Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

[kurtdev]

I thought this post[1] from exactly a year ago was a nice type of post and so to celebrate it I thought I would start another to show the diverse interest of the HN community. Cheers!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488891 (thanks mckirk!)

[vivekd]

This post caught my attention because recently I met a woman I really admire. She dropped out of her computer engineering class, took a vow of celibacy and poverty and became a missionary with a Catholic sect.

The reason I admire her isn't that. What caught my attention about her is that she has a sense of purpose. She has a purpose in life and has devoted her life to it.

I used to have one. My goal was to make the legal system cheaper and more accessible. And I devoted the last decade of my life to that. Now that's fallen apart and I'm a little lost and it hurts me alot.

I hope I'll find a purpose soon. That's what I'm passionate about right now, finding a new purpose or a new way to accomplish my past purpose.

[lewisjoe]

I worked with a founder who had the same vision. Democratising legal industry using tech.

It was my first job after college and was fun building a contract negotiation platform, document assembling API, etc.

Learnt a lot but had to leave because something was missing & it wasn't working out.

The person who I worked with has the same name signature as yours: vivek durai

[m463]

It would be nice to have a legal wiki.

Maybe not to represent yourself ("anyone who represents himself has a fool for a client") but maybe useful stuff.

For example, in california, you have certain online privacy rights you can exercise, and it would be nice to have a form letter to enumerate and exercise those rights.

or how to fight a parking ticket, etc.

[shalmanese]

> And I devoted the last decade of my life to that. Now that's fallen apart and I'm a little lost and it hurts me alot.

You have no contact in your bio but I've run into this with founders a lot and you need to recognize that what you're going through is a period of grief and mourning. I recommend you look up some books on how grief is processed in breakups or deaths and see if you find points of similarity.

Kubler-Ross' "On Death and Dying" is a classic place to start, it's where the "five stages of grief" model was first introduced. Her version of it is a lot more complex than the pop culture, linear understanding that most people have. She mostly talks about the interplay between the five stages and how we ping pong back and forth in interesting ways.

Also, FWIW, I've found ChatGPT a remarkably efficient tool to "read" books in an area you're totally unfamiliar with and want a quick download. You start by asking it to give you a broad overview of a book/set of books and then dive into the areas you find the most interesting until you arrive at an actionable framework.

[kylebenzle]

If you are into the legal system issues right now I am passionate about fathers rights and its been a huge outlet for me. SO many kids and fathers are desperate for help and 50/50 shared parenting is a admirable and achievable goal.

[1] https://www.sharedparenting.org/

[chadk]

Thanks for your honest answer. Finding purpose is a pretty good passion

[_DeadFred_]

Hey I fell into this, only I tried to improve the health care industry and it fell apart over a decade ago. My tip, be a good person, don't let other people change you. Bring kindness to the world. You aren't god, you're vivekd, which is actually much harder to be. You aren't all powerful, yet your mind can comprehend so much beyond your reach. Read some Sun Tzu, only fight the battles (including those in your head) that are winnable (I.E. the outcome is worthy of the energy). Be a good person. Stand up for others. Give up political dogma, emotional mastrubation, and just be human. My grandfather spent his whole live advocating for better mental health care in a midwest state. Just hitting a brick wall. But he was content, he did what he could do, and what he felt he must.

[Dowwie]

Time and new life experiences will mend some of your wounds. I had to give up my life's work and its mission. People often talk about regret of not trying, and there's a less-discussed painful experience of not accomplishing a mission.

If you'd like to connect, please reach out.

[em-bee]

i believe that the purpose of humanity itself is to advance our civilization.

that suggests that everyone should contribute to that, which further implies that every contribution matters, no matter how small. you tried something, and it failed. that's fine. ideally others have an opportunity to learn from that, but even if not, at least you learned something, and you can use that learning for your future.

the goal is not to create the greatest possible impact, but to learn and make the most of the resources available to you. it could be something small like if you are a lawyer having one out of ten clients pro-bono or for a very low rate for people who could not afford a lawyer otherwise.

find an area/place/people that need help, and then help them.

[dendrite9]

Not that I find this person's path admirable, although I don't know enough about his personal life to feel comfortable saying much more than that. But you might be interested in reading about this one time wold class climber who left his life to join a monastery and become a priest. And then left that and returned to climbing recently. His story doesn't resonate with me, but there might be something to it that grasps you. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/crack-of-des...

