Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

I got myself involved with a nonprofit local group preserving local pioneer era apple trees. They've been DNA testing and cataloging the trees, and had all the info stashed away in google drive and onedrive folders. The founder was looking to step back so they asked me if I wanted to step up as project lead, which I did.

I took the info and organized it into a nice wiki-style site with maps and descriptions so everyone in the community can learn about the old orchards.

https://heritageapplecorps.org/index.php/Main_Page

I've also learned how to prune and graft hundred year old apple trees and now have a couple dozen young grafted trees growing in my garage, all clones of local hundred year old trees, some of which genetically tested unique and are of currently unknown varieties.

Put it down over winter but just picking it back up.

Bat detection/identification with ultrasonic recordings. It's been fun building the data pipeline to manage the ~30GB+ of WAV files generated every night, run through some identification processes (currently using https://github.com/rdz-oss/BattyBirdNET-Analyzer) and build a UI (mostly vibe coded lol) to help with replay, cataloging, etc.

I'm using an AudioMoth currently (https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth), am thinking about extending it to do some of the preprocessing in the field to scale things up a bit.

If you like to work with your hands and have space, build something physical: big and complex, and actually finish it. I built a single engine two seat kit airplane in my garage, did all the flight testing, and now have an interesting way to travel/commute as a result. The "finish it" part is the most important bit. Computer people spend too much time working on projects that don't have a "done" state. Change that up.

My hobby is organizing in-person meetups for random people to get together, chat and make friends. Barely structured, if at all. I've found this rewarding and ended up making friends this way.

You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos you probably don't want to be around. And another 10% at any given meetup are autistic or neuro-divergent but well-meaning, kind and full of interesting insights and hobbies, although perhaps difficult to socialize with, at least until they get to know you're well-meaning too.

These challenges come with the territory. You end up talking to people you'd otherwise never meet in the normal course of your life, and it's neutral at worst and wonderful at best.

Consider mathematics. If you already know enough math to derive the quadratic equation, you might make a small change, like adding X^3 or X^4. See where your own techniques take you before looking up the answer. With just a few pen strokes, you will be playing with an equation for which there is no general solution, or no known solution. In mathematics it will take you very little time to start playing at the boundaries of human knowledge, and it's relatively easy to memorize a few starting points that many hours of passenger travel fly by.

Almost everything you can do on your own is a "solved problem". Why go into woodworking if you can buy an Ikea stool? The point of hobbies isn't to solve problems - that's called a job - but to learn and have fun.

Find a niche where you can resist the temptation to constantly compare yourself to eight billion other people on the internet. Something where success isn't measured in Github stars, Youtube likes, or Reddit upvotes. Once you get in that mindset, almost anything goes. I know people who collect RPN calculators and are having a blast. All kinds of hands-on crafts are great too. I like making electronic music and I'm pretty bad at it.

I started designing my own clothes. The insight was that I spend 80% money on suits that I wear 2 times a year, and the rest was low quality clothing I actually wore.

I flipped it, and made suits and pants that I could wear everyday.

The fast fashion stores were crap quality, my body is not a template size and I care about fabric and comfort.

The process was to learn how to sketch, to determine fabrics, colors and fit. I made pants that stay comfortable even after I eat food, I made suits that I can wear casually.

I don’t stitch myself, for that I worked with multiple workshops, until I found one that works for me.

Took me about 3 years to reach a point where all my wardrobe is designed by and for me.

There were multiple side effects on my confidence, my life, and the opportunities coming my way.

You should try getting _extremely_ good at Trading Card Games. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic The Gathering all have extremely active current player bases and loads of places to play across the Americas, Europe, and (mostly east) Asia. Getting deep into card advantage, deck construction, and hypergeometric theory has been an absolute blast. Plus, the online simulators are free for Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon are free and pretty current with the paper game. Making new friendships with people not in my usual circles has been so rewarding, I can't recommend it enough. Not to mention the most meaningful contribution of all - winning events moves the needle on the way the rest of the playerbase plays the game. I could go on and on about this.

My wife & I are Scottish Country dancers. It's a social dance form (it's traditional to swap partners for every dance so nobody has to bring a partner, though not required). Pretty good cardio, there are groups all over the world, so it's often not that difficult to find a class.

Other similar social dance forms from the UK are Contra dancing, English Country dancing, and Ceilidh dancing. Square dancing in the US developed out of these forms. Many other cultures have their own social dance forms, with varying levels of formalization.

Meaningful contribution is easy: these groups always benefit from more participants. Scottish Country dance has a formalized teaching certificate program, roughly equivalent to a Master's degree worth of work (and if you're a UK resident it qualifies to teach PE in UK schools).

I got into HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) fencing last year through a club in my little town. Olympic/sport fencing is fun, but imagine (safely) swinging a 4lbs. steel longsword with two hands at your opponent instead. It's a ton of fun, a great workout (I burn ~1500 calories per class), and competitive so it keeps my interest.

Then there's the whole nerd layer of reading all the original sources from the 15th century, attempting to retain the historical character of the techniques while engaging in real combat, etc. It's both intellectually and physically stimulating.

Using crooked knives [0] for woodcarving.

They're essentially a combination of a plane, spoke-shave, draw-knife and gouge but all in a one handed tool. They were primarily used by Native Americans to build things like canoes, snowshoes, baskets etc. I first found about them from reading John McPhee's Survival of the Bark Canoe [1] but there are lots of uses of them on video on the website below (which I created).

