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Ask HN: An idea that you could not implement?

86 points by ninjahatho9 ↗ HN
We haven't had an idea thread in a while. Can you share what project you wanted to implement but you couldnot for some reason.

What ideas and projects will take over communities and in turn the world in next 3 years?

I personally think- adtech is very saturated. DSP have become commodities with each company coming up of their own. There is a good chance for innovation in this space.

124 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] thread
wilbertliu
Back then I wanted to implement an internet provider, since my country sucks on providing it with a proper plans
ninjahatho9
That's a great idea. I still think we have a long way to go for wireless peer-to-peer network that can act as transreceiver with something cellphone like device.
meesterdude
For me, it was a brain for my brain. I slung a lot of code to get what I wanted, but at the end of the day the encryption options are just not robust enough - or do not fit with other toolings needed.
ninjahatho9
"A brain for my brain" -

Do you mean capturing the thought train on devices and with adaptive feedback mechanism to generate new ideas?

bobjordan
Yes, I get this. I've been trying to code a virtual factory so that I can replace my actual factory and the overhead that comes with an actual factory. Just can't quite get there.
slinger
I don't think these ideas would take over communities neither the world, but they are awesome:

1) Some kind of crawler that goes through YouTube videos indexing them and its subtitles and then when a user searches a word or idiom the web app would show some part of a video that speaks exactly that search term. I know there are other services that does that, but I want something more natural since these services use some kind of text to speech with a robotic voice and not a real life situation.

2) An old school open world MMORPG with modern graphics and a mix of Ultima Online (PVP) and Diablo III (Dungeons) gameplay. Nowadays every mmorpg is a copy of World of Warcraft with a different story. There is no innovation...

EDIT: add another idea :)

wahnfrieden
I researched building this a few years ago. YouTube has this data indexed but didnt seem to expose a reasonable programmatic search interface for it. Indexing and providing the search myself seemed far beyond scope (would YouTube even allow harvesting all that?).
toomuchtodo
Use a chrome extension that piggybacks off of existing YouTube users to crawl YT (similar to RECAP for PACER), push to S3, process with Lambda to build your index and throw away the raw data after processing.

Bonus if you can finagle all of this with free AWS credits from their startup incubator offers.

egfx
Both ideas are personally music to my ears. I also happened to work on some of the titles you mention and a huge player of UO. What a game! On that thread, an arcade arena style PvP, where play is progressive and evolving. Basically LORD (legend of the red dragon) with today's VR tech. But Riot will undoubtedly see it and steal it though.
slinger
Nice to know I'm not alone! As for Riot, I don't think they would have eyes for anything other than MOBA.
egfx
nah, they're developing a game in the 1v1 fighting arena.
wodenokoto
As for number 1, there is a service than find words on YouTube, and plays for you their pronunciation. I can't for the life of me remember what it is called.
photogrammetry
I can't implement an asteroid mining program now because the cost of space launch for the preliminary/prototype mining equipment would be prohibitively high.

If I had access to a space launch capability for less than $100/kg, however, I could bootstrap the whole business from my basement with an investment of ~$100-200k from some friends. [0]

From SpaceX's perspective, they can put ~5 tons in lunar orbit for a cost of $200k in fuel [1]. $40/kg is great, but it's not what they charge their customers, and it's not what they'd charge me - demand from comsat operators with a much higher willingness to pay means that I have no access to the market, and SpaceX needs to make a profit.

Give it 10-50 years, and I'd expect real asteroid mining will become economically viable. [2]

[0] assuming zero NRE for mining robot fabrication and a single person salary.

[1] ignoring actual launch costs, personnel salaries, and assuming the whole booster stack is paid for through infinite perfect recovery.

[2] see also Planetary Resources, and why they should be in hibernation mode, not burning $2m/year developing camera sats. but hey, VCs have money to burn.

bbcbasic
Why not burn some vc money yourself?
michwill
* You can work on reducing cost of space access yourself! * There are some good things to do in space. Look for ZBLAN fibers, for example.

