Ask HN: Impossible Ideas? Hello HN, Is there any idea that you have that is great, but feel that it is impossible at the present.Or may be an idea that you think that the incumbent or competition is super strong. I am just looking an idea to hack on weekends after being bored of creating similar apps through out my IT career. |
A real time VR engine. The industry has spent decades building a graphics pipelines for full fidelity and variable frame rate through buffering.
We could go back to something like early consoles that ran at full framerate by displaying a max amount of sprites per frame.
Seems worth experimenting with.
[0]: https://asindu.drileba.capital/2020/02/fighting-of-disease-p...
Wondering if there'd be enough demand for this..
Ruby on Rails and similar for example.
Microsoft Access and similar is a bit older but does that too I guess.
There are a lot of complex physical jobs people perform that could be automated with enough enginerding and dedication.
Also, yard trimming/cleaning robots/drones more than just lawnmowers. Bonus points for cleaning-up after olive/plum trees and sculpting topiaries.
A sink/dishwasher robot combination that can clear plates, separate food waste and optionally compost, load a dishwasher, and "hand"-wash what cannot be dishwashed. Bonus points for clearing the table and putting away clean dishes automatically.
A good, automatic gutter cleaner robot and/or an inexpensive, modular, micromesh stainless steel gutter guard that doesn't suck.
A quality full-tower/super-tower case (similar to what CaseLabs produced) that actually holds an EATX or Supermicro server board comfortably, can support water cooling with an optional distro plate, can hold 11 3.5" drives, 4 2.5" drives, 2 5.25" bays, 6 200mm fans, 2 double-wide relocated GPUs, and options for RGB, temp monitoring, and fan controls that work under Linux, FreeBSD, hackintosh, and Windows. Options for color and tempered glass windows.
Harbor Freight-alike that has better quality, is online-only, no coupons/gimmicks, and ships must faster. Between HF and a McMasters. (HF ecomm, customer service, and shipping are a clusterf.)
Smart home integration amongst different brands and complementary products, preferably with open standards or a "Dolby NR"-meets-AWS for smart home APIs. For example, I bought an Awair IAQM only to discover they were dropping all of their integrations, including with their parent company's thermostat, Emerson Sensi. My Filtrete Smart air filters should work with Nest and Emerson. An IAQM should be able to turn on the central air fan if the indoor particle levels are high or if a smart smoke detector detects experiences a false alarm.
Also, turnkey smart home integration modules for Arduino, RPi, ESP32, and general electronics.
Also, speaking of social networks - giving people the ability to automatically sync their charity contributions to their public social profiles, as in "I'm donating 7% of my income to these causes, and 3% to those" (using some properly designed API from tax authorities) and making it popular enough so that most part of the population is socially nudged to some accepted level of regular charity donations. In my libertarian fantasy, it would gradually replace taxes, but yeah, I'm aware of how idealistic and far-fetched that sounds.
Today Email is effectively federalized, but in practice, unless you have some major spam technology, your inbox will be filled with spam as soon as your email becomes public. Same thing is going to happen with decentralized social netowrks.
Why we are not abstracting CRUD away like everything else? Is it because engineers are happy creating CRUD apps?
It's baffling to me that Amazon doesn't have something like this. Every vendor of clothing seems to upload a size chart or puts it in the text description, and you wind up with stuff like "6x plus size dress" having a waist size of 32 inches.
The jeans, not so much (they still need to work on it), but for shirts they were spot on. I will never buy 'off the rack' shirts anymore.
Everyone has different fitting issues. My main one is waist length/width and shoulder width. I'm 6'2" and fit so the waist of most shirts barely go below the top of my jeans and getting the shoulders to fit often means having a parachute around my waist. It looks dumb and clothing fit is extremely important to overall appearance. There's a lot of disruption to be had in this space.
Edit: to be slightly more clear, I'm thinking of technology to replacing the incumbent infrastructure/processes/consumer experience, as opposed to just creating a new specialty brand.
Even bigger: Discovering missing parts of the tree.
- A decentralized group of "meatspace" businesses provide notarization. To get an "account" to use the network and its websites, it is mandatory that a person provide government ID. Users can allow a notary to make arbitrary types of information about themselves public (eg: prove they once had cancer,prove they travelled to Cuba, prove they have a high-school diploma, etc). "Private" info is still available to law-enforcement. This makes users more accountable, both for breaking laws, and for (to use the phrase loosely) stolen valour. It might be useful, in addition, if users needed to provide some deposit as collateral in case they abuse notarization.
