HACKER Q&A
📣 aliqot

What are you doing this weekend?


Hoping to find out about some of your new hobbies and projects. Thanks in advance.


  👤 loves_mangoes Accepted Answer ✓
I did a volumetric dilution of desoxyn crystals, in an attempt to find some alternative tool to manage my ADHD, as a complement to the very limited solutions available in my country.

The scary thing about desoxyn is that it's thoroughly unregulated, so you have to watch for impurities or contamination. Especially scary would be fentanyl hotspots, which can happen if the chemical was improperly handled during packaging.

It's a very scary thing to be attempting, and I've actually had the experiment sitting for several months in my kitchen without touching it, due to how slightly alarming the whole prospect is, but my natural curiosity and engineering instinct tends to win in the end, when I feel sufficiently prepared.

So far I've slowly ramped up to a 40mg dose of oral metamphetamine and I'm still not consciously feeling anything that couldn't be attributed to placebo, so I'm starting to consider scraping the current batch, sending it to a lab for an expensive analysis, and potentially trying again a few months from now, if I have the energy for it.

It's a pretty slow-going project since I have to prepare for 12h of potential effects of each dose, and ramp up slowly due to uncertain purity, but the potential payoff of not having horrible executive dysfunction is pretty interesting.


👤 drakonka
Today I cycled to a nice coffee shop nearby and wrote a couple of chapters of my book there. I also took my cat for a walk earlier. Aside from what, watching some shows, reading, more writing, and laundry. I'm trying to convince myself to go to a book club meetup tomorrow, but I'm kind of on the fence right now.

👤 kmarc
I am attending a wedding. Why would that be interesting?

Because I flew across the planet to attend my friend's wedding, who I met on an open source conference, the OpenStack summit, many years ago.

At the early ages of my career I thought of any kind of tech gathering as a necessary forum to show off, be competitive, demonstrate how much one (individual) excel, and becomes superior to others. I definitely wasn't at the right spot with this toxic mindset.

I became a regular attendee and speaker and trainer on the summits, and made good connections who eventually became close friends. The community, and especially these people taught me how to be a better person, and showed me that one can maintain professional integrity while still having a more open, more friendly, more helpful mindset.

Thanks for this, community! And best wishes, Jay!


👤 qprofyeh
I'm spending time with friends and family. To be honest, I had a lot of time for hobbies during 2020 and 2021. The difficulty is increasing for finding a project that I'm prepared to reserve many weekends for. But seeing friends and family, even if life progress feels like 0, brings an unmeasurable kind of satisfaction I can't get enough of. Currently.

Also, workout & cleaning. Sorry for being off-topic.


👤 coolandsmartrr
Speaking at PyCon Portugal.

If only airline prices were more affordable, I'd be speaking in-person rather than online.

P.S. I like this Ask HN already. Will this get posted every week?


👤 anotherevan
Enjoying the last few days of our week in Surfers Paradise. This is our family holiday to celebrate my son finishing Year 12. He wanted to come up here and visit all the theme parks.

The twist in the tale is that he finished Year 12 in 2020, a year in which we spent a fair portion of our life in lock-down due to COVID. We're finally catching up on the backlog of things we had planned!


👤 octokatt
Eating Cocoa Puffs, watching M.O.D.O.K. because Saturday morning cartoons are awesome.

Sometimes, I get in my head that I haven't gotten further in life. Building a career, getting a doctorate, buying a house, finding a surrogate to have kids... So I started taking Saturday mornings to celebrate the little things that make me happy.


👤 peer2pay
It’s been raining quite a bit here in southern Germany so my better half and I are going out to find some mushrooms tomorrow. The last few years have not been great for foraging since it has been quite dry but this year I have some hopes. Wish us luck!

👤 jugg1es
I've been playing around a lot with Stable Diffusion lately.

👤 bbischof
I’m really into this gps game: https://wandrer.earth (I’m not the creator, just a fan)

It encourages you to walk/run/bike all the roads in a town/city/county and it tracks the percentage.

It’s a fun and creative way to go see parts of your area you wouldn’t otherwise. I’ve used it to walk 97% of the miles in Berkeley and seen so many funky little areas. I also really enjoy how much it has increased my walking over the last few years.


👤 curiousgal
Upgraded my laptop to a 1Tb SSD so I'll be reinstalling Arch and configuring everything up.

I also been binging People Do Nothing on Netflix. Really good.


👤 mindcrime
Continuing to work on Bosworth, my embodied AI research project. More specifically, I'm working on taking the code I wrote earlier - which reads data from the 9-DOF accelerometer board and the GPS board and sends it to both a storage server using MQTT and to the "percept queue" using ActiveMQ - and "operationalizing" it. So basically, writing scripts to build, package, and deploy this stuff, writing SystemD unit files, and all of the other miscellaneous trappings needed to make it easy to deploy and manage.

Once I tie up the loose ends on getting the GPS and orientation data, I'll start on one of the other data types I plan to work with. Not sure which one will come next, but some of the things queued up to do include:

- integrating one or more webcams for visual processing

- integrating one or more microphones for auditory processing

- integrating a thermocouple interface board to allow it to sense the ambient temperature. Will probably actually do two of these and use one thermocouple to measure the temperature inside the "body" of the system.

- considering also adding a light sensor to sense ambient light levels, a proximity sensor, a barometric pressure sensor, and possibly some other miscellaneous stuff. But the big ones I wanted to start with were the position/orientation stuff, and vision and audio.