[jll29]

> She dropped out of her computer engineering class, took a vow of celibacy and poverty and became a missionary with a Catholic sect.

It seems the only way to make HN even better is to bring in people that HNers admirer and to interview them on here.

Speaking of nuns, I know two cases of admirable women (one English and one French), who left their studies (and one also left her then-fiancee) to live and serve in a religious order. At least in one case no-one could have predicted that, least the (MIT-educated) brain researcher fiancee.

[blablabla123]

It definitely makes a lot of easier when having a purpose. On the other hand tying the own identity that close to one thing is the equivalent of putting all eggs in one basket.

[shyn3]

Don't be too dismayed. They get a credit card with an unlimited spending account.

Also, see my post history about acts. It may help you see the trees instead of the forest.

[oulu2006]

I hope you find it as well, thank you for sharing...it can be quite soul crushing when you loose something that gives you a strong sense of identity.

[solardev]

There is a new show on HBO called Scavengers Reign, and it's become my favorite scifi story ever. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21056886/

It's kinda like watching Planet Earth about another ecosystem, with a strong focus on judgment-free ecology (ie there isn't good and evil, just different flora and fauna and otherwise interacting both with their normal food webs and with human outsiders).

It really tickles the environmental science geek in me. There's such a wonderful assortment of predators, prey, symbiotes, diseases, treatments, and thoughtful little touches everywhere. Beautiful art too.

------

That aside, I can't stop thinking about how much fun it is to throw people off cliffs in Baldur's Gate 3. https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199138390397/recomm...

Simple pleasures, man.

[izzydata]

I'm really enjoying Scavengers Reign, but I can't help but feel like the local biology is a bit too absurdist. Or the amount of consistently lucky moves some of the characters would had to make to discover some weird quirk of that alien life. They had been there for maybe weeks or months, but somehow discovered that if you climb inside of the belly of this particular creature and twist some of his internal organs that it will release a light producing egg when you hit them against a hard surface? Or that if you attach this tentacle sac to your face that you won't inhale some fungus gas.

Very creative, but a bit hard to believe. Perhaps the timescale of how long they were stranded there could have been increased a little bit.

[O1111OOO]

> Beautiful art too.

I just looked over a couple of trailers. I think this makes my watchlist.

About the artwork... reminded me of Another World [0, 1] but with the better rez of today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_(video_game)?use...

[1] Walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjMf_bEfqIc

[mettamage]

Haha, yea I binged that one too. I'd give it a similar description, I loved it. I also watched Pantheon. There are a few questions in Pantheon that are interesting to imagine. Also, the computer science fan service (like the philosopher's problem in concurrency/multithreading) feels fun - irrelevant to be honest, but fun.

[cdchn]

>I can't stop thinking about how much fun it is to throw people off cliffs in Baldur's Gate 3.

I was too worried about wasting loot then I finished the game with 20k gold and nothing to spend it on and thought "And nothing of value would have been lost if I had yeeted more people off cliffs."

[cambaceres]

Hi, I read your comment last week and now I've almost completed the show, I love it. Do you have any other recommendations?

[dilawar]

It is surprising very creative. Somehow it reminds me of manga mushishi through there is hardly any obvious overlap

[windowshopping]

This sounded really cool so I went and checked it out, turned it off within 10 min. Was just kind of silly, felt more like someone having fun with drawing than someone really trying to do any sort of serious ecological design.

[andrei_says_]

It is incredible and definitely inspired by the work of Mobius which makes me incredibly excited.

Having his art style come to life as animation is beyond delightful.

If you are enjoying this I also recommend Blue Eye Samurai. Both are amazing.

[FFP999]

One of my favorite things about Deathloop was kicking unsuspecting NPCs off of cliffs and roofs. I've played a lot of that game and that hasn't gotten old yet.

[tommychillfiger]

Just dropping back in to say I started this show after reading your comment and am enjoying it quite a bit. Very imaginative and beautiful animation. Thanks!

[miki_tyler]

Is this based on any of Jean Giraud/Moebius's work?

[hoseja]

The aesthetic is heavily inspired by No Man's Sky.

