Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?

Yeah, why does clothing still come in S&#x2F;M&#x2F;L? Why can&#x27;t I order <i>existing</i> brands in styles 100% fitted to my unique body. Surely you can instantly measure shoulder&#x2F;chest&#x2F;waist width, torso&#x2F;leg height, etc with technology like Xbox Kinect. And on-demand, custom clothing has to be solvable in 2020, right? So it&#x27;s just a momentum&#x2F;supply chain problem, like Netflix vs old guard?

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.

An RSS reader that can organize feeds in a tree view. So if HN and Bruce Schiner&#x27;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.<p>Even bigger: Discovering missing parts of the tree.

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

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.

I want a second, locked-down internet&#x2F;web that coexists with the current internet. The type of controls:<p>- A decentralized group of &quot;meatspace&quot; businesses provide notarization. To get an &quot;account&quot; 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). &quot;Private&quot; 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.<p>- The web piece of the network uses a protocol with <i>no</i> 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 <i>all</i> 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.<p>- The web piece of the network uses a protocol with <i>no</i> 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.

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&#x27;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.<p>There&#x27;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&#x27;m afraid.

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&#x2F;using up some of theirs for non-human purposes. Not really an idea, but seems impossible.

I want someone to build a better linkedin. A database where I can search &quot;people I know that speak French.&quot; Or &quot;people I know that know something about digital marketing&quot;. Or &quot;people I know that know how to cook well.&quot; 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.

Not an impossible idea, but project management for life.<p>Construction project at home? Punchlist, budget, progress tracking, vendor relationship, contract management, dependencies and blocking.<p>Comparison shopping? Gift lists, family research, nominations, voting, chipping in for purchases.<p>Cooking at home? Family nominates a recipe for dinner, cross reference pantry, add needed items to shared grocery list.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>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.<p>tldr: instead of generic task management, management with detailed workflows, workflow interactions, automation, consensus building.

You read my mind, ilolu.<p>Lately, I&#x27;ve had so much time in my life that I&#x27;ve been literally coding out of boredom.<p>I am a great engineer with 15+ years of experience doing hundreds of different things.<p>I do not need money. I need to feel, once again, that I have made the impossible, possible.<p>If you wish to get in touch send me an email to hn @ &lt;username&gt;.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.

A decentralised pseudonymous reputation system, so that your good-standing in one online community (platform&#x2F;silo) can be visible to people in another online community.<p>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&#x27;s social graphs.

For a few years I&#x27;ve thought it would be cool to experiment with neural interfaces for bomb sniffing dogs&#x2F;cadaver dogs, etc - so instead of training the dog to find several specific compounds, the system could be trained for multiple compounds. You wouldn&#x27;t be training the dog, but the system instead.<p>Impossible to do with my current resources. Seems like something that will probably happen eventually.<p>Some scammer made ~80 million bucks selling fake bomb detectors <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-22380368" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-22380368</a> - I wonder if someone actually made the real deal if it would even be as profitable.

Flying cars. It&#x27;s 2020. Where are the flying cars? I don&#x27;t mean giant drones either. I&#x27;m talking honest to goodness anti-gravity floating vehicles.<p>I love watching the stories of scientific discovery on the reboot of the Cosmos series (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cosmos:_A_Spacetime_Odyssey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cosmos:_A_Spacetime_Odyssey</a>) and I can&#x27;t help but feel we lack a true understanding of gravity. I&#x27;m waiting for that one brilliant thinker to have a eureka moment with a simple experiment that makes it all very clear.

Great question. My answer would involve so many things in the music space.<p>These are mostly actually impossible right now, but being able to think about things that you <i>want</i> that <i>should</i> be possible and seem completely out of reach is a great technique for finding motivation.<p>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:<p>1. Live, remote, group music performance. Yeah, latency, blah blah blah. This problem can be solved if you have...<p>2. Music <i>generation</i> 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 &quot;live&quot; 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 &quot;music that sounds like&quot; projects. Have it be part of the <i>musician&#x27;s</i> workflow. Get them to trust it.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>5. Instrument&#x2F;track extraction. We&#x27;re getting better at this, it&#x27;s the impossible problem we&#x27;re closest to solving. But there&#x27;s still a lot to do.<p>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.<p>Cheers, great question.

