Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

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.

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.

A while back, at a company I used to work at, we did intros of new hires. This was one of the questions. One person shared that they do composting and worm farming. That was memorable. Sharing here since it's about as interesting and niche as I can imagine.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

I am enjoying "trigbagging"/"trigpointing" in Israel (look it up!). I also built an app for this hobby (currently in open beta)

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[0] https://xlights.org

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

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

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.

You should try getting _extremely_ good at Trading Card Games. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic The Gathering all have extremely active current player bases and loads of places to play across the Americas, Europe, and (mostly east) Asia. Getting deep into card advantage, deck construction, and hypergeometric theory has been an absolute blast. Plus, the online simulators are free for Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon are free and pretty current with the paper game. Making new friendships with people not in my usual circles has been so rewarding, I can't recommend it enough. Not to mention the most meaningful contribution of all - winning events moves the needle on the way the rest of the playerbase plays the game. I could go on and on about this.

https://dejabru.org - The Homebrew Competition Remembering Historic and Long-Forgotten Beer Styles

Bellringing, specifically change ringing. It’s a type of church bell ringing that is rather algorithmic in nature. Tends to attract mathy types. Religion not required or expected!

If you have English-style tower bells near you, it's worth checking out, even if only to listen.

I've been using Codex to build a repo that pulls down astronomical datasets and runs simulation to try to find explanation for the hubble tension. Having an agent to do the tedious bits and also having an LLM to bounce ideas has tough me so much about astronomy. I don't have serious hopes of finding anything new and novel but it's still a lot of fun.

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.

Is buying hopefully broken electronic test equipment at the flea market, fixing it and then blogging about it a niche hobby?

I’ve been learning Gregg Shorthand (Anniversary) since the start of the year. It’s a fun challenge even if it feels fantastically obsolete at this point with transcription models getting better and better every day. I’ve always liked paper-and-pen notes, so the idea of basically learning analog Vim was appealing :)

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'm very much into niche hobbies: they usually have nice tight & friendly communities.

Below are some of my favorite I'd love to share:

- FPV drone flying: once you've spent 5-10 hours to get initial reflexes for the controls in the simulator, the first flight on a real machine outside feels magical.

- Electric unicycles: the "mind-controlled" PEV, and arguably the best way to get around in San Francisco.

- Foiling: the closest feeling to riding a hoverboard. You can kite-foil, pump-foil, sup-foil etc, but wing foiling is the easiest to get started.

- Knots: tying laces properly just makes life easier, and tying tucker's / voodoo hitches for the first few times feels like a magic trick.

- Cardistry: learning to do a proper riffle shuffle and a few artistic cuts adds some fun to the most boring part of any card game.

I got into improv theatre. There are groups in every city, at least here in the EU. It is both fun and developing creativity, alertness, etc.

I'm into innovation in HCI as a hobby, but it does get expensive so I would like to bring in some additional financial support for my unusual builds.

I didn't really plan to build HCI as a hobby, but I have a strong interest in hardware engineering and eventually I wanted to switch back to building things that anyone can physically see.

Years ago I built a hemisphere keyboard and now I've built an LED globe with a viewing portal. I started building visible things again because I had a vision and it's very satisfying to use the result. I spend more time using it now than I did originally building it, although it is definitely a work in progress. I want to build it again for a 2.0 version.

Get your Part 107 federal drone license and volunteer for your local fire department or search and rescue. When the FD responds to structure fires they sometimes have to go up on the roof to cut an air hole. This allows oxygen into the building which helps prevent backdrafts. A FLIR equipped drone can help direct the hole cutter around hotspots on the roof. If your local fire department has a drone, it might not have the staff to be able to use it on calls.

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.

We got into scuba diving about 3 years ago. Have something like 200 dives now logged across Southern California, Hawaii and the Caribbean. Planning on adding Indonesia to the list later this year. That wow factor you experience the first time you dive hasn't gone away after 200 dives and I don't think it'll go away after 2000. Probably the most life-affirming thing I've ever gotten into and can't recommend it enough.