It's actually interesting question, what price of space launch (per kg, when you have low or high kg) would enable entrepreneurs to do all sorts of crazy shit there

FullMtlAlcoholc
Would you mind explaining how you'd bootstrap it? I'm obsessed with asteroid mining
photogrammetry
The book Seveneves may give you some hints, but take them with a few grains of salt.
talktime
SimVillage - A building simulation game of of a village of up to say 1,000 villagers. Like Simcity/Skylines, but with the emphasis on detailed human simulation rather than on large scale.
viraptor
So dwarf fortress with human village setting?
eropple
Perhaps Banished is more in line with what he's describing.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/242920/

talktime
Thanks, that's very interesting to me but not quite what I had in mind. I'm thinking modern era, where the sims have links to an outside world - so some sims would commute out of the village for work each day, some would go to the nearby city for nightlife at weekends.
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eropple
Look at Clockwork Empires, too.
talktime
I was thinking a contemporary village where villagers have cell phones, cars, social network accounts, hobbies, errands, illnesses, social functions etc. Human simulation at the level of The Sims, but community size of up to 1000.
cmdrfred
I've thought about something like this. Sort of Sid Meier's Civilization but more of a focus on governance and policy as opposed to war. I have the time and the programming chops to pull it off, just none of the artistic skills to make anyone want to actually play it as always been my mental roadblock.
supercoder
One JavaScript framework to rule them all
Razengan
Personally I would love for Swift to take over the place of JS.
Someone
Won't happen. If Apple added Swift as a sibling language alongside JavaScript, most people would still use JavaScript because of its wider support. If Apple replaced JavaScript by Swift, that would be suicide for their platform.

What, IMO, will happen is that WebAssembly will replace JavaScript, creating a level playing field for all languages. JavaScript will no longer be the only language you can on both server and client, so we will see all-Python, all-Javascript, all-Java, all-whatever frameworks in the browser (potentially each with its own GUI library, but I think that won't happen). All-Swift could be something that Apple could provide, and chances are they are already working on it.

TAForObvReasons
The recent election should have made it clear to everyone that many communities, centered around industries like manufacturing or fossil fuel energy, have been decimated in the last few decades or so. These are obviously large trends, but in our technological and economic progress we should figure out how to make sure these communities are not left behind.

I would like to see a larger effort for the SV community to expand into some of these communities and help give some of these communities a much-needed economic jolt.

developer2
a) Doesn't actually answer the OP's question whatsoever. b) Drones on uselessly and in a negative tone about the election; get over it.
developer2
Right. Downvote me because I react against someone who thinks that commenting about the election on a completely unrelated topic is appropriate. Good job, HN.
ivm
Fixing the issues of our countries is not only related but also should be a priority for all of us because they slow down progress in all other areas.
atmosx
The disparity in technical knowledge is enormous along with the lack of optimisation by using humans instead of robots.

It's time to go to the next level, with universal income and less (much less) working hours, free education and so forth.

The alternative is dark ages + war.

talktime
Reputational Review Network - A review network where users can rate local restaurants, services, goods and other reviewers' credibility. Ratings are personalized based on your own reviews and who you find credible - this gives a user an incentive to keep their reviews honest.
jon_richards
One complaint I've heard is people looking for restaurants and finding 4-5 star rated McDonalds. Seems ripe for PCA or something. There are a ton of examples of this sort of analysis too, especially since Netflix made their datasets available. Here's the first paper I found: http://www.lkozma.net/mlsp09binary.pdf
chrisfosterelli
I think absolute ratings for restaurants in general tend to be garbage, since a rating is skewed to the average expectations of the guests.

