Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

Consider mathematics. If you already know enough math to derive the quadratic equation, you might make a small change, like adding X^3 or X^4. See where your own techniques take you before looking up the answer. With just a few pen strokes, you will be playing with an equation for which there is no general solution, or no known solution. In mathematics it will take you very little time to start playing at the boundaries of human knowledge, and it's relatively easy to memorize a few starting points that many hours of passenger travel fly by.

I got myself involved with a nonprofit local group preserving local pioneer era apple trees. They've been DNA testing and cataloging the trees, and had all the info stashed away in google drive and onedrive folders. The founder was looking to step back so they asked me if I wanted to step up as project lead, which I did.

I took the info and organized it into a nice wiki-style site with maps and descriptions so everyone in the community can learn about the old orchards.

https://heritageapplecorps.org/index.php/Main_Page

I've also learned how to prune and graft hundred year old apple trees and now have a couple dozen young grafted trees growing in my garage, all clones of local hundred year old trees, some of which genetically tested unique and are of currently unknown varieties.

Put it down over winter but just picking it back up.

Bat detection/identification with ultrasonic recordings. It's been fun building the data pipeline to manage the ~30GB+ of WAV files generated every night, run through some identification processes (currently using https://github.com/rdz-oss/BattyBirdNET-Analyzer) and build a UI (mostly vibe coded lol) to help with replay, cataloging, etc.

I'm using an AudioMoth currently (https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth), am thinking about extending it to do some of the preprocessing in the field to scale things up a bit.

If you like to work with your hands and have space, build something physical: big and complex, and actually finish it. I built a single engine two seat kit airplane in my garage, did all the flight testing, and now have an interesting way to travel/commute as a result. The "finish it" part is the most important bit. Computer people spend too much time working on projects that don't have a "done" state. Change that up.

My hobby is organizing in-person meetups for random people to get together, chat and make friends. Barely structured, if at all. I've found this rewarding and ended up making friends this way.

You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos you probably don't want to be around. And another 10% at any given meetup are autistic or neuro-divergent but well-meaning, kind and full of interesting insights and hobbies, although perhaps difficult to socialize with, at least until they get to know you're well-meaning too.

These challenges come with the territory. You end up talking to people you'd otherwise never meet in the normal course of your life, and it's neutral at worst and wonderful at best.

Walking and finding history if your location has such history to offer to find.

People pay vast accruing cumulative sums over time to go to the gym and my exercise pays me with every single walk. Some of that modern human history I have found dates back hundreds of years in the form of coins and bottles while some of the native human history I have found dates back 10 thousand years. I cannot neglect the fossils either as the oldest I have found reviewed by an expert is said to be Paleozoic tabulate coral being over 251 million years aged.

Thanks to gravity everything lost in the past is under our feet and as digitalization has taken over our global society, created by some of those reading this here, there are not many folks walking let alone looking. I found my first item over 14 years ago now and while my partner HATES the aggregate volume of the things I have collected she cannot neglect the uniqueness, rarity and value of some of those items. Every single walk inspires real motivation however one needs their health first to take that walk.

Stay Healthy!

Using crooked knives [0] for woodcarving.

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

If you want to get into woodworking but want only a few tools and/or a very portable tool, highly recommend.

e.g. in theory you could build an entire canoe with an axe, crooked knife and 3 or 4 sided awl (and a lot of time, patience and materials)

0 - https://crookedknives.com/

1 - https://amzn.to/3NSj4T3

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

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

I started designing my own clothes. The insight was that I spend 80% money on suits that I wear 2 times a year, and the rest was low quality clothing I actually wore.

I flipped it, and made suits and pants that I could wear everyday.

The fast fashion stores were crap quality, my body is not a template size and I care about fabric and comfort.

The process was to learn how to sketch, to determine fabrics, colors and fit. I made pants that stay comfortable even after I eat food, I made suits that I can wear casually.

I don’t stitch myself, for that I worked with multiple workshops, until I found one that works for me.

Took me about 3 years to reach a point where all my wardrobe is designed by and for me.

There were multiple side effects on my confidence, my life, and the opportunities coming my way.

