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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: 0.288s | 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. joshavant ◴[11 Jun 25 16:52 UTC] No.44249464[source]▶
I want to build a large format, real-time, physical music visualizer that could orchestrate an artistic light symphony for any song.

I'm imagining physical visualizers that are columns of multiple, discrete light nodes, each able to have variable brightness and color.

The real-time music processing is the hard part (for me) to crack.

There's some standard tricks here: FFTs, bandpass filters, etc.

But I want to do more: Real-time stem separation, time signature and downbeat tracking, etc.

Imagine hearing Sweet Caroline and, when the horns kick in, the whole installation 'focuses' on the horns and bright yellow light jumps between each column on each horn note, before returning to tracking the bass line or something.

I've been noodling on this idea for a long time and slowly digging into the music and CS fundamentals. The rise of LLMs might finally be the piece that enables me to close my intelligence gap and finally build this thing...