If you want to get into woodworking but want only a few tools and/or a very portable tool, highly recommend.

e.g. in theory you could build an entire canoe with an axe, crooked knife and 3 or 4 sided awl (and a lot of time, patience and materials)

0 - https://crookedknives.com/

1 - https://amzn.to/3NSj4T3

I got into designing my own knitting patterns. I enjoy that I can customize everything — the yarn material, color (including marling, helix knitting, double knitting), yarn weight, needle size (e.g., resulting in "airy" vs "packed" textures), knit textures (e.g., stockinette, linen, miss, etc.), construction process (e.g., can I figure out a way to knit in the round vs flat?), cables, gradual increases/decreases, selvedge/cord, desired ease, etc..

I wrote software to generate patterns given configurations and keep track of which row I'm on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089

I am sharing some of my patterns here: https://alejo.ch/2s0

I'm currently working on my second ruana.

Traditional archery.

I started a few years back and have been doing it off and on since. It's challenging but a lot of fun.

I shoot a lot of older style "recurve" bows, but the main style I shoot are horsebows, that is, bows that were historically shot from horseback.

They're very lightweight and you can shoot much more rapidly than you can with a more modern/mechanical recurve or compound. Right now I shoot around 20-25 arrows a minute. Not amazing compared to experienced archers, but a lot of fun.

I have a number of bows, but here are my favorites:

Assyrian: https://www.bogararchery.sk/image/cache/catalog/product/boga... Buryat: (No longer available)

I also shoot an English longbow from time to time.

The horsebows use a technique called "thumb draw" which is very different from the way most bows are shot in the west.

Here's a great YouTube channel if you want to explore getting into it: https://www.youtube.com/@ArminHirmer

I was into woodworking, then I got into building fly fishing rods from bamboo.

Fly fishing has been around for a long time. They used to build rods by hand out of bamboo - a specific species of bamboo native to southern China - before factories started making them out of graphite, fiberglass, etc. for cheap.

Modern fly rods are a few hundred bucks. If you try to buy a bamboo rod in a store, they run $2K-$5K. They take a lot of time and meticulous work to build, and the result is a functional work of art.

Woodworking is a ton of fun, and challenging. Bamboo rod making is a niche within a niche, and there are not a whole lot of people who still do it ... mostly retired guys with a lot of time. It's a great tradition, and it's about as far away from computers and technology as I can get.

I didn't even know how to fly fish until I built my first bamboo rod.

Here's a great video showing the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfTvRxcTuV0

I highly recommend getting into loudspeakers or audio reproduction in general! Without a doubt the most enjoyable, satisfying, and enriching hobby I've had so far.

A couple years ago I decided to build a pair of synergy horns (look them up!) which included all kinds of interesting stuff! For example, I had to learn CAD, the principles of CNC and how to create toolpaths, what a waveguide is, general woodworking, and lots more. There's also lots of interesting "subhobbies" one may dwelve into such as psychoacoustics, signal processing, LEM/BEM simulations, the optimization of horn geometries (look up AKABAK or Ath4 and their respective DiyAudio threads), analog crossovers, or acoustically treating a room to reduce reverb.

Building speakers and experimenting with bracing and lining/damping have been rewarding for me as determining wether I prefer A or B really requires me to _listen_ in a different way from say, listening to a conversation (or even to music!). It feels very grounding and meditative in a way, and at least in my case, indirectly trains one to notice and appreciate more sounds in everyday life.

A big bonus is that it becomes really easy to throw outdoor parties out in the woods when one doesn't have to rent gear. Loudspeakers and bringing people together is a damn good and rewarding combo.

Walking and finding history if your location has such history to offer to find.

People pay vast accruing cumulative sums over time to go to the gym and my exercise pays me with every single walk. Some of that modern human history I have found dates back hundreds of years in the form of coins and bottles while some of the native human history I have found dates back 10 thousand years. I cannot neglect the fossils either as the oldest I have found reviewed by an expert is said to be Paleozoic tabulate coral being over 251 million years aged.

Thanks to gravity everything lost in the past is under our feet and as digitalization has taken over our global society, created by some of those reading this here, there are not many folks walking let alone looking. I found my first item over 14 years ago now and while my partner HATES the aggregate volume of the things I have collected she cannot neglect the uniqueness, rarity and value of some of those items. Every single walk inspires real motivation however one needs their health first to take that walk.

Stay Healthy!

amateur liquid bi-prop rocket engines for the High Power Rocketry hobby are gaining momentum. There's lot of opportunity there for performance profiling and even more if you have access to a machine tools like CNC lathes. There's also interest in active stabilization of amateur rockets using engine gimbaling which would put so much more performance in reach.

These guys are legit and actually flying airframes instead of just ignition on a test stand. https://www.halfcatrocketry.com/

The hobby is geography constrained though, you need access to large open spaces. Even small engines are spectacularly loud and igniting one in your garage would scare the crap out of your neighbors.

Edit: if you're in/near LA this club is pretty much ground zero. Tom Mueller of SpaceX's Merlin engine series fame was discovered here iirc. https://rrs.org

I've been playing exclusively CRPGs for the last 12 months or so, which was kinda a niche genre before the success of BG3. There are tons of way to beat those games and optimizing how you build your party and characters (what players call "min-maxing") while following a highly narrative story is a lot of fun. Most of them are quite old and often on sales for like 5 bucks on Steam, for which you get hundreds of hours of gameplay. A few recommendations: Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Owlcat's Pathfinders & W40K Rogue Trader, Larian's Divinity 1, 2 & BG3, Bioware's BG1 & BG2, etc…

I make my own hot sauce:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/08/04/making-your-own-ho...

It's quite easy and you don't have to make it super hot.

I am currently growing chillis for the next batch.

I'm into book restoration, here's a gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/1oNxCfKJp4k6yjoZ9

Much less niche, but I'm also really into acting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=do5PicgU0Jw

I’m obsessed with powerlifting. Not only because big numbers get bigger but also the physical changes that occur with a healthy dose of lifting each week. It’s also easy to track lifting stats and there are tons of analysis tools out there if data analysis is something you enjoy.