I don't know if it's niche, but I like making granola for my friends and family. I give them a big jar and tell them free refills are included ("just bring me the empty jar"). I get pretty good nuts and tend to make largish batches (around 2 kg), and, because of the refills, I get a good sense of who appreciates it — always happy to make more for them. My recipe is here: https://alejo.ch/365

I got into HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) fencing last year through a club in my little town. Olympic/sport fencing is fun, but imagine (safely) swinging a 4lbs. steel longsword with two hands at your opponent instead. It's a ton of fun, a great workout (I burn ~1500 calories per class), and competitive so it keeps my interest.

Then there's the whole nerd layer of reading all the original sources from the 15th century, attempting to retain the historical character of the techniques while engaging in real combat, etc. It's both intellectually and physically stimulating.

I'd suggest you try out something completely offline. My next candidate is flintknapping, but there are lots of really interesting historical crafts that are in need of preservation and are extremely interesting to learn and gain expertise at.

Woodworking, oil painting, pottery, analog synthesizers, animal husbandry, spinning and yarnmaking, knitting and weaving, sewing, pattern making, metalwork, welding, endurance running, rock climbing, beekeeping, brewing and distilling, the list goes on and on. Contrary to popular opinion they are all extremely technical and demanding fields, and getting to reconnect with the physical world and the people in it, as well as history, is extremely rewarding.

I was into woodworking, then I got into building fly fishing rods from bamboo.

Fly fishing has been around for a long time. They used to build rods by hand out of bamboo - a specific species of bamboo native to southern China - before factories started making them out of graphite, fiberglass, etc. for cheap.

Modern fly rods are a few hundred bucks. If you try to buy a bamboo rod in a store, they run $2K-$5K. They take a lot of time and meticulous work to build, and the result is a functional work of art.

Woodworking is a ton of fun, and challenging. Bamboo rod making is a niche within a niche, and there are not a whole lot of people who still do it ... mostly retired guys with a lot of time. It's a great tradition, and it's about as far away from computers and technology as I can get.

I didn't even know how to fly fish until I built my first bamboo rod.

Here's a great video showing the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfTvRxcTuV0

Traditional archery.

I started a few years back and have been doing it off and on since. It's challenging but a lot of fun.

I shoot a lot of older style "recurve" bows, but the main style I shoot are horsebows, that is, bows that were historically shot from horseback.

They're very lightweight and you can shoot much more rapidly than you can with a more modern/mechanical recurve or compound. Right now I shoot around 20-25 arrows a minute. Not amazing compared to experienced archers, but a lot of fun.

I have a number of bows, but here are my favorites:

Assyrian: https://www.bogararchery.sk/image/cache/catalog/product/boga... Buryat: (No longer available)

I also shoot an English longbow from time to time.

The horsebows use a technique called "thumb draw" which is very different from the way most bows are shot in the west.

Here's a great YouTube channel if you want to explore getting into it: https://www.youtube.com/@ArminHirmer

I’m a paraglider pilot and powered paraglider recently. Totally recommended, you get to connect with nature in a meaningful way. Also people who practice this kind of sports are nice. From a tech perspective there are a lot of data generated on each flight you can create your own way to capture that data or use already existing apps.

I build weird experimental instruments and then play them at the local electronic music open mic nights.

My main instrument is the electroduochord, a stereo two-stringed instrument played with a drone motor rotary magnetic bow. https://youtu.be/G1ftvw-Y6pk

I've also hooked up audio jacks to small solar panels to convert vibrations in light into sound. https://youtu.be/ZF2Rn5YfBC8

Now I'm working on cybernetic drumming and rhythm synthesis. https://youtu.be/oJZeP4Naqxo https://youtu.be/NwNrJLvHuAE

I recently started looking into hydroponics gardening. You can start very easily with a Kratky system and some herbs, and then take it a step at the time.

I’m quite at the beginning myself, but I like it so far! It’s a nice mix of science and craft.

A group of us in our community broadcast many of the local high school sports. Our original setup had a scoreboard that was really clunky to manage and was hard to learn, so I built a web-based version that pretty much any 12 year old with an iPad could use.

I have worked with the logs extensively over time to convert the simple data inputs from the scoreboard controls into charts & graphs that update in real time on the screen to “tell the story” of the game, and generate “talking points” from the data. It allows us to plug in students as commentators and they can talk about the game much more confidently because they can visually see the game's storyline that is based on actual data. “The Trojans are on a 14-4 streak starting late in the 3rd quarter, and that has flipped the lead in their favor” is a lot more fun than “the Trojans are doing well the last little bit”.

It’s been fun (and challenging) to develop the right UI to display the game’s story in a way that is rich yet easy to read at a glance. And it has been cool to see the students increase in how professional they sound on the live broadcast.