[nwiswell]

Powerlifting.

Solitary and meditative if you want it to be; social and uplifting if you don't.

It's healthy in a variety of ways (including bone density; physical activity; higher BMR and glucose metabolism; improved cardiovascular function). Also being strong is useful surprisingly often.

Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested, with the exception of (hopefully) temporary setbacks like injury. Hitting personal records and milestones feels particularly good because you know you've earned it. It's hard! But it's also not so hard that I'm liable to get discouraged.

Lots of people prefer bodybuilding style training, but there's something magic about the barbell for me. Olympic lifts are also a lot of fun, but they're more technical and you need more gear and space.

Also it's much easier to quantify your strength progress (I have a literal spreadsheet), and it feels less vain than focusing on looks (not that it isn't a significant bonus).

Dunno. Feels good. I'm gonna keep at it. Two thumbs up.

[kfoley]

For anyone looking to get started I highly recommend the StrongLifts program and the associated app, both free [1].

I neglected strength training for a long time because every time I tried to get started I would feel overwhelmed. Then I tried StrongLifts and loved the fact that it's just 5 exercises, but provides pretty much a full body strength workout.

The guy who developed the program has put a ton of effort into making sure it's detailed and accessible so that pretty much any question you could have is answered.

[1]: https://stronglifts.com/5x5/

[probablynish]

> Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested

This really resonates with me. Not powerlifting myself, but I have a strength training routine at the gym with the goal of improving my right knee pain. I have to take things very slow (increase by 1 rep each session, up the weight every ~2 weeks by the smallest possible increment) but looking at my graph this year is very satisfying. This little corner of my life feels a lot more under my control than anything else right now

[candiddevmike]

Powerlifting can be very dangerous. You can really, permanently, mess up your body, specifically your back and neck. What steps do you take to mitigate that risk?

[BonoboIO]

ChatGPT makes very good training plans if you know what you want. Like a 4 day split with XYZ available machines.

Not for beginners, but very good if you want to think a little bit less which exercises you take for the next 4-6 weeks.

[bodhi_mind]

I just began the 5/3/1 strength training method. I’d like to use gymnastic rings for most of my accessory work to try and get a nice balance of strength and flexibility.

[kbf]

Mental health. I recently passed out in public and had to finally admit to myself that I’m severely burnt out. I had ignored the signs and mentally written off the concept of burnout as a bit of a wishy-washy mostly “emotional” concept and not as the very real psychological AND physiological condition that doesn’t just go away if you get a good nights sleep and a day off. It was emotional to actually read up on it and realize my disillusionment with work, deteriorating relationships and steady decline in my ability to carry out daily tasks weren’t signs of a personal lack of interest or effort, but an inevitability resulting from the position I had put myself in.

[uncharted9]

Learning about my own mind and how to tame it.

I've started realizing that I don't have much control over the external world, people or events, and only my perception of it can keep me sane or fix my mental issues.

This has effectively forced me to see my relationship with my devices with more scrutiny. I've repeatedly found that digital consumption, whether it is infotainment, knowledge, or mindless Reels or Shorts, has always led me to a more depressed and sad state.

A recent trip in the mountains without any cell reception even further confirmed this hypothesis for me personally.

I try to leave my devices and social media for longer durations, but the eventual FOMO and withdrawals that kick in always bring me back to square one of agony.

Events around a romantic interest recently also made me to rethink on how to effectively control emotions and feelings. The other person can do nothing wrong, but my mind can still feel tormented by their simple actions and events that unfold.

Unless I can achieve some sort of mental and emotional equanimity, I feel all my pursuits of learning and career would still not alleviate me from this joyless state of life.

[hahahacorn]

Running.

I got the bug about 12 weeks ago. I had never ran longer than 1.5 miles continuously 12 weeks ago. Now I’m planning my next Sundays long run. 12.5ish miles.

Im a heavy guy. My heaviest was 270, but I’m down to 220 now. I hated running my entire life. But I finally figured out how to run pain free and now it’s the thing I look forward to everyday.

It’s also tremendously rewarding to see such rapid improvement. When I first started I ran a 38 minute 5k, and 10 weeks later I ran a 25:44. I’ve almost improved my 1mi time from 8:30 to 6:30. Signed up for a marathon a couple weeks ago and gave myself 6 months to train.

