Great search engine for an eBook collection. Gives higher ranking to sections i annotated. Must be a desktop app.
Have you tried Calibre?
Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
41–50 of 104 posts
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#42Also, 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 makin…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#43Yeah, 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?
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Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#44Yeah, 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?
https://www.eshakti.com/ does this for some clothes (not via Kinect, you have to enter the measurements). No personal experience, but it's nice to see folks trying it.
It's baffling to me that Amazon doesn't have something like this. Every vendor of clothing seems to upload a size chart or puts it in the text description, and you wind up with stuff like "6x plus size dress" having a waist size of 32 inches.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#45A 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.
Isn't it one of the goals of Urbit?
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.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#46A 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.
Isn't it one of the goals of Urbit?
Sure, but nobody knows how to use Urbit.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#47A 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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#48Yeah, 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?
Not a F but I understand lots of them would be very interested in bras that fit.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
It's a mistery to me too.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#50[deleted]