
Ask HN: Impossible Ideas? - ilolu
Hello HN,<p>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.<p>I am just looking an idea to hack on weekends after being bored of creating similar apps through out my IT career.
======
thomasrognon
Yeah, why does clothing still come in S/M/L? Why can't I order _existing_
brands in styles 100% fitted to my unique body. Surely you can instantly
measure shoulder/chest/waist width, torso/leg height, etc with technology like
Xbox Kinect. And on-demand, custom clothing has to be solvable in 2020, right?
So it's just a momentum/supply chain problem, like Netflix vs old guard?

~~~
ardit33
yes, that already exists.... I used MTaylor, a while ago (download the app,
scan your body via the camera), and the shirts came in perfectly fitted to my
body.

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.

~~~
thomasrognon
I'm familiar, but MTailor is a standalone brand. I'm dreaming of a world where
I can see any piece/brand of clothing and not even think about the size or
fit. It's just taken as a given that I can see it on myself (AR?) and get one
that fits me perfectly. The clothing outlets, last stalwarts of strip malls,
would be a thing of the past. No such thing as needing to "try it on" 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.

------
epberry
I’ve long been interested in the “cocktail party problem” which involves
disambiguating audio in a conversation with multiple people. I think this tech
is foundational for better video calls and smart speaker devices for homes.
The best research I’ve seen on this is from Mitsubishi but as far as I know
this is well into the territory of an impossible problem today.

~~~
nappy
There's been a ton of interesting research and progress on this in the last
few years: [https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/04/looking-to-listen-audio-
vi...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/04/looking-to-listen-audio-visual-
speech.html)

------
disposekinetics
An RSS reader that can organize feeds in a tree view. So if HN and Bruce
Schiner's blog both link to the same article, that article would be the parent
node and they would be two items off of it. If there were responses and
followups the tree could grow larger.

Even bigger: Discovering missing parts of the tree.

------
gjsman-1000
Creating a desktop OS that feels free to break past UNIX standards and start
from a clean slate

~~~
rohan1024
Fuchsia?

~~~
max_
I believe Fuchsia is targeted towards ARM chips(mobile devices)?

------
benologist
Open source Pokemon, where new creatures can be contributed by anyone and
anyone can add stories and adventures or fork the whole thing and do whatever
they want.

~~~
majewsky
The main reason for the commercial success of Pokemon is the huge array of
readily available merchandise and anime/movie tie-ins. How would you go about
replicating that with a crowd-sourced competitor? How would I be able to
obtain a plushie for my favorite crowd-sourced character without paying the
high prices associated with custom commissions?

~~~
benologist
It'd be open source so you'd get plushies, figurines, videos etc after someone
else made them because permissive licensing let them use the art and ideas to
do whatever they want. There would be nothing preventing a plushie company or
a person or a DIY project making them affordable.

~~~
majewsky
Yeah, but economies of scale couldn't apply as much, increasing unit prices.

~~~
crobertsbmw
But competition could be much higher, pushing down unit prices...

~~~
benologist
It would be potentially much cheaper without licensing negotiations, royalties
and IP policing adding to the price too.

------
crobertsbmw
I want someone to build a better linkedin. A database where I can search
"people I know that speak French." Or "people I know that know something about
digital marketing". Or "people I know that know how to cook well." Everytime I
have gone to linkedin to try and find someone that has a particular skill, it
has failed me. This is probably challenging to do well because linkedin is
already trying to do this, and because of privacy issues.

------
uniqueid
I want a second, locked-down internet/web that coexists with the current
internet. The type of controls:

\- 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.

------
golergka
Code editor that fully embraces power of VR, and treats code not as text, but
as AST. Imagine every node of the AST on it's own plane, with every related
signature or declaration just one vim-style keystoke away, opening right next
to the previous one, instead of above it.

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.

------
kodablah
Decentralized, unique, human-usable identifiers, free and anonymous to
legitimate humans (limited to only a few per) but unobtainable by non-humans.
I can accept humans giving/using up some of theirs for non-human purposes. Not
really an idea, but seems impossible.

~~~
jayd16
$1 scratchers with a guid on them at every corner store might have some use.

------
basch
Not an impossible idea, but project management for life.

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.

------
moralestapia
You read my mind, ilolu.

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.

------
dane-pgp
A decentralised pseudonymous reputation system, so that your good-standing in
one online community (platform/silo) can be visible to people in another
online community.

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.