Also, I’m trying to learn guitar - right now following the Justinguitar.com lessons

I’m a paraglider pilot and powered paraglider recently. Totally recommended, you get to connect with nature in a meaningful way. Also people who practice this kind of sports are nice. From a tech perspective there are a lot of data generated on each flight you can create your own way to capture that data or use already existing apps.

Create custom software for non profits is pretty rewarding. They cant afford anything and have process flow needs that are completely unmet.

The software wont be sexy, but will help the non profits and the people they serve

How niche is retrocomputing?

I absolutely love my ancient machines, and I use them to explore period applications, much more than games.

I also love to restore and preserve them. There’s something magical about a Sun workstation Solaris 2 a Frog Design Trinitron monitor. or a Microvax running VMS and DECWindows. Or a multi-user Altair Z80. I think it’s sad a lot of software was lost and some platforms were denied the documentation that’d enable their preservation (looking at you, IBM - document the AS/400 and release old OS to hobbyists).

Railway preservation (full size, not model). It looks crowded when a steam train is running and the moths gather around. The reality, when the trains are not running, is typically quite different, with a small dedicated group. If a place looks too crowded, pick a smaller museum.

Think of all the jobs that have to be done to run a railway and you will be able to find a museum that does it: heavy maintenance, boiler work, fitting and turning, blacksmithing, woodwork, upholstering, painting, catering, engine driving, fireman, signalling, customer service, ...

It's a great way to meet people, learn new skills and work with physical things.

Not sure if it is niche, but focused on one South Asian music genre -- been working on this personal project to compile, and collect resources from reliable sources along with mapping lineages of people. Also, I archive a lot of music for this genre from different sources before it vanishes from internet!

https://www.qavvali.com/

EDIT: I have one more page but that is not in navigation yet for people not familiar with the genre. The site is still work in progress -- if you have any feedback, please do leave it here, on the website if you can. The content curation is the most tedious part! https://www.qavvali.com/tradition/

I’ve started making what I “joy machines” that I am putting up in or near my neighborhood. They’re some combination of public interactive art (e.g. push a button and it prints out a compliment) and little art on display that I design and 3D print for people to take.

I don't think chess engines are a solved problem for some use cases. Yes you can make something strong, maybe even the strongest, but can you create a chess engine perfectly tuned to actually teaching a player? Instead of superhuman perfect lines and inscrutable long-horizon strategy, can you teach nearly optimal human play in a way that's actionable, modular and memorable? Can you improve on tournament prep for players against particular opponents or within a particular metagame?

Also, obviously it's your life, and we're here on Earth to fart around, but I have spent a good portion of my life dipping into one hobby after another, as my dad did before me, so I'm half speaking to myself when I ask this: why do you think you can't meaningfully contribute to any of these realms, even now? To me that sounds like some deep seated fear or doubt, some aversion to competition, some overriding bitterness. I'm slightly worried you'll just be back here in another couple of years trying to find another new hobby, unsullied by the efforts and achievements of others. You won't find that! I would actually suggest a particularly expensive hobby: going to therapy. Try that, and learn that you're already enough, and if your contributions are meaningful to you, that's all that matters. Happy to be way off the mark here though.

I've been doing photography for a long time but over the last few years had phases where I got bored of it and tried something new.

I had a long time when I was bored and carried the camera in my pack but never took any pictures, then one day I looked out at the sports center out my window and decided to start shooting sports.

Posting photos to socials I found flower photographs were popular so I take a lot of them and find ways to not get bored. (Maybe I will start focus stacking one of these days)

Since the beginning of the year I have been "going out" as a character who is a bit like a Disney cast member who gets photos like

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116326541009492328

from people who recognize my character. Like the Disney cast member it works better when people have seen the movie so i hand out these tokens

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840

which spread virally around a university campus, particularly among Chinese students who recognize the huli jing and all the time I have experiences "that could only happen in a manga" when, for instance, somebody who's heard the rumors is waiting at the bus stop for me. Laugh but all my marketing KPIs have an extra zero on the right!

Recreational mapmaking.

Every couple of months the family and I will book out some long weekend to just go to an Airbnb in some random town with some copy paper and just go around trying to draw what we think is around us. Inevitably the lines collide and we have to ask some local passerby for help, and if they know any interesting places nearby, and before you know it they're following along with a colored pencil and some copy paper against a hardcover book too.

My strange hobby was going on what I called "leak walks".

I lived in a town where on any sunny day I could go for a walk and be almost guaranteed to spot a water mains leak I hadn't seen before, which I'd then report and see how long it would be before it was fixed.

The record was over a year for one of them.

( Yes, it was a Thames Water area. )

FDM 3d printing is still a wild-west and there are plenty of avenues to explore. Not sure what else to say about that other than as someone with daily and close personal proximity to the 'industry' that cropped up I am well aware that there is plenty of work to be done by enthusiasts and niche-people.

Engineering and machinery is still a place full of exploration if you have the chops. If you don't have them yet then there is plenty of topics within that domain to explore; you'll never run out of things to learn there.

My 0.02c : learn to disregard the crowds and focus on your own work. Just because people are doing something you used to do doesn't mean they have anywhere near the depth of understanding and 'freedom of movement' as you do as a 'resident expert'.

also : the fact that no one is doing something may be a signal; crowds form for a reason. Very few hobbyist bomb-squad folk and rabid-racoon-caregivers, get what I mean?

the GPT3 models didn't keep you from learning about ML. The industry didn't push you from keyboard and printers. You did these things.