I'm into book restoration, here's a gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/1oNxCfKJp4k6yjoZ9

Much less niche, but I'm also really into acting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=do5PicgU0Jw

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

How niche is retrocomputing?

I absolutely love my ancient machines, and I use them to explore period applications, much more than games.

I also love to restore and preserve them. There’s something magical about a Sun workstation Solaris 2 a Frog Design Trinitron monitor. or a Microvax running VMS and DECWindows. Or a multi-user Altair Z80. I think it’s sad a lot of software was lost and some platforms were denied the documentation that’d enable their preservation (looking at you, IBM - document the AS/400 and release old OS to hobbyists).

I've been playing exclusively CRPGs for the last 12 months or so, which was kinda a niche genre before the success of BG3. There are tons of way to beat those games and optimizing how you build your party and characters (what players call "min-maxing") while following a highly narrative story is a lot of fun. Most of them are quite old and often on sales for like 5 bucks on Steam, for which you get hundreds of hours of gameplay. A few recommendations: Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Owlcat's Pathfinders & W40K Rogue Trader, Larian's Divinity 1, 2 & BG3, Bioware's BG1 & BG2, etc…

Create custom software for non profits is pretty rewarding. They cant afford anything and have process flow needs that are completely unmet.

The software wont be sexy, but will help the non profits and the people they serve

Railway preservation (full size, not model). It looks crowded when a steam train is running and the moths gather around. The reality, when the trains are not running, is typically quite different, with a small dedicated group. If a place looks too crowded, pick a smaller museum.

Think of all the jobs that have to be done to run a railway and you will be able to find a museum that does it: heavy maintenance, boiler work, fitting and turning, blacksmithing, woodwork, upholstering, painting, catering, engine driving, fireman, signalling, customer service, ...

It's a great way to meet people, learn new skills and work with physical things.

I design print on demand t-shirts and merch

https://www.amazon.com/s?refresh=1&rh=n%3A7141123011%2Cp_4%3...

I've been doing photography for a long time but over the last few years had phases where I got bored of it and tried something new.

I had a long time when I was bored and carried the camera in my pack but never took any pictures, then one day I looked out at the sports center out my window and decided to start shooting sports.

Posting photos to socials I found flower photographs were popular so I take a lot of them and find ways to not get bored. (Maybe I will start focus stacking one of these days)

Since the beginning of the year I have been "going out" as a character who is a bit like a Disney cast member who gets photos like

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116326541009492328

from people who recognize my character. Like the Disney cast member it works better when people have seen the movie so i hand out these tokens

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840

which spread virally around a university campus, particularly among Chinese students who recognize the huli jing and all the time I have experiences "that could only happen in a manga" when, for instance, somebody who's heard the rumors is waiting at the bus stop for me. Laugh but all my marketing KPIs have an extra zero on the right!

I’m obsessed with powerlifting. Not only because big numbers get bigger but also the physical changes that occur with a healthy dose of lifting each week. It’s also easy to track lifting stats and there are tons of analysis tools out there if data analysis is something you enjoy.

Also, I’m trying to learn guitar - right now following the Justinguitar.com lessons

I don't think chess engines are a solved problem for some use cases. Yes you can make something strong, maybe even the strongest, but can you create a chess engine perfectly tuned to actually teaching a player? Instead of superhuman perfect lines and inscrutable long-horizon strategy, can you teach nearly optimal human play in a way that's actionable, modular and memorable? Can you improve on tournament prep for players against particular opponents or within a particular metagame?

Also, obviously it's your life, and we're here on Earth to fart around, but I have spent a good portion of my life dipping into one hobby after another, as my dad did before me, so I'm half speaking to myself when I ask this: why do you think you can't meaningfully contribute to any of these realms, even now? To me that sounds like some deep seated fear or doubt, some aversion to competition, some overriding bitterness. I'm slightly worried you'll just be back here in another couple of years trying to find another new hobby, unsullied by the efforts and achievements of others. You won't find that! I would actually suggest a particularly expensive hobby: going to therapy. Try that, and learn that you're already enough, and if your contributions are meaningful to you, that's all that matters. Happy to be way off the mark here though.

