Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

My wife started reselling vintage furniture as a hobby, but now it has become her full-time job and she earns money from it. We live in the UK and went to France for shopping for the first time last weekend. Happy to answer any questions

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.

Boat building is in a really interesting time with new materials allow foiling, along with new battery technology giving new power sources.

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.

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.

Printmaking. In a tiny apartment I did linocuts and Gelli prints on my kitchen counter for a few months. https://lucidbeaming.com/art/prints

I'm learning to play the accordion

Holograms! It's fascinating how they are made and how they can serve as a metaphor for how the universe might work.

Somebody already mentioned "Modular Synths". There's incredible resources for building your own synth modules for everything from circuit design to simple kits. Check out LMNC on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCTLeNxge54

I'm a football/soccer coach (youth, U12 and U19).

Got started as a "temp" for my sons mini-team (back when he was 5). Temporary turns into UEFA certified youth trainer/coach real fast. It's no longer just about the kids (sorry guys), but a really awesome hobby with lots of personal development paths.

I decided to run for congressional representative.

Since you mentioned biohacking but are wary of "wetware" risks, consider Personal Bioinformatics via 30x Whole Genome Sequencing. Now that sequencing costs have dropped significantly, you can use AI to take a deep dive into the latest research surrounding your own genomic data.

While severall open medical databases and open-source tools exist, they are often fragmented or built for academia. There is significant room to contribute by hacking together better toolsets, localized databases, or AI-driven interfaces to make this data truly accessible.

I view hobbies as something that I derive value or pleasure from. I do not approach them from the perspective of “meaningfully contributing”. IMO, that sounds more like compensation for career dissatisfaction. I’m not being critical. I just recommend choosing hobbies that you derive value and meaning from, regardless of what the world may think of it. For example, a friend of mine, with high pressure tech management job, quilts in the evening. He says it helps him relax. Doesn’t matter if anyone likes what he does or wants to buy it. As for myself, now that I’m retired I delve into a number of areas, just for me, and absolutely have no interest in sharing them or being recognized for what I do. Good luck on your quest.

Someone needs to solve barbecue. The entire industry is based on feel and experience. Why can't a beginner replicate Franklin's brisket by following a recipe online?

It's probably because the main measuring instrument (a probe thermometer) doesn't provide any feedback about fat rendering, moisture, etc. Plus, every brisket cut has different fat ratios and thickness, which means a recipe can't guarantee identical inputs like bread baking. I'd love for someone to throw some over the top engineering & experimentation at this.

You might look into applying RL in the domain of low cost robotics and drones. That would draw on some of your past experience but applied to a domain (robotics) which I perceive is seeing renewed interest.

Design whistle sequences to get dolphins to respond in ways that will help you figure out their meaning. A few multi-million $ projects could use that, such as Google, Baidu, and SDRP.

Hey, I love this thread!! Thanks for asking the question, there's _so many_ interesting responses in here!

> that isn't absolutely crowded

I'm sure there are field that should be absolutely crowded but where you can do something meaningful.

If I had free time, I would write an app to learn foreign languages I'm interested in. I'm pretty sure that there are good apps, but I tried a few ones, and none really fit my needs.

There are also software that I use a lot, like transcribe! which works well, but that I could see how to improve.

So as others mentioned, do something that you would be interested in.

Nowadays, apart from stockpicking as a value investor, I use LLMs to develop AIs that don’t use backpropagation and that support continuous learning.

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

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

I do a lot of lindyhop Swing dancing as a hobby. It's not innovative work, but I find it rewarding.

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

You mention chess, Chessboxing is an interesting niche hobby where you play both chess and boxing.

I play chess but not chessboxing but hey, you asked for some interesting niche hobbies!

It seems that what you do is mostly related to computers within the niche hobbies but what if you can do something else too?

> Right now I'm making a chess engine, but that's already a solved problem

Not everything should be done for the end-result, sometimes its the process which matters, there was a great hackernews post about it (https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/)

If you want something niche, perhaps make some portal-2 mods or make more efficient versions of using GlaDOS TTS within browser etc. (this is just something that I want to be honest, but I feel like it can be a niche hobby in its regards seeing your interests)

Let me know if you want more ideas and have fun and have a nice day man!

I used to play Pokémon cards competitively. It was fun going to local tournaments and flying with friends for Regional tournaments. I stopped to focus on night school, and I want to pick it back up with the card legality change happening Friday.

Pokémon Champions just came out, so I might give up cards for the video game. We'll see.

I saw a few videos of making glasses (cups) out of nice liquor bottles. Seems like a nice cheapish hobby.

Not too niche: Traditional archery. Niche: Make wood climbing holds.

Gamey Boy / Modretro Chromatic / LSDJ / Dirtywave M8 / anything F# / MiniDisc community

I wouldn't say that chess is a solved problem. Just a hard problem to make a better chess engine than current Stockfish.