Sub 4:30, here we come

[sjmulder]

Small city council politics :( there's a lot of resistance against a new temporary housing project for Ukrainian refugees with many legit concerns, and some NIMBY, but also xenophobia and racism.

It's tough but we've been able to start a YIMBY group and encouraging people and organisations to make public comments or send letters of support. A good few didn't dare because they feared reactions, and rightfully so, because some who did (including me) ended up on the receiving end of some bullshit. All bark and no bite - for now - but not great for democracy.

[politelemon]

Games. I've been forcing myself into productivity for too long because that is the thing to do. I recently built a gaming pc, picked some jrpgs, and I'm having a blast. There are entire franchises and worlds for the exploring. There are amazing rich stories and history and beautiful soundtracks that I'm living through right now. My wishlist grows by the day as I discover new tales.

[philip1209]

Low-plastic living.

I read a book by the world's first zero-waste restaurant, Silo. The book got me thinking about how different our lives would be if oil were expensive. "Pretend oil is really expensive" is a good proxy for doing things that are "eco-friendly." Since reading the book, I've tried to eliminate single-use plastic from most of my life. It's incredibly hard. Everything from my socks to my vegetable packaging to my dog's toys to my floor is made of plastic.

I've slowly been adjusting my habits - such as checking whether clothing is natural or oil-based, buying food mostly at the farmers market, and eating in instead of takeaway. These little change have decreased my carbon footprint immensely.

I enjoy playing this game of "pretend oil is expensive" even though it's not because it's revealing problems we will need to tackle as a society. At some point we will run out of oil. When that happens, everything will be impacted. Travel, food delivery, and most of all healthcare.

[a3_nm]

The following open research problem. Given an undirected graph G with two vertices s and t, the task is to determine whether there is an undirected path connecting s and t which is simple (no repeated vertices) and has length divisible by 3.

It is not known whether this problem is NP-hard, or whether it can be solved in polynomial time; apparently the question is open since the early 90s.

(The problem is also open for paths of length p mod q for any fixed p and q (fixed means they are constants, and are not given as input), whenever q>2. The problem is known to be in PTIME for 0 mod 2 and 1 mod 2, and to be NP-hard when the graph is directed. Pointers to related work here: https://gitlab.com/a3nm/modpath)

[pipes]

Not drinking. I only drank at weekends. But pretty much every weekend for 25 + years, this is totally normal from where I'm from.

I read the book alcohol explained https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alcohol-Explained-William-Porter-eb...

Listened to the Huberman podcast about alcohol.

And realised I don't want to drink anymore.

It's really strange, I used to struggle having a single weekend with no booze. Now I actively just don't want to. I look around me and see people boozing and I think it's insane.

I'm 8 weeks in. I doubt I'll drink again. I really regret not realising much earlier in life how shit drinking actually is

[dcw303]

Math as prep for 3d game programming. I've been out of school a long time, and when I was there I didn't even get to the pre-calculus level.

This year I've churned through all the introductory level texts from Art Of Problem Solving. Yes, they're written for high schoolers and you need to have some humility to admit you might be missing or have forgotten some fundamentals, but the lesson strucutre really appeals to me. It's the only series I've found that respects the learner and really builds up knowledge one piece at a time.

Before I start the intermediate texts and the calculus book, I've taken a detour to "Linear Algebra: Theory, Intuition, Code" and it's sticking a lot better now than previous attempts on the subject. So that gives me some confidence.

[rchaud]

Print media -- seriously. There are vanishingly few types of paper-based products left besides mass-market paperbacks and a handful of soulless conglomerate-owned magazines that may disappear tomorrow.

Just like there are small farming collectives out there, I'd love for there to be micro-magazines and short stories on paper, made cheaply and distributed to small mailing lists with a single stamp (not an email newsletter!). PDF versions available for long-distance readers.

Something, anything to counter the overwhelm of ad and email popup-ridden "content blogs" and walled garden platforms sucking everything into their in-house LLMs.

[beachy]

Moving golf simulation into the cloud [0].

Golf is one of the only sports that can be realistically simulated indoors.

Golf is also one of the only sports where even severe lag has no effect on the accuracy of the play - just the viewing experience. Unlike FPS games in the cloud which become unplayable with even modest lag.

