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

125 points akktor | 5 comments | 09 Jun 25 12:41 UTC | HN request time: 1.242s | 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. zikani_03 ◴[11 Jun 25 03:11 UTC] No.44243853[source]▶
On the development side, I feel like I just don't have the "brain" for Rust even though I have built a couple of useful things with it and have also contributed to an open source project (checkout hurl.dev, great tool!) - I would love to get into low level OS development, VMMs and microVMs . It's probably just an issue of effort

Outside of programming, I'd like to get into welding so I can make some things. I recently learned to use my angle grinder but welding feels like it's out of reach because of not having the right tools and experience.

replies(2): >>44247246 #>>44259987 #
2. nathan_douglas ◴[11 Jun 25 13:12 UTC] No.44247246[source]▶
Yeah, Rust was... nontrivial for me too. I feel like I understand it now quite well, but it took more effort than I'd expected to expend on anything. Prolog was a similar but distinct mindfuck too.
replies(1): >>44249051 #
3. whytevuhuni ◴[11 Jun 25 16:06 UTC] No.44249051[source]▶
Do you regret the expended effort? Does it feel wasted, or does it feel useful?
4. jicea ◴[12 Jun 25 16:59 UTC] No.44259987[source]▶
Hi, maintainer of Hurl [1] here.

We're trying to write "simple" Rust as far as we can, without going into too much optimisation: very little lifetime usage, no async stuff (just classic multi-thread directly from the last sample of the Rust book), liberal usage of clone, no macros, reusing crates for C libcurl and libxml binding, limiting dependencies. We could certainly gain a lot of performances but with this first simple approach, the binary is already "fast"... The only advice I would give for someone going into Rust is to not try to optimise everything from the start to get a first "feeling" of the language.

[1]: https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl

replies(1): >>44271462 #
5. zikani_03 ◴[13 Jun 25 19:24 UTC] No.44271462[source]▶
Hello there, thanks!

Hurl is definitely one of the more approachable Rust codebases I have looked at and worked with. The test suite is one of the best I've seen - so thorough! Definitely, one of my fav projects