
Ask HN: Which of your original ideas was already implemented by someone else? - lecarore
More than once I thought i head an awesome original idea for a product, and in the end it existence already. I prototyped something like airconsole, and a password manager that generates password by hashing the site domain predictably.. what were your ideas that happened to already exist?
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psyc
I did a lot of work on things like stitching aerial photos and generating 3D
models of cities in the early 2000s. Then Keyhole/Google Earth came along
around 2004 and mooted all of it. Within a few years, Google and Microsoft had
achieved all of my vision. All the 3D earth products have now far surpassed my
wildest imaginings.

Then I did a lot of thinking and prototyping around grammar-based procedural
generation. I'd noticed that all the research on this stopped at simplistic
academic models. But I'd realized that _all_ industrial design is intensely
grammatical, so why couldn't I easily whip up a 3D model of a toilet or the
Pixar lamp with just a sentence? Well, a few years ago a professional
architect turned programmer noticed this too, and turned that dull academic
research into a sophisticated and expensive Unity asset:
[http://www.archimatix.com/gallery](http://www.archimatix.com/gallery)

I worked on a GPU accelerated OS shell in 2003, before Vista did it. Mine was
actually 3D though, which never caught on.

I'm working on a thing right now that I believe will be ubiquitous in games
and especially VR. I've scoured the web and haven't found a single word
written about it. It's sufficiently ahead of its time that although I have a
very clear understanding of it, and have no trouble saying a lot of words
about it, it's very hard to communicate the value to others. And no I'm not
telling what it is, unless you're an angel investor :D

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AlexITC
Once I had the idea to hide information inside images using the least
significant bit, all made sense in my head, got home a searched for something
similar and discovered it was a well-known steganography technique.

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alashley
I had an idea to use the gmail API to create reminders based on a user's
inbox. Google implemented it before I attempted it.

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IpV8
I came up with the idea of combining roof shingles with solar panels back in
2012. Now here we are in 2018 and Tesla is making it happen.

