Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You can impliment my catastrophy bonds idea[0]

[0]: https://asindu.drileba.capital/2020/02/fighting-of-disease-p...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

Fully automated restaurant

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.

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 - I wonder if someone actually made the real deal if it would even be as profitable.

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.

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.

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.

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.