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.<p>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.

A web map that is updated in near-real time. I&#x27;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&#x2F;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.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;d love to chat.

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

How about the YC request for startups list? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;rfs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;rfs&#x2F;</a>

An agent that can read scientific papers and implement code for them.<p>Or a much simpler one - an Agent that can read rules for an arbitrary boardgame (PDF) And generate a playable version for you.

A user interface that combines eye tracking, voice, keyboard, and mouse input. I&#x27;m not sure what might work, but as something to explore&#x2F;test: I look at a button and say &quot;choose&quot;, and the button gets clicked. Or maybe I blink twice while looking at the button to click it. Or I say &#x27;switch to Chrome&#x27; and it does so immediately, not after 10 seconds for a Siri round trip to Apple.

A P2P file sharing application based on Publius technology. Allows anonymous uploads, splits and encrypts files redundantly across servers. The hosts don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re holding. Privacy enhancing and censorship-resistant.<p>See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cs.nyu.edu&#x2F;~waldman&#x2F;publius&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cs.nyu.edu&#x2F;~waldman&#x2F;publius&#x2F;</a>

Why do we only serve user interfaces over the web via HTML&#x2F;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)?

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&#x27;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&#x27;s still far away to be in every household.

Neither my idea nor do I think it is impossible to create, but I would love for this tool to exist and don&#x27;t have the skills yet to make it myself: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;#!&#x2F;DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalk" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;#!&#x2F;DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalk</a>

You can impliment my catastrophy bonds idea[0]<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asindu.drileba.capital&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;fighting-of-disease-pandemics-with-defi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asindu.drileba.capital&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;fighting-of-disease-p...</a>

Forecasting game (inspired by the book Superforecasters)<p>Wondering if there&#x27;d be enough demand for this..<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23584165" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23584165</a>

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.

Not impossible but hard: create an application that lets you talk and auto-generate code&#x2F;pages for an app. There are lots of companies working on this but you might be able to find a good niche.

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

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

A native text editor with VS Code&#x27;s capabilities.

Fully automated restaurant

A bathroom-cleaning robot&#x2F;s that can do tile floors, sinks, mirrors, counters, showers, and tubs. Cleaning bathrooms is a really, really sucky chore.<p>Also, yard trimming&#x2F;cleaning robots&#x2F;drones more than just lawnmowers. Bonus points for cleaning-up after olive&#x2F;plum trees and sculpting topiaries.<p>A sink&#x2F;dishwasher robot combination that can clear plates, separate food waste and optionally compost, load a dishwasher, and &quot;hand&quot;-wash what cannot be dishwashed. Bonus points for clearing the table and putting away clean dishes automatically.<p>A good, automatic gutter cleaner robot and&#x2F;or an inexpensive, modular, micromesh stainless steel gutter guard that doesn&#x27;t suck.<p>A quality full-tower&#x2F;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&quot; drives, 4 2.5&quot; drives, 2 5.25&quot; 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.<p>Harbor Freight-alike that has better quality, is online-only, no coupons&#x2F;gimmicks, and ships must faster. Between HF and a McMasters. (HF ecomm, customer service, and shipping are a clusterf.)<p>Smart home integration amongst different brands and complementary products, preferably with open standards or a &quot;Dolby NR&quot;-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&#x27;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.<p>Also, turnkey smart home integration modules for Arduino, RPi, ESP32, and general electronics.

Also, federalizing social networks. I know that Mastodon exists, but the impossible part would be making something like that truly popular.<p>Also, speaking of social networks - giving people the ability to automatically sync their charity contributions to their public social profiles, as in &quot;I&#x27;m donating 7% of my income to these causes, and 3% to those&quot; (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&#x27;m aware of how idealistic and far-fetched that sounds.