Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?

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.

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.

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.

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.