If you're trying to lead an entirely one-off human life with total uniqueness from other people then all I could suggest is hallucinogens , but personally I think that the goal of just being unique for the sake of being unique is ludicrous.

Just find enjoyment, that's the goal for me at least.

I'm very much into niche hobbies: they usually have nice tight & friendly communities.

Below are some of my favorite I'd love to share:

- FPV drone flying: once you've spent 5-10 hours to get initial reflexes for the controls in the simulator, the first flight on a real machine outside feels magical.

- Electric unicycles: the "mind-controlled" PEV, and arguably the best way to get around in San Francisco.

- Foiling: the closest feeling to riding a hoverboard. You can kite-foil, pump-foil, sup-foil etc, but wing foiling is the easiest to get started.

- Knots: tying laces properly just makes life easier, and tying tucker's / voodoo hitches for the first few times feels like a magic trick.

- Cardistry: learning to do a proper riffle shuffle and a few artistic cuts adds some fun to the most boring part of any card game.

A group of us in our community broadcast many of the local high school sports. Our original setup had a scoreboard that was really clunky to manage and was hard to learn, so I built a web-based version that pretty much any 12 year old with an iPad could use.

I have worked with the logs extensively over time to convert the simple data inputs from the scoreboard controls into charts & graphs that update in real time on the screen to “tell the story” of the game, and generate “talking points” from the data. It allows us to plug in students as commentators and they can talk about the game much more confidently because they can visually see the game's storyline that is based on actual data. “The Trojans are on a 14-4 streak starting late in the 3rd quarter, and that has flipped the lead in their favor” is a lot more fun than “the Trojans are doing well the last little bit”.

It’s been fun (and challenging) to develop the right UI to display the game’s story in a way that is rich yet easy to read at a glance. And it has been cool to see the students increase in how professional they sound on the live broadcast.

I've been using Codex to build a repo that pulls down astronomical datasets and runs simulation to try to find explanation for the hubble tension. Having an agent to do the tedious bits and also having an LLM to bounce ideas has tough me so much about astronomy. I don't have serious hopes of finding anything new and novel but it's still a lot of fun.

Synthesizers! I like it because it's tactile and immediate, and you're not glued to a screen, but can create fun-sounding beats.

Nowadays there are nice, cheapish groove boxes that are perfect for noodling on the couch. I started with the Novation Circuit Tracks, and also really enjoy the Teenage Engineering EP-133. Not to say that I am any good at this, but it's an enjoyable hobby! Bonus if you are friends who are also into it and you can jam together :)

I build weird experimental instruments and then play them at the local electronic music open mic nights.

My main instrument is the electroduochord, a stereo two-stringed instrument played with a drone motor rotary magnetic bow. https://youtu.be/G1ftvw-Y6pk

I've also hooked up audio jacks to small solar panels to convert vibrations in light into sound. https://youtu.be/ZF2Rn5YfBC8

Now I'm working on cybernetic drumming and rhythm synthesis. https://youtu.be/oJZeP4Naqxo https://youtu.be/NwNrJLvHuAE

Despite AI starting to crowd this space, I've been spending all of my free time learning music production (doing it the old fashion way without AI). It's a great mix of technical and creative problem solving. Mostly focusing on dark ambient/cinematic composition, playing around hardware synths (Prophet 6, Subsequent 37, modular / eurorack, Digitone II).

If anyone is curious, I put out a single recently (remaster from last year): https://soundcloud.com/vectordust/ion-dunes-1

My main personal goal right now is to release a full length album this year.

Not sure if you were looking only for indoor hobbies, but I picked up Kiteboarding recently, and it is the most outrageously fun thing I've ever done.

It's like being a kid and jumping off the house with a bedsheet, except it works. Most mistakes are laughed off by splashing in the water. I'm 3 years in and I can jump 7-10m then fly like a bird for 5-10 seconds without consequences.

Even as a beginner, sailing around or just feeling a kite pull you around is such a blast. Keep in mind it's really difficult and pretty much requires 10-20 hours of private lessons.

I don't know if it's niche, but I like making granola for my friends and family. I give them a big jar and tell them free refills are included ("just bring me the empty jar"). I get pretty good nuts and tend to make largish batches (around 2 kg), and, because of the refills, I get a good sense of who appreciates it — always happy to make more for them. My recipe is here: https://alejo.ch/365

I'm big into anti tech/work related activities. It reminds me that no matter how much I know, or think I know, that I have so much more to learn.

I got into scuba diving while living in NC, and it just happens that there's a lot of it off the coast! The other problem is that it's deep. Diving down to 130 feet sounds cool until you experience hours on a boat only to get a few minutes at the bottom. Eventually I got bothered to learn more about diving.

I headed down to northern Florida to dive with GUE. My instructor was a person who regularly got hit up to dive to exotic places all over the world. Missions like collecting/deploying samples, archaeology, recovery. Here were people meaningfully impacting the environment, science, and keeping technical know-how alive.

I don't know how to convey a the wonder I feel in text. Check it out maybe.

I’ve recently started making bread, at the moment still with fresh or bakers yeast and planning to grow my own sourdough.

It’s not very niche, but as a hobby it’s pretty fulfilling. It allows for a lot of play, and you end with something tasty. Also, makes for a great small gift for friends and family.

I build ukuleles and guitars from scratch. That's not as niche as what a lot of people do -- it's just woodworking -- but I do software for a living and enjoy making durable, physical things in my free time.

I don't think it's a niche hobby, but I really enjoy cooking. Trying out new techniques and receipts, cooking dinner for friends and family or just preparing a delicious meal in advance.

Animal tracking. I picked it up in college and it has been a real source of joy and a true challenge. It's also something you can do almost anywhere: urban, suburban, rural, out in "the wild."