I also need to replace the amplifier I use to drive the speakers used for audio output. In the current configuration I get some unwanted hum when then box is running on wall current, and the amp isn't really powerful enough anyway.

Outside of all that, I am trying to get back to cycling 40 miles a week, and right now I'm sitting at 25 miles of MTB'ing for the week, so I need to go out for a road ride tonight, or tomorrow and try to pick up the final 15 miles I need.

And, of course, I'll watch the Dolphins / Bills game tomorrow. #PHINSUP


👤 captn3m0
Trying to replicate this python security research: https://github.com/vinayak-mehta/pdftopng/issues/12 that scans for vulnerabilities inside shared libraries bundled in python packages.

👤 vyrotek
Our neighborhood is hosting a no-rules Pinewood Derby for all kids and adults tonight. I made 3 cars with my kids.

We learned a lot of Pinewood Derby science from this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RjJtO51ykY


👤 aurbano
I started installing a reversing camera in my car, but quickly realized I'll have to drill into the car to get the cables through so I've postponed it to another day when I'll start a lot earlier (almost 4:30pm and it'll be dark in a couple hours)

👤 athorax
Eloping with the love of my life :)

👤 nancymiller
This weekend we are planning to rent a house in the country with friends, fry kebabs, ride bicycles around the area and play video games in the evening! By the way, video games are a pleasurable pastime. They also train your brain for the challenges you face in real life. Playing video games helps you become more creative, quick-thinking, and emotionally intelligent: https://ivypanda.com/blog/how-playing-video-games-makes-you-...

👤 Q6T46nT668w6i3m
I need to prepare for a meeting on Tuesday about quantizing a transformer-based object detector to improve inference speed. I hope to find some time to work on another transformer-based method (using transformers for root-finding).

👤 rowanajmarshall
Yesterday I spent the day volunteering at a gathering of homeless services, handing out food to anyone who needed it.

Today, I went to a British Museum exhibit with my partner.

Tomorrow, I'm going on a 12 mile hike in Surrey with some friends.


👤 Ken_At_EM
Spending time with my kids and wife.

Polishing my new Electron app which is a data viewer for the time-series data that my companies products produce.

Spinning up another side project with Tauri/Rust as a background data collector service.


👤 asicsp
I read about 80+ SFF novels a year. Today I read a graphical novel "Pilu of the Woods" (emotional and heartwarming like "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Inside Out", reviewed on my blog: https://learnbyexample.github.io/escapist-reviews/pilu-of-th...).

Tomorrow, I'm planning to visit a lake on the other end of the city again (should be flush with all the recent rain) and do some shopping on the way back.


👤 djohnston
Grinding leetcode to prep for my first SWE interviews in 4 years :( . Blekhh

👤 doe88
Learning Haskell, just reading through runST and rank-2 polymorphism, my brain exploded, so I just came reading HN and procrastinate a couple of minutes (or more...) :).

👤 ljnelson
Playing jump blues at the North Bend Blues Walk (https://www.northbendblueswalk.com/).

👤 eyeball
sleep, watch tv, and eat junk food hopefully rest enough to recover a sliver from the burnout so I can give it all to the job another week and survive long enough to repeat the cycle

#livingthedream


👤 efxhoy
Finishing up my latest speaker cabinet for my sound system.

It's a double 18" reflex cabinet I designed myself. I'm using 18mm birch plywood. I'm doing some finishing bits this weekend:

* Soldering the connectors, the drivers will be wired in series and are 8 ohm so the box will be 16 ohm. My soldering skills are trash so it looks terrible.

* Final sanding

* Oiling

Next weekend will be mounting drivers and handles and hopefully testing :)


👤 BOOSTERHIDROGEN
Moving backup and encryption with gocryptfs

👤 mrblampo
Zoo and grocery shopping with my kids

👤 emehex
I'm dog-fooding my new Python data manipulation library, redframes: https://github.com/maxhumber/redframes

To help me prep for my Fantasy Hockey Draft next week!


👤 r2_pilot
Drove 3 hours to help a sweet lady with some yard work and replacing a garbage disposal unit.

👤 qnk
Enabled email bounces for non-existing accounts on newsletterss.com. Server costs are increasing each month at rate higher than new users.

Around noon, once it gets a bit warmer, I'll go with the family on a hike to see the fall foliage.


👤 elpocko
I will drink until I pass out.

👤 sjrd
I have been singing all day today in a choir (Rachmaninoff's All Night Vigil). Tomorrow I attend a meeting and lunch for the committee of another choir, and I conduct a third choir in the evening.

👤 dver
Family weekend for my youngest son's college baseball team.

A scrimmage each day. A big BBQ dinner tonight. Some alumni activities as well.

My Dad joined my wife and I, so we get some time with him as well.


👤 switchstance
I’m at a horse show in Lexington Kentucky where my daughter is competing.

It’s my first time here, and with the cooler weather it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite show venues.


👤 cee_el123
good Ask HN - mostly binge watch TV show(s), some minor errands, some time with parents, lot of the usual reddit/HN

👤 orsenthil
Taking up some certification exams. Cleaning up my software projects, setting up one of my project for hacktoberfest.

👤 petarb
Hanging out with the kids, going to the park, running errands.

👤 brntsllvn
Watching baseball and my kids. Probably at the same time.

👤 MisterSandman
Going to stare at the 728262 internship rejection letters I've received in the past few weeks, and hopefully find the energy and motivation to apply to more companies (who will then proceed to reject me further).

Oh, and I might play same Avalon/Secret Hitler with some classmates.