The golf simulation technology landscape today is pre-cloud. People running their own gaming computers with complex lash ups of open source software to connect their launch monitors. All pretty prohibitive to the stereotypical older tech-averse golf player.

[0] https://golfsimcloud.com

[aeonik]

I'm obsessed with interfaces at the moment.

How do humans interface with computers and data, from control to visual feedback.

How humans interface with music, perform it, read it, store it. How do birds interface with tones and rhythm?

How software interfaces with other software and hardware.

How humans interface with the world via symbols. I've been reading about Semiotics a bit, and find the field fascinating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics?wprov=sfla1

Birdsong as code: https://youtu.be/OCYU0LtqRH0?si=4DwOKC3oZ6vE-w-y

[pushfoo]

Text rendering / UI on minimal hardware and finding more time for ML-family languages.

A few months ago, an iced-rs maintainer[1] recommended I try Elm. So far, this has lead to:

1. A an MVP[2] of a curses[3]-like library for CHIP-8 derivatives (https://github.com/pushfoo/octo-termlib)

2. A growing interest in language design

3. An ongoing re-evaluation of my software development worldview

[1] 13r0ck / Brock on GitHub (https://github.com/13r0ck). Hire him if you get the chance. He has a rare blend of know-how, mentorship, and community management skills.

[2] Unsolved issues with octo-termlib:

1. Finding a license friendly toward beginners editing pre-made template assembly files (Maybe zlib + acknowledgement?)

2. Elegant & efficient syntax for ending screen X / Y parsing before all digits are used

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library)

[RecycledEle]

I am passionate about AI in education.

Economies die because of underutilized or wasted resources.

Our educations system is horrible at wasting everyone's time right now. Source: I've been teaching since the 1990's and learning in school since the late 1970's or 1980.

AI can fix most of that.

Example: It has been many years since I looked a C code and I never really understood much about the Linux Kernel, even back when I tried to contribute to it in the 1990's. Yesterday I started chatting with ChatGPT on how I could understand the code in the Linux Kernel. I made some progress towards a previously inscrutable goal.

I am teaching my students how to use AI to learn anything they need to know.

[namrog84]

Quit my job earlier this year to start an indie game studio and a little bit of contributions to misc open-source projects.

A fair balance of relax time but also enjoying the time off. There is so much I want to do and get excited for, but I still suffer a lot of procrastination related problems or else I feel like I could have done a tremendous amount more.

I feel like there is lifetimes of things I get excited about and want to do, but spend so little time doing them. :( It sucks

[makingstuffs]

Love, life, people and planet.

When I was young I spent a lot of time blinded by rappers with their spinning wheels and crowds of hangers-on which drastically lead me astray — being from a single parented poverty stricken family in the London it wasn’t exactly hard.

Since then I have been through so many different stages to get to the point of contentment with whatever life throws my way.

Within this contentment I have found that the things I truly care about are (as cliché as it sounds) not the things which can be bought but the things which connect me to other beings.

The realisation and acceptance of the inevitable end of life has made me realise that we will all cease to exist within a generation, our memory will cease within two, our entire footprint within three.

From this I found my passion was not buying things to distract me nor was my desire to be remembered long after I pass. It is to enjoy the now, make others feel the love I never felt until I reached my mid 30s, lift people out of bad places where possible and do my utmost to appreciate this breathtakingly beautiful planet we call home.

Cheesy, I know

[bayesianbot]

I've been collecting data from my phone and some different "sensors" (food delivery orders, bank payments, Activity Watch statistics, I'm adding a video camera soon. For phone about every sensor I have in my phone like ambient light, wifi APs, GPS, rotation, steps, when it was last unlocked, what app is in use, what app / artist is playing media etc.) and I'm using ML to predict activities I'm currently doing. I guess the end goal is to automate my diary writing to GPT as a joke..

Started as a small project on wanting to learn C# better and being interested about how much sensors collect information about us and how we could analyze that, but it really got out of hand. I've been working on it for a ~month (with some breaks), sometimes all day, built a lot of tooling (like webassembly & android app to tag current activities for ML training data) and analysis things for it and am nearing a burnout point :P but been fun and I've definitely learned a lot about C# and ML.