The 5-star McDonalds may be a really good McDonalds that's very clean and consistent, but the $50/meal ocean-side bar only has 3-stars because the steak is sometimes rare instead of medium-rare. People are rating relative to their expectations of the restaurant, so someone who doesn't share those same expectations will be confused that a dollar cheese burger is 5 stars but a prime rib steak is 3 stars.

jon_richards
Yeah, that's why I recommend PCA. It works by finding groups of agreement. You can then classify people by how much they resemble each group and predict how they will react to a new thing by how their groups have reacted to it. One criticism is that using it can easily lead to constructing echo chambers, but that's exactly what you want for reviews. If you care about how a steak is cooked, here is how other people who care about how a steak is cooked review this restaurant.
bostik
I'd like a rating system that intelligently weighs the reviewers and provides the overall grade after adjusting for individual review points.

Examples:

- if a person only posts 5-star or 1-star reviews, they are polarised and/or punitive. Any and all reviews from such users should be weighted accordingly - 5 stars clearly means "thumbs up, for whatever reason" and accordingly 1 star means "thumbs down, for whatever reason".

- if a person posts a fair selection of review scores, they are likely more thoughtful. Individual review scores from these users are more accurate.

- if a person posts mostly 2/3/4-star reviews, then any 1/5 star review is likely to carry a lot more weight.

To make score manipulation slightly harder, some kind of meta moderation would need to be in place too. Preferably on a per-category basis, so your reviews might have "good karma" on some topics and "bad karma" on others.

jackyb
I would want to have something like Wikipedia that takes account of the user's context and knowledge to present transformed text that is customized for the user so it's easier to digest.
fillskills
iPlantTrees - kind of tree sharing. You want a plant, post location. You know how to plant or have money, go there and plant a real tree. 8 billion people and counting. If every 8th person plants 1 tree, we can have a billion trees.
bootload
"iPlantTrees - kind of tree sharing. You want a plant, post location."

the secondary market here is you search by tree and find fruit/seeds/nuts. A more generic, iPlant would also show vegetables/crops and hook this up to seasonal sales.

fillskills
That's brilliant. Would definitely add it. Thanks for the suggestion!!
bootload
"show vegetables/crops and hook this up to seasonal sales"

I've been noticing the market for local fresh food is pretty big. If you have a system that decentralises the growing it could used as a peer to peer sales or arbitrage where people buy others and re-sell.

As for the iPlantTrees, yes... This is what has been done in my hometown, Melbourne ~ http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au

fillskills
The Melbourne site is fantastic. Lot of useful data presented in the a very digestible manner. Haven't seen such info on any US ones so far. I have reached out to them to see if there is room for knowledge sharing.
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Sir_Cmpwn
A self-hosting static Linux distro, with pacman. It's bloody hard to bootstrap a Linux userspace from scratch in general, but when you add that you want everything to be static it just gets stupidly difficult. I'll try again at some point with another strategy, it'll be the fourth such attempt.
faddat
Not certain I could implement.

Certain I'd like to talk with you about your strategy and see if we can get any closer than you did the past three times.

Sir_Cmpwn
This is my current best effort: https://gogs.sr.ht/SirCmpwn/sconix

I was trying to build a clean static system I could use as a bootstrap to build clean packages from. Ran into trouble with things like coreutils, util-linux, and fakeroot. Making things harder is that I'm building everything against musl libc because glibc doesn't handle static linking well (and also because I don't like glibc).

I'm thinking a better strategy might be to use some other host system with pacman to build a base system of clean static packages, then use pacstrap to get this system up and running.

judahmeek
I've been dreaming of creating a platform that used crowd sourcing to map concept & procedural masteries to higher level masteries and to occupations. Basically, a giant graph database mapping concepts, procedures, systems (versioned), and occupations. I think such a database could be used to improve learning management systems for school faculty and autodidacts alike. It could also serve as the basis for a performance/competency evaluation system that could replace resumes eventually.
ivan_ah
That's very cool. I've been thinking about "detailed" prerequisite structures (e.g. [1]) for a long time, but I never thought about connecting with occupations/jobs/competencies. In addition to replacing resumes, it could also replace exams (e.g. mastery-based grades).

[1] https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/conceptmap.pdf

hnhamdani
I like the idea, which is work for autodidact/professional who want to master their craftmanship. There is always something to learn. By giving mastery path as a guide would help on self-improvement.