- The web piece of the network uses a protocol with no page- or site-provided style sheets. A developer can create a style-sheet, but the user chooses styles per-browser (eg: the same style-sheet for all websites they view). This makes for a dull, but usable, web-browsing experience. No font-sizes changing, articles laid out the same everywhere, widgets work the same everywhere.
- The web piece of the network uses a protocol with no page- or site-provided dynamic features (ie: no scripting). Any dynamic features (eg: a login box, or an upload status bar, etc etc etc) need to be standards. The group responsible for this new web protocol can always treat the old web as a playground from which to steal ideas. This makes shady advertising, and many types of hacking, impossible.
There's nothing impossible from the technical side, but figuring out what is actually useful and time-saving in terms of UX and what would just end up as useless eye candy would require enormous amount of work, I'm afraid.
Construction project at home? Punchlist, budget, progress tracking, vendor relationship, contract management, dependencies and blocking.
Comparison shopping? Gift lists, family research, nominations, voting, chipping in for purchases.
Cooking at home? Family nominates a recipe for dinner, cross reference pantry, add needed items to shared grocery list.
Transportation? Whos taking what kids to what events, in the event a plan changes, a push notification goes out to all parties (friends, drivers not in the family.)
Budeting? Projected cashflows. Asset allocation in multiple accounts is incredibly complex, with different family members having different roles. Being able to budget and save, while still giving extended family privacy. Signing a kid up for soccer, or starting a new construction project automatically updates the budget.
Calendars exist, task management like asana exists, financial management like mint and personalcapital exists. But tools are either too generalized or too specific to interact with other ultra specific domains. An app knowing when someone leaves work, knowing they are the best person to pass a grocery store and pick up kids en route from soccer. We have all sorts of complex interactions in life that require planning, and they are often extremely repetitive sequences. The apps that do exist in these specific fiends often dont facilitate collaboration with other families.
tldr: instead of generic task management, management with detailed workflows, workflow interactions, automation, consensus building.
Lately, I've had so much time in my life that I've been literally coding out of boredom.
I am a great engineer with 15+ years of experience doing hundreds of different things.
I do not need money. I need to feel, once again, that I have made the impossible, possible.
If you wish to get in touch send me an email to hn @ <username>.com. I leave it here from time to time and a few folks have decided to write back. One day, hopefully, we could be a community of sorts.
The answer might involve some sort of web-of-trust solution, and storing proofs on a blockchain, but the hard problems are how to avoid Sybil Attacks and not exposing people's social graphs.
"Urbit OS is a completely new, carefully architected software stack: a VM, programming language, and kernel designed to run software for an individual."
Even solving an impossible problem shouldn't require all of that.
Impossible to do with my current resources. Seems like something that will probably happen eventually.
Some scammer made ~80 million bucks selling fake bomb detectors https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22380368 - I wonder if someone actually made the real deal if it would even be as profitable.
Sadly we see the same devices being used to "detect" covid-19. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/coronav...
I love watching the stories of scientific discovery on the reboot of the Cosmos series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Spacetime_Odyssey) and I can't help but feel we lack a true understanding of gravity. I'm waiting for that one brilliant thinker to have a eureka moment with a simple experiment that makes it all very clear.
We have a very solid understanding of gravity [1]. It's just that it's not as accessible as you and I would like it to be [2]. Unfortunately, you cannot argue aesthetics with the laws of nature.
[1] Source: When majoring in physics, one of my exams was on general relativity theory.
[2] As in: Even solving simple symmetrical problems requires dealing with some quite frustrating differential equations.
These are mostly actually impossible right now, but being able to think about things that you want that should be possible and seem completely out of reach is a great technique for finding motivation.
The world is much, much, much bigger and more full than our little brains with our little problems can usually understand. So, some of mine:
1. Live, remote, group music performance. Yeah, latency, blah blah blah. This problem can be solved if you have...
2. Music generation as the standard way music is distributed. Some people love hearing the exact same recorded song played the exact same way over and over again. It bores me. And "live" performances are often musically and sonically inferior. Every musician I know is creative, every note uniquely created and delivered. We should convey that uniqueness in the distribution of the music. Yeah, there are tons of "music that sounds like" projects. Have it be part of the musician's workflow. Get them to trust it.