I do some synthetic biology as a hobby - genetically engineered a baker’s yeast to produce grape aroma and then baked bread with it, and gave it to like 100 people at an event I was at.

Also do a few others - learned Esperanto (exclusively through listening and speaking with people), beekeeping, woodworking, etc.

It has been learning ,learning &exploring new platforms lately .Well also interesting in Substacking .Do give your precious reviews.https://fortauderdaleseo.substack.com/

Baking bread, albeit with a (Panasonic) bread making machine. Might not be niche, however, traditions of giving bread to guests runs deep and people are always delighted if you give them a loaf of extremely fresh bread.

There are different directions that bread making can go. During the pandemic there was a rash of people making rock hard sourdough, and sourdough is still the magic word for 'higher status' bread, even though almost every commercially available sourdough loaf is faked with enzymes added to a regular 'Chorleywood' loaf.

I gave sourdough a go but I prefer my bread making machines creations that are definitely not sourdough. I like to fortify my bread in two different ways, either with fruits and nuts to make a 'fruit loaf' of sorts, or with seeds and wholemeal flour to have bread that covers many a niche nutrient.

Commercial bread in the UK comes with government issued fortifications of folates, B vitamins and whatnot. This might be fine for pregnant mums that can't cook, but I am not one of them! So the challenge is to do a better job of the fortifications, mostly with seeds and choice of flour.

Commercial bread is also not very real, with lots of additives that I don't seem to need in my own creations. Emulsifiers, preservatives and everything else are needed for commercial bread, if it is to have shelf life and appeal, but my intestines are not crying out for these sorts of additives and I seem to still be alive without them, with improved digestive tract functionality.

Although we have more interesting things to eat than bread, our history in the West is the history of bread, we would not be here without it. Once you start baking your own, albeit with a machine, history becomes so much more interesting.

The other optimisation I try is cost. It is easy to produce a decent loaf with very expensive ingredients, however, on a budget it gets to have a different challenge to it.

I introduced my uncle to the hobby and he is a meticulous record keeper, so I wrote a simple app for him to record his bakes and ratings. This enables him to make fine adjustments to quantities so as to improve on his creations.

I did look for an app before I wrote my own, and the app was called 'Microsoft Excel'. I am sure that could be customised with recipes and whatnot, but I wanted to reinvent the wheel, hence my own app, just for myself and my uncle.

With some hobbies that is all you do and an obsession. Bread making is not like that, you can have plenty of more strings to your bow. As mentioned, people are always impressed if you give them a loaf, or if they learn that your sandwiches are made with your own bread. You can insist that it took three minutes with the machine, to downplay everything, however people stay impressed.

I make AI music https://suno.com/@igorstechoclub

im an airsoft nerd. its a fun way to blow some steam with friends. not the tight milsim approach just the recreational way,

I am trying to build microphone capsules in my garage. Trying to go below 14dB (Primo EM272 level), under 1". It is difficult but rewarding. I do not expect any financial benefits from it, even if I make it under 10mm, because it is very time-consuming. Big players already have massive factories doing 10,000x of what I am doing.

This is the most niche tech-related hobby I have currently.

Postcrossing

Synbio but it’s expensive as hell

I had a route around San Francisco that I would visit, and all the places on the route were where there were good blackberry bushes. I’d take a bucket. Around Golden Gate Park and the Inner Sunset mostly, heading down into the Forest Hills area as well. I did that for a few years. Would pick up some plums along the way as well.

Now on the other side of the Bay I have a couple spots, not as dense a network. About an hour away there are masses.

My thing right now is Arcade Machines. I cant get enough of them. I have a 1988 Sega Aero City cabinet that I'm doing a kind of rest-mod on.

Not niche, but photography has a way of opening doors because you push yourself to get to places you might not otherwise.

Maybe learn a new language that isn't European or Japanese.

If "niche" matters to you, anything currently receiving any type of investing (ML etc) is probably not gonna work.

I've been making a seabed simulation of the seabed for interacting with polymetallic nodules. The idea is these nodules contain a lot of cobalt, but due to their location on the seafloor they're had to access, making mining difficult.

It took me a while but I finally got my hands on some polymetallic nodules (basically the rocks you find on the seabed that contain cobalt) which I'm scanning and will hopefully have uploaded soon. Tragically the nodules were damaged through shipping but it's all I have, especially since the first shipment was stolen off my porch lol. It's build with Project Chrono using C++ https://github.com/thansen0/seabed-sim-chrono

Invasive species removal, bird identification, trail running, mountain biking, audiobook listening while walking. All are best done out of doors. :P Most are teh opposite of the posture and brain patterns that intensive computer usage encourages.

Lockpicking.

very cool post

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Try pet biohacking. You can experiment with the food they consume, their gut microbiome, you can implant robotics into them, so many fun things.

Btw: If you intend to blog about it make sure your alias resides in a jurisdiction without conversative laws.