Not sure if it is niche, but focused on one South Asian music genre -- been working on this personal project to compile, and collect resources from reliable sources along with mapping lineages of people. Also, I archive a lot of music for this genre from different sources before it vanishes from internet!

https://www.qavvali.com/

EDIT: I have one more page but that is not in navigation yet for people not familiar with the genre. The site is still work in progress -- if you have any feedback, please do leave it here, on the website if you can. The content curation is the most tedious part! https://www.qavvali.com/tradition/

I got into designing my own knitting patterns. I enjoy that I can customize everything — the yarn material, color (including marling, helix knitting, double knitting), yarn weight, needle size (e.g., resulting in "airy" vs "packed" textures), knit textures (e.g., stockinette, linen, miss, etc.), construction process (e.g., can I figure out a way to knit in the round vs flat?), cables, gradual increases/decreases, selvedge/cord, desired ease, etc..

I wrote software to generate patterns given configurations and keep track of which row I'm on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089

I am sharing some of my patterns here: https://alejo.ch/2s0

I'm currently working on my second ruana.

I've been conlanging since I was about 8yo or so. This hobby also has me randomly learning natural human languages too. I've always just enjoyed it. I could make up reasons for enjoying it, but I am not certain that any of those would be true.

FDM 3d printing is still a wild-west and there are plenty of avenues to explore. Not sure what else to say about that other than as someone with daily and close personal proximity to the 'industry' that cropped up I am well aware that there is plenty of work to be done by enthusiasts and niche-people.

Engineering and machinery is still a place full of exploration if you have the chops. If you don't have them yet then there is plenty of topics within that domain to explore; you'll never run out of things to learn there.

My 0.02c : learn to disregard the crowds and focus on your own work. Just because people are doing something you used to do doesn't mean they have anywhere near the depth of understanding and 'freedom of movement' as you do as a 'resident expert'.

also : the fact that no one is doing something may be a signal; crowds form for a reason. Very few hobbyist bomb-squad folk and rabid-racoon-caregivers, get what I mean?

the GPT3 models didn't keep you from learning about ML. The industry didn't push you from keyboard and printers. You did these things.

If you're trying to lead an entirely one-off human life with total uniqueness from other people then all I could suggest is hallucinogens , but personally I think that the goal of just being unique for the sake of being unique is ludicrous.

Just find enjoyment, that's the goal for me at least.

My strange hobby was going on what I called "leak walks".

I lived in a town where on any sunny day I could go for a walk and be almost guaranteed to spot a water mains leak I hadn't seen before, which I'd then report and see how long it would be before it was fixed.

The record was over a year for one of them.

( Yes, it was a Thames Water area. )

Recreational mapmaking.

Every couple of months the family and I will book out some long weekend to just go to an Airbnb in some random town with some copy paper and just go around trying to draw what we think is around us. Inevitably the lines collide and we have to ask some local passerby for help, and if they know any interesting places nearby, and before you know it they're following along with a colored pencil and some copy paper against a hardcover book too.

Not sure if you were looking only for indoor hobbies, but I picked up Kiteboarding recently, and it is the most outrageously fun thing I've ever done.

It's like being a kid and jumping off the house with a bedsheet, except it works. Most mistakes are laughed off by splashing in the water. I'm 3 years in and I can jump 7-10m then fly like a bird for 5-10 seconds without consequences.

Even as a beginner, sailing around or just feeling a kite pull you around is such a blast. Keep in mind it's really difficult and pretty much requires 10-20 hours of private lessons.

Synthesizers! I like it because it's tactile and immediate, and you're not glued to a screen, but can create fun-sounding beats.

Nowadays there are nice, cheapish groove boxes that are perfect for noodling on the couch. I started with the Novation Circuit Tracks, and also really enjoy the Teenage Engineering EP-133. Not to say that I am any good at this, but it's an enjoyable hobby! Bonus if you are friends who are also into it and you can jam together :)

I’ve recently started making bread, at the moment still with fresh or bakers yeast and planning to grow my own sourdough.

It’s not very niche, but as a hobby it’s pretty fulfilling. It allows for a lot of play, and you end with something tasty. Also, makes for a great small gift for friends and family.

Learn how to calculate longitude and latitude by eyesight using the Ptolemaic system.

Then add a telescope or sextant.

This is lots of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I don't think it's a niche hobby, but I really enjoy cooking. Trying out new techniques and receipts, cooking dinner for friends and family or just preparing a delicious meal in advance.

I'm big into anti tech/work related activities. It reminds me that no matter how much I know, or think I know, that I have so much more to learn.