~~~
d_silin
Isn't it one of the goals of Urbit?

~~~
dane-pgp
I guess, but:

"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.

------
newman8r
For a few years I've thought it would be cool to experiment with neural
interfaces for bomb sniffing dogs/cadaver dogs, etc - so instead of training
the dog to find several specific compounds, the system could be trained for
multiple compounds. You wouldn't be training the dog, but the system instead.

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](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22380368)
\- I wonder if someone actually made the real deal if it would even be as
profitable.

~~~
DanBC
> Some scammer made ~80 million bucks selling fake bomb detectors

Sadly we see the same devices being used to "detect" covid-19.
[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-
east/coronav...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-
east/coronavirus-iran-bomb-detector-revolutionary-guard-hossein-
salami-a9466236.html)

------
mmcconnell1618
Flying cars. It's 2020. Where are the flying cars? I don't mean giant drones
either. I'm talking honest to goodness anti-gravity floating vehicles.

I love watching the stories of scientific discovery on the reboot of the
Cosmos series
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Spacetime_Odyssey](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.

~~~
majewsky
> I can't help but feel we lack a true understanding of gravity.

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.

------
jonahbenton
Great question. My answer would involve so many things in the music space.

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.

~~~
user_agent
Those are superb points!

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.

~~~
jonahbenton
Thank you very much, am very interested to learn more.

------
julianeon
A bot that uses ML to trawl through all your social media accounts, get a good
sense of what you would post, and then starts auto-generating posts for each
platform, for you to review.

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.

~~~
captn3m0
You also need to setup the other side and train another network to like and RT
tweets.

And use the RTs you get and use them as feedback.

------
csteubs
A web map that is updated in near-real time. I'm working on a launching a
startup (notasatellite.com) that uses a network of cameras on 80,000+
commercial flights to build the most accurate map. Had the idea flying home
one day and realized the image quality at 30,000ft is just about as good as a
satellite at 300 miles. There are thousands of planes flying around
interesting places every day, so 100x the revisit rate w/o needing to spend
millions building, launching and maintaining satellites. Original use case was
detecting port container volume over 5 minute periods on approach to PDX which
proved the feasibility.

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.

~~~
dbetteridge
Are you comfortable talking about the existing pipeline on HN?

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.

~~~
csteubs
Thanks! I can definitely elaborate on some of the strategy here. The cameras
geo-tag the images at the edge and verify against the flight path using time
stamps for accuracy. Resolution is a function of altitude (among other
things), but tests have consistently demonstrated <1m resolution at common
cruise (35,000ft) and <10cm below 4,000 AGL. Multi-spectral is planned, and
the final the prototype is equipped with an IR dome among the other sensors in
the array. The entire device is mounted internally on the window which
sidesteps the need for FAA clearance or tunnel testing.

~~~
dbetteridge
Awesome stuff, This sort of data is going to be key for future planning/remote
sensing work so great to see an alternative to satellite imagery popping up.

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.

------
petra
Great search engine for an eBook collection. Gives higher ranking to sections
i annotated. Must be a desktop app.

~~~
coolspot
Have you tried Calibre?

~~~
mrec
I think they're looking for something that searches content. Calbre search
only covers metadata.

Need to clarify _re_ ebook format though - if it's DRMed then any third-party
tool is going to be out of luck.

~~~
newman8r
Someone was working on a full text search plugin for calibre
[https://github.com/idealist1508/Recoll-Full-Text-Search-
For-...](https://github.com/idealist1508/Recoll-Full-Text-Search-For-Calibre/)

I intended to try it out but never did - might give it a look again soon.

------
mmcconnell1618
How about the YC request for startups list?
[https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

------
captn3m0
An agent that can read scientific papers and implement code for them.

Or a much simpler one - an Agent that can read rules for an arbitrary
boardgame (PDF) And generate a playable version for you.

------
blackeneth
A P2P file sharing application based on Publius technology. Allows anonymous
uploads, splits and encrypts files redundantly across servers. The hosts don't
know what they're holding. Privacy enhancing and censorship-resistant.

See:
[https://cs.nyu.edu/~waldman/publius/](https://cs.nyu.edu/~waldman/publius/)

------
lcuff
A user interface that combines eye tracking, voice, keyboard, and mouse input.
I'm not sure what might work, but as something to explore/test: I look at a
button and say "choose", and the button gets clicked. Or maybe I blink twice
while looking at the button to click it. Or I say 'switch to Chrome' and it
does so immediately, not after 10 seconds for a Siri round trip to Apple.

~~~
basch
Eye gestures. Look at button, look left, look back at button.

Radial menus, like Maya. Look at button, menu appears, look in direction to
open next menu, new radial menu appears.

------
mkaymalright
Why do we only serve user interfaces over the web via HTML/JS interpreter
inside the browser? If you can somehow provide some isolation (something
docker like) and not yet thinking about delta changes, why would we not able
to load e.g. a native QT application over the network (i.e. using DNS but
instead of serving HTML over the webserver, serve a native application)?