I build ukuleles and guitars from scratch. That's not as niche as what a lot of people do -- it's just woodworking -- but I do software for a living and enjoy making durable, physical things in my free time.

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'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.

High altitude balloon launches using weather balloons to get photos of the curvature of the earth.

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?

I do wrestling and BJJ, helps me cope with my stressful job and besides my joints hurting (especially fingers) from time to time, it was great for both my mental and physical health

I've designed jewellery for my wife's last few birthdays. Nothing fancy, geometries, square kufic and such.

Very crude approach: I've been doing it in Blender, if you've 3D skills should be easy. I've got a friend who does the printing and casting, so there's more I could explore there later.

I also do dioramas, which grew out of 40K. Got bored with hench guys with guns and moved to 6mm, it's been great fun focusing on buildings.

There's a surprisingly high number of people in my extended social circle who picked up archery as a sport.

It's actually a complex discipline with a huge range of bows and projectiles to choose from, each having unique characteristics you have to train for.

Training using VR equipment is picking up steam, as typically you need a sizeable amount of real estate to practice when the weather is bad.

Hang gliding. It's good if you are in an area with some hills and consistent winds. There are maybe a dozen well-established launch sites around the U.S. Sadly, I broke down my glider around 2001 -- and did a post-mortem on it to discover it had a minor dent in it.

Recommendation -- don't stall the glider at heights between 10 and 25 feet from the ground. Also, avoid barbed wire fences.

* playing shortlarps

* using short boardgames to measure cognitive performance on various metrics

* creating simple 3d boardgames with raylib kolibri_engine

* dancing and studying vajra dance and the vajra song from namkai norbu

* reading and studying about: mahamudra and dzogchen vs christian contemplative traditions and mystics, and transpersonal psychology

I design print on demand t-shirts and merch

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

Not a new hobby per se, but the combination of

- a good audio book

- a massage chair

- a mindless idle game that you don't need to think of while listening to a good book and getting a massage

Priceless.

Hydrophonic farming at home. You can play with sensors (acidity, humidity etc), LED lighting (frequencies, intensity, etc), vision processing (maybe throw in some AI buzzword here) to keep track of your plants and do some decision making.

Bonus: You get to eat the stuff you grow :)

Six months deep now into analog computing. (I have a modular, hobbyist analog computer wrapping up—just writing the manual).

Going to have to do something on the other end of the spectrum after this. Maybe RISO printing…

If you like music and technology - there's a massive world of possibilities out there (e.g., software based music production, tone.js, music programming with Strudel).

If you have more money - 1) DJing/mixing on vinyl + record digging, 2) Modular synthesis (your wallet will hate you your soul will love you)

Juggling! I used to juggle when i was a teenager, managed to juggle 5 balls and clubs. Then after decades of neglecting it, i picked it up again and i found the joy in this hobby again! I can highly recommend.

If chess is a solved problem, think about skating to where the puck is going to be, an interest area a bit further away from relatively easier verifiability such as coding, math, and hard sciences.

Do you have any interest in digital humanities? Knowledge work where verification is still important but not as black-and-white as does the math check out, does the code run.

Do you have any interest in family history or genealogy?

https://vibegenealogy.ai/p/the-genealogical-research-assista...

One of my hobbies is organizing events. I, like to think, I am pretty good at it. Main point is to create good initial conditions, then people take care of the rest.

Working through PRML and creating a full solution set, albeit very slowly.

https://github.com/abhimanyu-jain/PRML_Solutions

After binging on youtube, I am working on learning to do leatherwork, small stuff at first like making your own wallet etc.

What you’re looking for is a research topic, or maybe a better way to put it is your hobby is research… if that makes sense?

So for ideas, sorry that’s going to be whatever floats your boat. You listed a bunch of different things.

But hobby is normally “playing softball” or “guitar”, but it could be “researching next gen PCs”… but that seems more like a PhD lab project.

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.