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

125 points akktor | 1 comments | 09 Jun 25 12:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.478s | 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. nathan_compton ◴[10 Jun 25 19:22 UTC] No.44240418[source]▶
Well, I'm have a little guilty bias towards spacetime non-substantivalism and I've always been interested in getting back to physics in this area. I've particularly found the Shape Dynamics program to be at least somewhat interesting and while I have a sort of ok grasp of the language and mathematics of GR translating that to the SD world has been a persistent challenge. If I had time I'd try to figure that out.

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.