~~~
cercatrova
You can. Flutter does this by making the app run in a canvas element with
WASM.

~~~
mkaymalright
Look cool, but I was envisioning a more general approach I suppose, not
limited to a single specific language/tool. Flutter still outputs a x.js which
is interpreted by V8 and runs within the Chrome sandbox, what I meant was more
along the line of a supercharged browser able to run e.g. the JRE allowing to
run any random java program out there, but then accessed over an URL and
requiring no manual "installation"/copying/extracting files or interpreter
setup. Same for e.g. a native Dart app. So you would be able to run any native
application (given it's built for your platform obviously) within this kind of
browser, you could run chrome in it and access the web like usual I suppose?

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 :')

~~~
cercatrova
Looks like you're looking for WASM apps then. Native programs including games
if they're compiled to WASM can run on the browser.

~~~
mkaymalright
Ok WASM looks pretty epic. Google Earth browser version works pretty well and
this QT example feels pretty native qt.io/web-assembly-example-slate

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.

~~~
cercatrova
Still in development, basically. It's not used for full GUI apps necessarily,
more like to run computations in the background that are then sent back to the
HTML/CSS/JS based GUI.

~~~
mkaymalright
I see. But theoretically say I want to make a web-accessible GUI I could just
make it using my favorite native GUI library which supports compiling to WASM
and it _should_ work from there cross platform + mobile, right? Thanks for the
chat :-)

------
bdz
Accessible VR. I mean monetary and technically. VR is good but the main
problems are the price (should be much much cheaper) and you also need a
pretty beefy PC. I know it's a new technology breaking in slowly but I really
have high hopes as I look back at smartphones for example (just compare 2010
vs 2020). Yet it's still far away to be in every household.

~~~
jayd16
I'll throw in a possible solution.

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.

------
brewzair
Neither my idea nor do I think it is impossible to create, but I would love
for this tool to exist and don't have the skills yet to make it myself:
[http://worrydream.com/#!/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalk](http://worrydream.com/#!/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalk)

------
max_
You can impliment my catastrophy bonds idea[0]

[0]: [https://asindu.drileba.capital/2020/02/fighting-of-
disease-p...](https://asindu.drileba.capital/2020/02/fighting-of-disease-
pandemics-with-defi/)

------
devchris10
Forecasting game (inspired by the book Superforecasters)

Wondering if there'd be enough demand for this..

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23584165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23584165)

------
tcgv
A reliable fake news detector that my older relatives can use easily, and
maybe more importantly, that they feel inclined to use instead of just
believing and sharing every piece of information they receive.

~~~
disposekinetics
It wouldn't be perfect but something that followed everything back to the
original source by following links in articles and looked for loops might go a
long way.

------
davidajackson
Not impossible but hard: create an application that lets you talk and auto-
generate code/pages for an app. There are lots of companies working on this
but you might be able to find a good niche.

~~~
rohan1024
I can't believe we still don't have a standard tool that lets a user design a
CRUD application right from server back-end to front-end.

~~~
speedgoose
I think they do exist.

Ruby on Rails and similar for example.

Microsoft Access and similar is a bit older but does that too I guess.

~~~
rohan1024
Microsoft Access is decades old and no one seems to have improved on that.
Microsoft FrontPage was also on same lines.

Why we are not abstracting CRUD away like everything else? Is it because
engineers are happy creating CRUD apps?

~~~
speedgoose
It's a mistery to me too.

------
Vanit
No, because the best way to motivate an engineer is to tell them something is
impossible.

------
anarchyrucks
A native text editor with VS Code's capabilities.

~~~
cercatrova
Check out Onivim 2

------
godelmachine
Making a browser do all the work of an OS or vice versa

~~~
marcelluspye
I think somewhere in between these two options is emacs.

------
hyzyla
Fully automated restaurant

~~~
rkwasny
+1 however making a robot that can chop ingredients and make a simple stir-fry
looks quite possible now

------
golergka
Also, federalizing social networks. I know that Mastodon exists, but the
impossible part would be making something like that truly popular.

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.

~~~
ardit33
Not going to work, unless there is a certain way to have 'one person one
account' type of tech, or make account creation very expensive.

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.