3. Live noise cancellation for spaces. People love noise cancellation for in ear or over ear headphones, where you have tight control over the sound path and the acoustics. Child's play. Solve it for spaces where you may have undesirable sounds coming from any direction, with unusual acoustics and strange surfaces. A $1000 device that does this makes you $B, because it increases the property value of many spaces by 2 orders of magnitude.
4. Accurate performance reproduction. JFC the state of musical reproduction is so completely absolutely shitty. The chills one experiences being proximate to a virtuoso instrumentalist...even the best tube amp speaker set up does not fool a close listener for more than a few seconds. Is there a Turing-test like name for this? There should be.
5. Instrument/track extraction. We're getting better at this, it's the impossible problem we're closest to solving. But there's still a lot to do.
6. Instrument acquisition. Everyone should be able to acquire skills in an instrument. With all respect to the 10,000 hours theory, we are in the dark ages when it comes to acquisition and skill accumulation. Teaching is terrible and pretty much everybody practices terribly. People learn from watching and doing and participating- we are visual copy paste monkeys. With some combination of robots and visual production and feedback systems and nutrition it should be possible to develop benchmarks for dramatically improved acquisition.
Cheers, great question.
You look at them once a day, select the ones you want to publish or just click select all, and it publishes them, appropriately spaced out over a 24 hour period.
And use the RTs you get and use them as feedback.
I've got ~250 customer commitments with letters of intent so far but need help with some of the ingestion pipeline work. If you have GIS experience in any capacity (as an analyst, developer, enthusiast, etc.) I'd love to chat.
Do the cameras geo-tag the images into a GEOTIFF or similar at the edge?
What sort of spatial resolution do you get on the resulting maps?
Any chance of multi-spectral imagery in the future? would be amazing for doing remote-sensing projects
Sounds like a awesome project.
The best i've found is recoll: https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/
But search quality isn't good.
Need to clarify re ebook format though - if it's DRMed then any third-party tool is going to be out of luck.
Or a much simpler one - an Agent that can read rules for an arbitrary boardgame (PDF) And generate a playable version for you.
Radial menus, like Maya. Look at button, menu appears, look in direction to open next menu, new radial menu appears.
So I guess just hassle-free native apps with a focus on client/server architecture like websites, running gimp/paint doesn't seem like a good fit for something like this :')
You might want to know that (4) has been IMO solved (long time audio enthusiast here, spent more than 15 years on solving that exact problem, developed my own startup that was focused on making DACs with the best possible analog sections - I gave up to a better idea done by someone else, which I'm going to mention next.
Rob Watts, a DAC designer from the UK has solved the problem with his FPGA based DACs and pulse array analog sections. Instruments' transients and how they impact a listener (human hearing is far, far more complicated than vision) seems to be the key for the brain to mark a given sound a "natural one" and properly place it into 3D space. Watts works exclusively for Chord Electronics nowadays, but he'd started his own kind of DACs in the 80s. The guy is a genius, I have nothing more to say. My long time quest for properly sounding audio source has been finished. Currently he's working on his Davina project which is going to bring the same technology for audio reproduction (and rebuilding) to studios, leveling up his game even more. Stay tuned, because it's going to take some time. The only other company that does something similar is DCS, but they're extremely expensive and they're rather on the fun side of listening than accuracy.
Myself, I use Chord Electronics Hugo 2 DAC (that's the cheapest one having all important Watts' technology, ca. $2500; there's also Mojo - very cheap, but it's mostly for the on-the-go listening) paired with either Audioquest NightOwl headphones or my valve custom made stereo. It's a bliss.
PS: Regarding (3) there's no way noise cancellation technologies can produce superb audio. Not possible (unfortunately) at this point of technological advancement of how speakers are being build (and close to nothing has changed during the last 60 years in that area), so they should rather be saved for dealing with unpleasantness of very loud environments, not necessarily suited for music listening.
I was thinking about if this being weaponized to suppress speech. If an array could be put on top of a protest to silence it. It's sort of the equivalent of shouting over someone. Would the supreme court find the government pumping out anti-noise a violation of rights?
I intended to try it out but never did - might give it a look again soon.
What sort of issues are you having with the ingestion pipeline? I have some amount of GIS/mapping experience and happy to weigh in if I can.
I don't understand why someone can't put in a few basic measurements - waist, hip, bust, inseam - and filter clothing based on those, today. It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be a damned sight better than putting "plus size dress" and getting keyword-stuffed listings made for a size 0.
Any idea of how popular WASM is? I don't feel like I've ever interacted with any WASM app in the wild which seems pretty sad given the possibilities and how bloated websites in general are.