We've seen it in Pluralsight or FreecodeCamp where they made the paths for their users. Now, if we can turn it around by making it crowd sourced and to a wider skills, that'd be awesome.

gregoor
Glad to hear that someone else finds this direction interesting. I actually built something in that direction half a year ago: https://owleo.com

But I mostly abandoned it for now, as expii.com seems to be pretty close to what I wanted to have. Also since I finished my studies, my learning changed to be more explorative and need-driven, which didn't fit well into the thinking behind Owleo.

viraptor
Bubble burster bot. Identify cliques with few "outside" connections, that talk about politics on a social network. Start engaging both groups with content "acceptable" to both of them. Continue until direct connections are formed and move on. "Content" can be trivial - like finding a link posted by one person and responding "similar to this, right? <link to other person's post including related link>"

Potential risk: choosing bad content could cause more conflicts than new connections.

Why not done: just came up with it, also unlikely to be profitable unless you get a research grant for it.

Trigger: this idea is similar, right? https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/796845589254275072

chiliap2
A Reddit alternative where the ranking for posts was personalized to each user. The ranking would be based the similarity between the voting history of the people who've voted compared to your own voting history. Think Netflix recommendation algorithm for Reddit.
EchoAce
Couldn't this simply exacerbate the very problem of echo chambers in social media?
wodenokoto
It might not be great for political discussion, but just fine for people looking for discussions on their favorite TV show or programming language.
xtracto
I just want a "best" like sort mechanism that weights stories based on the average or maximum number of votes on each sub-reddit. Sometime there is a very voted story in an interesting sub-reddit but it only has 50 or so votes because it is very niche
smrtinsert
A mood indicator for every person within a nation. Takes into account technical know how and intent to thwart. Think of everyone from people who dont even use phones to a SF techie. The goal is to share in parseable data what is important to you on a daily basis (or as often as you like) so that sentiment is not a surprise to fellow countrymen or governments, advertisers, entertainers etc.
bdr
Someone did this using Twitter data and NLP. Can't find it right now but I think the name had to do with weather.
farright
A voting system for websites based on "liquid democracy"[0], where a pagerank like algorithm is used to let a person assign votes to others. The catch is this system would deliver personalized scores so each person sees a personalized ranking based on the votes they cast rather than an average of everyone's votes.

The idea is that people get a "bubble" but that when people vote, hopefully they take into account both quality and how similar the post is to their own. So people get a better version of their own views, which hopefully also allows them to see similar but non-identical views.

You can see that sites like reddit which tend to have high quality posts, but many subreddis have very strong biases as well. Letting people live in their own bubble means that people can write the best quality posts they can without worrying if their bias matches the subreddit they are writing in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy

andrewtbham
I have wanted to build a chat bot that acts as a counselor. I am quite sure it could be created with enough training data or at least be used for training. But it is difficult to convice anyone else that it's a good idea.

Here is an outline of the technical requirements and how they could be achieved.

https://github.com/andrewt3000/DL4NLP/blob/master/carl.md#co...

old-gregg
I always wanted to build an indoor navigation system for a phone. Large office buildings, hotels and especially department stores can be hard to find stuff in and you have to rely on navigation signs of inconsistent quality.

I couldn't build it because I a) lack hardware expertise to figure out tricks to navigate without GPS or/and map buildings and b) never figured out a realistic GTM for this.

myroon5
I've always wished there would be just a simple tablet at the entrance of grocery/supermarket stores to search for a product's location.
ice109
the reason this doesn't exist is because stores make money off you wandering around, looking for what you want, picking up other stuff along the way.
bootload
good question, going through these ideas I keep in mind: "The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts. If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring." [0]

1/ So the idea I haven't done is build a hacker search engine. I'm not sure what this would look like, but I'd bet being able to search through source code at high/low levels might be interesting.

2/ Another idea is I noted on the the Amazon/NES classic thread, arbitrage by Amazon/users resulting in instant sellout. Could this idea be used somehow?