A lot of people think of it as looking for paw/hoof marks in the mud, but tracking can actually be quite involved, requiring you to understand the environment and ecology as a whole.

For example, tracking birds is outrageously difficult and when I first started out I didn't think it was possible. But the more I learned about birds, their habits (per species), their environment, I started to see signs everywhere. It really got my eyes open and I started seeing the same old places in completely new ways!

And in terms of contributing something, there are all sorts of apps/organization that can help you identify different species and in turn you give them data in the form of pictures, location, etc. I use iNaturalist myself, but there are others.

Not sure if this is an established hobby or something I've just come up with myself, but I've been "dashboarding." Essentially I have a Blazor webapp that integrates lots of data sources (some manual, some automatic) from areas of my life and I use that to visualize and analyze goals and habits. The main page consists of rolling-weekly stats that deliver "integration scores." Each score contributes to an overall score that gives me a general idea of how I'm doing on all my habits and goals.

So for instance, I use YNAB for our family budgeting, and I have it setup so that if I go a whole week without performing reconciliations, I get dinged -1. Otherwise this sits at 1.0. Then I have a score for journaling - my goal is to journal 4-5 times per week, so each time I journal it resets the score to 1, and then slowly ticks down to 0 over time. Then I have a number of Apple health scores that get imported automatically via REST API. This part compiles all the data on calories, relevant macronutrients (I mostly track protein and fiber currently), steps, workouts, etc. and builds a nice visualization. I consider a total integration score of 0.8 to be pretty good - keeping at that level is actually better than seeking for a perfect 1.0 all the time as my theory is that it will prevent burnout and allow for some forgiveness, because I can't be perfect.

It's been a fun project, and one that I generally try to avoid any AI use. Fun to just build and because the stakes are so low I just chip away at one feature at a time, carving out 15 minutes here or there.

I'd suggest you try out something completely offline. My next candidate is flintknapping, but there are lots of really interesting historical crafts that are in need of preservation and are extremely interesting to learn and gain expertise at.

Woodworking, oil painting, pottery, analog synthesizers, animal husbandry, spinning and yarnmaking, knitting and weaving, sewing, pattern making, metalwork, welding, endurance running, rock climbing, beekeeping, brewing and distilling, the list goes on and on. Contrary to popular opinion they are all extremely technical and demanding fields, and getting to reconnect with the physical world and the people in it, as well as history, is extremely rewarding.

Juggling! I used to juggle when i was a teenager, managed to juggle 5 balls and clubs. Then after decades of neglecting it, i picked it up again and i found the joy in this hobby again! I can highly recommend.

Echoing others, Chess engines certainly aren't a solved problem! In fact there are a lot of niches that are absolutely starving for effort. Ones I'm interested in are related to Chess variants and puzzles.

Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety of tools to train new neural nets for these variants, generate opening books, puzzles, etc. You can play some of them on PyChess (pychess.org). These are projects basically run by a couple people with huge backlogs of bugs and feature requests. An enthusiastic developer can easily get involved! Or just enjoy playing different variants and getting involved with the player community.

Fishing. But not just regular fishing, life listing. I catalogue and detail ever fish I catch; the conditions, the type of lure or bait, the rod etc. From there you can get into microfishing with tanago rods, surf fishing etc. It's can get quite deep and a good additional hobby for people who love to travel.

There's a lot of legacy / retro coding out there that despite the output being used by anywhere from hundreds, to thousands to even millions of end-users, it still involves small tight night communities per project, sometimes they overlap somewhat. I've mentioned it before, if you follow people reverse engineering Shockwave, you will note that they are all on the same communities to capture as much wisdom from others as possible. In niche reverse engineering communities, the smallest thing can be a life changer.

https://dejabru.org - The Homebrew Competition Remembering Historic and Long-Forgotten Beer Styles

I have been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find the owners of the old Digital Research "Concurrent DOS" operating system. There's a lot of interesting turns in the search and it's been fun to document.

I've written a blog post about it [1] though there have been a few updates since I've written that.

I honestly think it might be a fun thing for me to keep doing, whether or not I'm successful with my search. I think there is a lot of old software that is just sitting on old hard drives that is waiting to be preserved.

[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/03-March/The-Q...

Hnefatafl, a simple board game that was played by the vikings and others who had frequent contact with them. Or rather, what we play today is an approximation of what they played back then as we don't really know the exact rules they used. It's interesting in that unlike chess and others, it is asymmetrical, and there are a number of different variants each with their own challenges and different balances between attacker and defender.

The main community and learning resource is at http://aagenielsen.dk.

I do gundog training. When I started with our first dog I did not expect to enjoy it that much. It’s hard to express how much it takes mentally and physically, and the bond you build with your dog is crazy.

Best of all, you don’t actually have to hunt. You can stick to dummies.

In terms of contributing in a meaningful way, your local trainer will always be happy with helpers. If you need to setup multiple 200m retrieves for multiple dogs, it helps if you have someone out in the field doing the work. And lots of stuff to organise and help out with.

I got into improv theatre. There are groups in every city, at least here in the EU. It is both fun and developing creativity, alertness, etc.

Try playing Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder (or any number of other systems.) Pathfinder is super deep and complex.

There's also an entire community of people who play Table Top Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) solo and use the outcomes of their play reports to blog or write fiction.

Also, the tooling around these games is very interesting if you want to build an app: Crafting calculator? Generative hexcrawl maps? Random tables? Statistics tools for dice rolls?

