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Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?

124 points akktor | 2 comments | 09 Jun 25 12:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.744s | source

This question's for all those cool projects or skills you're secretly fascinated by, but haven't quite jumped into. Maybe you feel like you just don't have the right "brain" for it, or you're not smart enough to figure it out, or even worse, you simply have no clue how or where to even start.

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!

1. taylorius ◴[10 Jun 25 19:17 UTC] No.44240354[source]▶
There's a certain change of perspective with modern AI (by "modern" I mean Resnet and beyond). When I was deep into neural nets in the 1990s, they weren't that large, and I would think of them in terms of the number of weights and nodes - but modern deep learning seems to have has moved up a few levels of abstraction. (I stepped away from the field for a while). And there's a certain understanding people seem to have now regarding the "gradient flow" through the net and why certain architectures work well (Resnet, Unets etc). I must say I'm finding it tricky to shift into this new level of thinking. Also Transformers - still looking for an intuitive sense of how they work, haha.
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2. ckrailo ◴[11 Jun 25 20:20 UTC] No.44251377[source]▶
3Blue1Brown's youtube channel has a lot of visualizations that may help. Transformers are video #6 in his neural networks playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_6700...