, translate them with an LLM and then track the airplane properly. This is harder and can be problematic from a legal standpoint (listening ATC is illegal in some countries)
Check out the Week Sauce Jam [0]. You still make a game in seven days, but it can be any seven days of the month; there's no voting or ranking either. Jams are typically too stressful for me too, but this one is deliberately as low-pressure as possible, you can take on as much or as little accountability as you want, and release whatever you have done with no judgement.
But, that's too much for poor ol' me :). Will just start simple.
On the other hand, you could probably hack a cheap ECG device to measure EEG signals.
I'm also interested in electronics, like building my own drone.
1. I'd like to store code without a company using my code to train their language model.
2. I'd like to store code without a company deciding my code's merit (Github removing youtube-dl, Sourcehut not allowing crypto projects, etc).
3. Something about storing private code on a closed source forge feels wrong. It also feels wrong that company can read my code, and any of its employees can.
- firearms technology: designing or modifying guns. Feels out of reach because... laws, obviously.
- general ICE engines knowledge: Will probably be obsolete when I get the space and the time to pursue this.
Naturally, there are DefCAD/Defense Distributed and the like and a couple of very active subreddits/forums and some new developments/techniques.
Arguably, 1st Amendment + 2nd Amendment == the right to 3D print firearms, but of course, no one aside from Cody Wilson wants to be the poster child for that court case, note the example made of Philip Luty in England and his writings.
For internal combustion engines, small models are popular things (have you at least purchased a Revell Visible V8 model?)
Yeah, but no such thing where I live unfortunately. Meanwhile I'll just watch Mark Serbu's fun experiments.
My skill that often feels "out of reach" is building a truly great Go-to-Market machine.
I'm a product-obsessed founder. I can spend all day architecting our 'Workspace OS' or fine-tuning our AI, MAKi. But when it comes to sales funnels, marketing channels, and building a repeatable sales process, my brain just fogs over. I truly feel like I wasn't born with the "sales gene."
After 10 years, multiple pivots, and learning to survive like a cockroach, here's the only method I've found for tackling any skill that feels too big: Make it small.
1. Don't read 20 books; talk to one person. I find one person who is great at it and just ask: "What is the very first, smallest thing you would do?"
2. Don't build a complex system; do one dumb, simple action. I don't try to build the perfect marketing funnel. I write one LinkedIn post. I send one cold email. The goal isn't to succeed, it's just to start and get a single data point.
3. Don't guess what the market wants; ask one customer. I ask, "How did you really find us?" Their answer is always more valuable than a market research report.
4. Don't try to master it in a week; just survive to the next day. The goal is just to learn one thing today, so I can be slightly less clueless tomorrow.
I don't think any of us have the "right brain" for everything. But cockroaches don't have big brains either. They just keep moving, adapting, and refuse to die.
We just need to find the next small, tangible step. That's how we get unstuck.
Hardware: electronics repair, especially vintage ones.
The software you want is called a DAW - Digital Audio Workstation. There are 300 DAWs, you need to find the one that fits your 'style' or 'workflow'. There are a multitude of paradigms, as making music is not a single technique.
Once you find your DAW, my recommendation is to just make lots of music. Make the music you imagine in your head. Make the tracks that don't exist but you wish they did. Your first 100-200-300 tracks will all be extremely crappy in hindsight, but when you finish them you'll think they are, at the time, a magnum opus each. Keep iterating that process over and over and after many years, you'll start making something that you'll feel semi-proud enough to be able to show your friends!
This is a track I've done 11 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlkoEI4Sq7w&list=PL2xsoYcYFo...
and this is a newer track, released "only" 8 years ago:
https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/twothousandseventeen-feat-m...
so you can definitely notice the difference of what 3 years of music making look like in terms of progress
GOOD LUCK!
Back when I was more active with electronic music I would do an entire album worth of tracks with each new synth I got, software or hardware, good way to learn a synth.
GarageBand is easy. I’m gonna upgrade to logic at some point but that’s a start.
And good studio monitors or studio headphones. Can’t mix on regular headphones. I’ve got some m-audio pretty good.
Then you play. I don’t have many followers or fans but I’m doing it for me.
Here’s a track https://open.spotify.com/track/5o0xa7x1Q3bokEwFOEnXBQ?si=QZc...
It’s lofi/ electronica.
Best of luck
I still have a Gmail address because getting a bazillion people to update their address books is a monster problem but otherwise I'm glad I at least halfway won't lose my digital life if some Google bot decided it doesn't like me
Why I'm not doing it: I'm not sure it would be accepted. I took a lot of lumps for trying to use Hashcash in email, and I'm not sure I want to go through that again, but it does have value. Embedding proof-of-work puzzles in a protocol is a great way to limit abusive requests and patterns. SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS are easy to modify and probably could be done via a proxy. I'm not sure how easy it is to change the SSH protocol, but that would be useful as well.
2) Low-income living space electrification.
I tested this idea out on a friend who works for a Housing Authority, and their eyes lit up. However, they warned me that it would take a few years for everyone to sign off on it.
The original idea was to provide a kit, a bag of parts, that an affordable housing authority could use to improve living quarters and housing for low-income people, and eliminate/reduce the use of gas.
a) Replacing gas stoves with a set of three induction plates. The significant challenges are filling the void created by the original stove, ensuring sufficient power to operate the induction plates, and addressing how to handle the absence of an oven.
b) Filling the hole is easy. This is something a halfway decent carpenter could do, or we could provide an adjustable-size box that fits in such a space, not quite an IKEA flat-pack but roughly similar.
c) Power is a little more difficult. One company is solving this problem by putting in a battery to handle the load. This is possible, but the baseline cost would now be approximately $2,000, just for the parts.
d) window mount heat pump. New York City has funded in-window heat pumps as part of a design project. The problem is they run around $4,000 to $6,000, but an ordinary handyman could install them.
3) Recycling car batteries from crashed vehicles into home power banks.
This project is a bit of a stretch for me. I know people are doing this, but not in the States as far as I can tell. The off-grid solar community has a variety of inverters and solar chargers that may be suitable for this kind of situation, but I don't have enough knowledge.
4) Ad hoc virtual power plants
Many people have rooftop solar. The grid gets overfull on bright sunny days. People who can't have solar often have space for batteries. Work out the instrumentation and accounting so that solar producers can charge batteries, and everybody gets compensated when the grid demands the battery's power.
It seems to me that this would be a great application of distributed system concepts, providing a win for the local community and grid resiliency.
I need a second life to make progress on these ideas
I think the economic problem is that while there /may/ be overproduction during the day, the day is the only time other than early-mid evening when there is significant demand.
You would effectively be targeting the early-mid evening demand, assuming there was overproduction during the day, and with the current cost of batteries, their installation, and their replacement, I can't see the numbers working out.
I would love for battery prices to come down enough to make something like this possible though.
What I want is different in terms of its organization. The intention is to establish a local community microgrid that anyone with the necessary equipment can participate in. I think the biggest problem will be the accounting, but that's my blind spot
If crypto keeps going up there's a chance my 3k investment in it eclipses my 40yr 401k so I'm hoping for that....