I don’t know how niche they are, but a few I’ve done in the past

- 3D printed musical instruments. Print other designs or contribute your own

- lock picking. When you really get into it, you modify locks to make them more of a challenge and mail them to people

- Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat. I’m currently mainly interested in linearizing switch-mode amplifiers, but was doing fox hunting for a bit (radio direction finding), and periodically do POTA (transmitting from parks)

I design print on demand t-shirts and merch

https://www.amazon.com/s?refresh=1&rh=n%3A7141123011%2Cp_4%3...

I make holiday light shows with an open source program called XLights[0]. I'm sure you've seen the videos[1] of what people[2] can do. Usually the top comment is "man that is cool but I wouldn't want to be their neighbor!" followed by "my neighbors love my light shows".

Creating the sequences is time consuming, and lot of people end up buying them or sharing them, but those are rarely as good as the ones you make for yourself.

Some folks have dabbled with using AI to create the sequences. I think the biggest issues are lack of training data and it's a very visual art, so there needs to be a better feedback between the text representation and the visual manifestation.

So if you're into using AI to make physical world things better, that would be a good place to look!

[0] https://xlights.org

[1] https://youtu.be/enhhtPZMwCE?t=119

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5dfpe_-Lgg

I'm into innovation in HCI as a hobby, but it does get expensive so I would like to bring in some additional financial support for my unusual builds.

I didn't really plan to build HCI as a hobby, but I have a strong interest in hardware engineering and eventually I wanted to switch back to building things that anyone can physically see.

Years ago I built a hemisphere keyboard and now I've built an LED globe with a viewing portal. I started building visible things again because I had a vision and it's very satisfying to use the result. I spend more time using it now than I did originally building it, although it is definitely a work in progress. I want to build it again for a 2.0 version.

I've designed jewellery for my wife's last few birthdays. Nothing fancy, geometries, square kufic and such.

Very crude approach: I've been doing it in Blender, if you've 3D skills should be easy. I've got a friend who does the printing and casting, so there's more I could explore there later.

I also do dioramas, which grew out of 40K. Got bored with hench guys with guns and moved to 6mm, it's been great fun focusing on buildings.

Local urbex and exploration of 'haikyo' areas. Easy for me since I am in Tokyo and it's super walkable. I have taken to just getting on the train and getting off at random stations and walking in a random direction for a couple of kilometers. Every now and then I run into interesting abandoned buildings or neat shrines. Also makes for good exercise.

* playing shortlarps

* using short boardgames to measure cognitive performance on various metrics

* creating simple 3d boardgames with raylib kolibri_engine

* dancing and studying vajra dance and the vajra song from namkai norbu

* reading and studying about: mahamudra and dzogchen vs christian contemplative traditions and mystics, and transpersonal psychology

I recently started looking into hydroponics gardening. You can start very easily with a Kratky system and some herbs, and then take it a step at the time.

I’m quite at the beginning myself, but I like it so far! It’s a nice mix of science and craft.

I've been conlanging since I was about 8yo or so. This hobby also has me randomly learning natural human languages too. I've always just enjoyed it. I could make up reasons for enjoying it, but I am not certain that any of those would be true.

Bellringing, specifically change ringing. It’s a type of church bell ringing that is rather algorithmic in nature. Tends to attract mathy types. Religion not required or expected!

If you have English-style tower bells near you, it's worth checking out, even if only to listen.

Is buying hopefully broken electronic test equipment at the flea market, fixing it and then blogging about it a niche hobby?

Get your Part 107 federal drone license and volunteer for your local fire department or search and rescue. When the FD responds to structure fires they sometimes have to go up on the roof to cut an air hole. This allows oxygen into the building which helps prevent backdrafts. A FLIR equipped drone can help direct the hole cutter around hotspots on the roof. If your local fire department has a drone, it might not have the staff to be able to use it on calls.

Hey, I love this thread!! Thanks for asking the question, there's _so many_ interesting responses in here!

I’ve been learning Gregg Shorthand (Anniversary) since the start of the year. It’s a fun challenge even if it feels fantastically obsolete at this point with transcription models getting better and better every day. I’ve always liked paper-and-pen notes, so the idea of basically learning analog Vim was appealing :)

There's a surprisingly high number of people in my extended social circle who picked up archery as a sport.

It's actually a complex discipline with a huge range of bows and projectiles to choose from, each having unique characteristics you have to train for.

Training using VR equipment is picking up steam, as typically you need a sizeable amount of real estate to practice when the weather is bad.

What you’re looking for is a research topic, or maybe a better way to put it is your hobby is research… if that makes sense?

So for ideas, sorry that’s going to be whatever floats your boat. You listed a bunch of different things.

But hobby is normally “playing softball” or “guitar”, but it could be “researching next gen PCs”… but that seems more like a PhD lab project.

Hang gliding. It's good if you are in an area with some hills and consistent winds. There are maybe a dozen well-established launch sites around the U.S. Sadly, I broke down my glider around 2001 -- and did a post-mortem on it to discover it had a minor dent in it.

Recommendation -- don't stall the glider at heights between 10 and 25 feet from the ground. Also, avoid barbed wire fences.

Six months deep now into analog computing. (I have a modular, hobbyist analog computer wrapping up—just writing the manual).

Going to have to do something on the other end of the spectrum after this. Maybe RISO printing…

We got into scuba diving about 3 years ago. Have something like 200 dives now logged across Southern California, Hawaii and the Caribbean. Planning on adding Indonesia to the list later this year. That wow factor you experience the first time you dive hasn't gone away after 200 dives and I don't think it'll go away after 2000. Probably the most life-affirming thing I've ever gotten into and can't recommend it enough.

One of my hobbies is organizing events. I, like to think, I am pretty good at it. Main point is to create good initial conditions, then people take care of the rest.

I do a lot of lindyhop Swing dancing as a hobby. It's not innovative work, but I find it rewarding.