[0] http://paulgraham.com/ecw.html

findjashua
something like sourcegraph?
bootload
"sourcegraph"

dunno, haven't looked at this, will do. Having access to any public source code would be interesting to find ^canonical^ examples. I know where this does't happen, cough stack overflow cough

sqs
Sourcegraph CEO here. Sourcegraph shows local and global usage examples for code. It's useful for understanding unfamiliar code or writing better, idiomatic code more quickly. https://sourcegraph.com

To see how we built it and future plans, check out https://sourcegraph.com/plan.

bootload
"Sourcegraph show local and global usage examples for code. It's useful for understanding unfamiliar code or writing better, idiomatic code more quickly." ~ https://sourcegraph.com/plan

Great, will do.

Animats
being able to search through source code at high/low levels might be interesting.

It was called "Google Code Search". 2005-2013. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code_Search

bootload
yeah I saw that. Was/is it any good? Is that all hackers search for? I'll take a look at this. Might be some gaps I might find interesting.
faddat
Inverse Commerce -

Customers simply type what they want. GPS locates the customer. Companies submit reverse bids both manually and algorithmically. Customer accepts what suits them best. Yay, money saved, time saved, customer happy.

Specifically, I don't have enough experience building android apps to make it as slick as I would like. Happy to talk with anyone about it. Can build back end, will travel, etc :).

xtracto
This is something I also have been thinking about... specially because I am useless around fixing the house.

I would love to be able to write somewhere "my backyard aluminium door has problem closing/is stuck" and get quotes from whoever is the indicated person/profession to fix that.

I started learning React Native to do that, but darn I just don't have enough time :(

madmax108
Doesn't this already exist? especially for hardware? I remember a few years ago I needed some LED name tags and on some Chinese site I just asked for quotes for LED name tags... even today i get quotes from sellers for the same :P
koichirose
How would companies submit bids though? Should they have their own natural language/keyword analyzer to identify which product the customer is actually looking for and submit their price for it?
thescribe
I want to build a meta-layer that sits on top of basically every cloud platform be it dropbox or facebook. The best one sentence pitch I can come up with is "A dashboard for your online life" it should ideally do things like present all your storage as a single filesystem, present all your social networks as a single feed, and beyond that allow interactions between services like saving an image from your social network to storage as easily as moving a photo from one folder to another on a local machine. I want to commodify all these web sites and make them as easy to script as bash.
jdale27
I think that is a great idea, and perhaps not unlike what the Semantic Web was possibly intended to enable. But it seems not to have been very successful. Or am I mistaken?
thescribe
I think I'm thinking of a more limited scope than the semantic web. The semantic web needs everything, I just need the top 100 services people use.
crystalPalace
Sounds very similar to urbit or sandstorm. The key difference being the single filesystem and single feed which are not explicit features of either of the aforementioned products but could be created on them or might be planned.
kmf
I had an idea a few months ago that I liked a lot - a drop-in service for Amazon-style recommendations for your web app. It was going to be Stripe-like in ease of use, where you could just drop a lib in and start getting recommendations immediately.

On the service-end, it would have basically been an Apache Spark instance doing collaborative filtering as data comes in. It seemed like a pretty sweet idea, but I couldn't find the time to work on it.

If this seems like a cool idea, you should definitely steal it and start working on it.

Related to this -- I wrote a blog post about a lot of my random ideas I haven't finished and why you should steal them. Complete list and blog post here: https://kristianfreeman.com/post/steal/

ruliov
I'm currently cannot implement my own programming language with dependent types, because there is no fully formalized type theory in type theory itself. And nobody didn't formalized it for 40 years.
Razengan
We should have a regular "Suggest HN" or "Ideas for HN" post where people suggest ideas or projects for other hackers to make, similar to the SomebodyMakeThis subreddit [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/

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paukiatwee
Machine/deep learning based github/gitlab/bitbucket issue bot that auto label issue with "bug", "enhancement", or "question" label. Currently implemented machine learning(no tuning yet) part but no time implement bot part.