I got into scuba diving while living in NC, and it just happens that there's a lot of it off the coast! The other problem is that it's deep. Diving down to 130 feet sounds cool until you experience hours on a boat only to get a few minutes at the bottom. Eventually I got bothered to learn more about diving.

I headed down to northern Florida to dive with GUE. My instructor was a person who regularly got hit up to dive to exotic places all over the world. Missions like collecting/deploying samples, archaeology, recovery. Here were people meaningfully impacting the environment, science, and keeping technical know-how alive.

I don't know how to convey a the wonder I feel in text. Check it out maybe.

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

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

Local urbex and exploration of 'haikyo' areas. Easy for me since I am in Tokyo and it's super walkable. I have taken to just getting on the train and getting off at random stations and walking in a random direction for a couple of kilometers. Every now and then I run into interesting abandoned buildings or neat shrines. Also makes for good exercise.

Not sure if this is an established hobby or something I've just come up with myself, but I've been "dashboarding." Essentially I have a Blazor webapp that integrates lots of data sources (some manual, some automatic) from areas of my life and I use that to visualize and analyze goals and habits. The main page consists of rolling-weekly stats that deliver "integration scores." Each score contributes to an overall score that gives me a general idea of how I'm doing on all my habits and goals.

So for instance, I use YNAB for our family budgeting, and I have it setup so that if I go a whole week without performing reconciliations, I get dinged -1. Otherwise this sits at 1.0. Then I have a score for journaling - my goal is to journal 4-5 times per week, so each time I journal it resets the score to 1, and then slowly ticks down to 0 over time. Then I have a number of Apple health scores that get imported automatically via REST API. This part compiles all the data on calories, relevant macronutrients (I mostly track protein and fiber currently), steps, workouts, etc. and builds a nice visualization. I consider a total integration score of 0.8 to be pretty good - keeping at that level is actually better than seeking for a perfect 1.0 all the time as my theory is that it will prevent burnout and allow for some forgiveness, because I can't be perfect.

It's been a fun project, and one that I generally try to avoid any AI use. Fun to just build and because the stakes are so low I just chip away at one feature at a time, carving out 15 minutes here or there.

Fishing. But not just regular fishing, life listing. I catalogue and detail ever fish I catch; the conditions, the type of lure or bait, the rod etc. From there you can get into microfishing with tanago rods, surf fishing etc. It's can get quite deep and a good additional hobby for people who love to travel.

I do gundog training. When I started with our first dog I did not expect to enjoy it that much. It’s hard to express how much it takes mentally and physically, and the bond you build with your dog is crazy.

Best of all, you don’t actually have to hunt. You can stick to dummies.

In terms of contributing in a meaningful way, your local trainer will always be happy with helpers. If you need to setup multiple 200m retrieves for multiple dogs, it helps if you have someone out in the field doing the work. And lots of stuff to organise and help out with.

There's a lot of legacy / retro coding out there that despite the output being used by anywhere from hundreds, to thousands to even millions of end-users, it still involves small tight night communities per project, sometimes they overlap somewhat. I've mentioned it before, if you follow people reverse engineering Shockwave, you will note that they are all on the same communities to capture as much wisdom from others as possible. In niche reverse engineering communities, the smallest thing can be a life changer.

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

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

Animal tracking. I picked it up in college and it has been a real source of joy and a true challenge. It's also something you can do almost anywhere: urban, suburban, rural, out in "the wild."

A lot of people think of it as looking for paw/hoof marks in the mud, but tracking can actually be quite involved, requiring you to understand the environment and ecology as a whole.

For example, tracking birds is outrageously difficult and when I first started out I didn't think it was possible. But the more I learned about birds, their habits (per species), their environment, I started to see signs everywhere. It really got my eyes open and I started seeing the same old places in completely new ways!

And in terms of contributing something, there are all sorts of apps/organization that can help you identify different species and in turn you give them data in the form of pictures, location, etc. I use iNaturalist myself, but there are others.

Despite AI starting to crowd this space, I've been spending all of my free time learning music production (doing it the old fashion way without AI). It's a great mix of technical and creative problem solving. Mostly focusing on dark ambient/cinematic composition, playing around hardware synths (Prophet 6, Subsequent 37, modular / eurorack, Digitone II).

If anyone is curious, I put out a single recently (remaster from last year): https://soundcloud.com/vectordust/ion-dunes-1

My main personal goal right now is to release a full length album this year.

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

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

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