Printmaking. In a tiny apartment I did linocuts and Gelli prints on my kitchen counter for a few months. https://lucidbeaming.com/art/prints

Not too niche: Traditional archery. Niche: Make wood climbing holds.

Learn how to calculate longitude and latitude by eyesight using the Ptolemaic system.

Then add a telescope or sextant.

This is lots of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Hydrophonic farming at home. You can play with sensors (acidity, humidity etc), LED lighting (frequencies, intensity, etc), vision processing (maybe throw in some AI buzzword here) to keep track of your plants and do some decision making.

Bonus: You get to eat the stuff you grow :)

If chess is a solved problem, think about skating to where the puck is going to be, an interest area a bit further away from relatively easier verifiability such as coding, math, and hard sciences.

Do you have any interest in digital humanities? Knowledge work where verification is still important but not as black-and-white as does the math check out, does the code run.

Do you have any interest in family history or genealogy?

https://vibegenealogy.ai/p/the-genealogical-research-assista...

After binging on youtube, I am working on learning to do leatherwork, small stuff at first like making your own wallet etc.

I'm a football/soccer coach (youth, U12 and U19).

Got started as a "temp" for my sons mini-team (back when he was 5). Temporary turns into UEFA certified youth trainer/coach real fast. It's no longer just about the kids (sorry guys), but a really awesome hobby with lots of personal development paths.

High altitude balloon launches using weather balloons to get photos of the curvature of the earth.

I make AI music https://suno.com/@igorstechoclub

Somebody already mentioned "Modular Synths". There's incredible resources for building your own synth modules for everything from circuit design to simple kits. Check out LMNC on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCTLeNxge54

Not a new hobby per se, but the combination of

- a good audio book

- a massage chair

- a mindless idle game that you don't need to think of while listening to a good book and getting a massage

Priceless.

I'm learning to play the accordion

If you like music and technology - there's a massive world of possibilities out there (e.g., software based music production, tone.js, music programming with Strudel).

If you have more money - 1) DJing/mixing on vinyl + record digging, 2) Modular synthesis (your wallet will hate you your soul will love you)

Boat building is in a really interesting time with new materials allow foiling, along with new battery technology giving new power sources.

I decided to run for congressional representative.

I saw a few videos of making glasses (cups) out of nice liquor bottles. Seems like a nice cheapish hobby.

Since you mentioned biohacking but are wary of "wetware" risks, consider Personal Bioinformatics via 30x Whole Genome Sequencing. Now that sequencing costs have dropped significantly, you can use AI to take a deep dive into the latest research surrounding your own genomic data.

While severall open medical databases and open-source tools exist, they are often fragmented or built for academia. There is significant room to contribute by hacking together better toolsets, localized databases, or AI-driven interfaces to make this data truly accessible.

Someone needs to solve barbecue. The entire industry is based on feel and experience. Why can't a beginner replicate Franklin's brisket by following a recipe online?

It's probably because the main measuring instrument (a probe thermometer) doesn't provide any feedback about fat rendering, moisture, etc. Plus, every brisket cut has different fat ratios and thickness, which means a recipe can't guarantee identical inputs like bread baking. I'd love for someone to throw some over the top engineering & experimentation at this.

I view hobbies as something that I derive value or pleasure from. I do not approach them from the perspective of “meaningfully contributing”. IMO, that sounds more like compensation for career dissatisfaction. I’m not being critical. I just recommend choosing hobbies that you derive value and meaning from, regardless of what the world may think of it. For example, a friend of mine, with high pressure tech management job, quilts in the evening. He says it helps him relax. Doesn’t matter if anyone likes what he does or wants to buy it. As for myself, now that I’m retired I delve into a number of areas, just for me, and absolutely have no interest in sharing them or being recognized for what I do. Good luck on your quest.

Design whistle sequences to get dolphins to respond in ways that will help you figure out their meaning. A few multi-million $ projects could use that, such as Google, Baidu, and SDRP.

You might look into applying RL in the domain of low cost robotics and drones. That would draw on some of your past experience but applied to a domain (robotics) which I perceive is seeing renewed interest.

Gamey Boy / Modretro Chromatic / LSDJ / Dirtywave M8 / anything F# / MiniDisc community

I wouldn't say that chess is a solved problem. Just a hard problem to make a better chess engine than current Stockfish.

> that isn't absolutely crowded

I'm sure there are field that should be absolutely crowded but where you can do something meaningful.

If I had free time, I would write an app to learn foreign languages I'm interested in. I'm pretty sure that there are good apps, but I tried a few ones, and none really fit my needs.

There are also software that I use a lot, like transcribe! which works well, but that I could see how to improve.

So as others mentioned, do something that you would be interested in.

Nowadays, apart from stockpicking as a value investor, I use LLMs to develop AIs that don’t use backpropagation and that support continuous learning.

Holograms! It's fascinating how they are made and how they can serve as a metaphor for how the universe might work.

im an airsoft nerd. its a fun way to blow some steam with friends. not the tight milsim approach just the recreational way,

I've been pretty obsessed with FSRS in general (tldr: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/awesome-fsrs/wiki/...) It's a fantastic new-ish scheduler for spaced repetition - basically a machine learning model which adapts to you, and schedules flash (or anything, really, it's an algorithm) cards according to how well you are personally performing - surfacing data like retention, stability, recall, etc. It's a massive jump over previous "learning algorithms" like

For the past 60d I've been using Anki (a flash card program) and it's FSRS setting to learn my French deck (5000 most common French words) and I'm absolutely zooming. I can already follow a fair chunk of conversational French.

I've also been using the same system to learn Chess more deeply (endgames, tactics, openings) through Chessable and a few other websites that offer FSRS. It's levelled up my chess game a lot

Basically - the thing that hooked me was the data. Being able to see how many cards I've reviewed, how many cards are at 90/80% retention, the stability of every piece of that knowledge, the decay rate, etc... It's really cool.

Synbio but it’s expensive as hell

I do some synthetic biology as a hobby - genetically engineered a baker’s yeast to produce grape aroma and then baked bread with it, and gave it to like 100 people at an event I was at.

Also do a few others - learned Esperanto (exclusively through listening and speaking with people), beekeeping, woodworking, etc.

I used to play Pokémon cards competitively. It was fun going to local tournaments and flying with friends for Regional tournaments. I stopped to focus on night school, and I want to pick it back up with the card legality change happening Friday.

Pokémon Champions just came out, so I might give up cards for the video game. We'll see.

It has been learning ,learning &exploring new platforms lately .Well also interesting in Substacking .Do give your precious reviews.https://fortauderdaleseo.substack.com/

You mention chess, Chessboxing is an interesting niche hobby where you play both chess and boxing.

I play chess but not chessboxing but hey, you asked for some interesting niche hobbies!

It seems that what you do is mostly related to computers within the niche hobbies but what if you can do something else too?

> Right now I'm making a chess engine, but that's already a solved problem

Not everything should be done for the end-result, sometimes its the process which matters, there was a great hackernews post about it (https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/)

If you want something niche, perhaps make some portal-2 mods or make more efficient versions of using GlaDOS TTS within browser etc. (this is just something that I want to be honest, but I feel like it can be a niche hobby in its regards seeing your interests)

Let me know if you want more ideas and have fun and have a nice day man!

I am trying to build microphone capsules in my garage. Trying to go below 14dB (Primo EM272 level), under 1". It is difficult but rewarding. I do not expect any financial benefits from it, even if I make it under 10mm, because it is very time-consuming. Big players already have massive factories doing 10,000x of what I am doing.

This is the most niche tech-related hobby I have currently.

Lockpicking.

Postcrossing

Baking bread, albeit with a (Panasonic) bread making machine. Might not be niche, however, traditions of giving bread to guests runs deep and people are always delighted if you give them a loaf of extremely fresh bread.

There are different directions that bread making can go. During the pandemic there was a rash of people making rock hard sourdough, and sourdough is still the magic word for 'higher status' bread, even though almost every commercially available sourdough loaf is faked with enzymes added to a regular 'Chorleywood' loaf.

I gave sourdough a go but I prefer my bread making machines creations that are definitely not sourdough. I like to fortify my bread in two different ways, either with fruits and nuts to make a 'fruit loaf' of sorts, or with seeds and wholemeal flour to have bread that covers many a niche nutrient.

Commercial bread in the UK comes with government issued fortifications of folates, B vitamins and whatnot. This might be fine for pregnant mums that can't cook, but I am not one of them! So the challenge is to do a better job of the fortifications, mostly with seeds and choice of flour.

Commercial bread is also not very real, with lots of additives that I don't seem to need in my own creations. Emulsifiers, preservatives and everything else are needed for commercial bread, if it is to have shelf life and appeal, but my intestines are not crying out for these sorts of additives and I seem to still be alive without them, with improved digestive tract functionality.

Although we have more interesting things to eat than bread, our history in the West is the history of bread, we would not be here without it. Once you start baking your own, albeit with a machine, history becomes so much more interesting.

The other optimisation I try is cost. It is easy to produce a decent loaf with very expensive ingredients, however, on a budget it gets to have a different challenge to it.

I introduced my uncle to the hobby and he is a meticulous record keeper, so I wrote a simple app for him to record his bakes and ratings. This enables him to make fine adjustments to quantities so as to improve on his creations.

I did look for an app before I wrote my own, and the app was called 'Microsoft Excel'. I am sure that could be customised with recipes and whatnot, but I wanted to reinvent the wheel, hence my own app, just for myself and my uncle.

With some hobbies that is all you do and an obsession. Bread making is not like that, you can have plenty of more strings to your bow. As mentioned, people are always impressed if you give them a loaf, or if they learn that your sandwiches are made with your own bread. You can insist that it took three minutes with the machine, to downplay everything, however people stay impressed.

Not niche, but photography has a way of opening doors because you push yourself to get to places you might not otherwise.

Maybe learn a new language that isn't European or Japanese.

If "niche" matters to you, anything currently receiving any type of investing (ML etc) is probably not gonna work.

Invasive species removal, bird identification, trail running, mountain biking, audiobook listening while walking. All are best done out of doors. :P Most are teh opposite of the posture and brain patterns that intensive computer usage encourages.

I had a route around San Francisco that I would visit, and all the places on the route were where there were good blackberry bushes. I’d take a bucket. Around Golden Gate Park and the Inner Sunset mostly, heading down into the Forest Hills area as well. I did that for a few years. Would pick up some plums along the way as well.

Now on the other side of the Bay I have a couple spots, not as dense a network. About an hour away there are masses.

I've been making a seabed simulation of the seabed for interacting with polymetallic nodules. The idea is these nodules contain a lot of cobalt, but due to their location on the seafloor they're had to access, making mining difficult.

It took me a while but I finally got my hands on some polymetallic nodules (basically the rocks you find on the seabed that contain cobalt) which I'm scanning and will hopefully have uploaded soon. Tragically the nodules were damaged through shipping but it's all I have, especially since the first shipment was stolen off my porch lol. It's build with Project Chrono using C++ https://github.com/thansen0/seabed-sim-chrono

very cool post

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Try pet biohacking. You can experiment with the food they consume, their gut microbiome, you can implant robotics into them, so many fun things.

Btw: If you intend to blog about it make sure your alias resides in a jurisdiction without conversative laws.