How about the YC request for startups list? https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
61–70 of 104 posts
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#62Decentralized, 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.
$1 scratchers with a guid on them at every corner store might have some use.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#63A 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…
Are you comfortable talking about the existing pipeline on HN?
Do the cameras geo-tag the images into a GEOTIFF or similar at the edge?
What sort of spatial resolution do you get on the resulting maps?
Any chance of multi-spectral imagery in the future? would be amazing for doing remote-sensing projects
Sounds like a awesome project.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#64Yeah, 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?
IMO, it's a unit economics problem. Mass producing/selling S/M/L is much more profitable than selling extra wide shoulders/small ribcage to two people.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried Calibre?
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.
Someone was working on a full text search plugin for calibre https://github.com/idealist1508/Recoll-Full-Text-Search-For-...
I intended to try it out but never did - might give it a look again soon.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#66Forecasting game (inspired by the book Superforecasters)
Wondering if there'd be enough demand for this..
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#67Flying cars. It's 2020. Where are the flying cars? I don't mean giant drones either. I'm talking honest to goodness anti-gravity floating vehicles. I love watching the stories of scientific discovery on the reboot of the Cosmos series ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Spacetime_Odyssey ) and I can't help but feel we lack a true understanding of gravity. I'm waiting for that one brilliant thinker to have a eur…
> I can't help but feel we lack a true understanding of gravity.
We have a very solid understanding of gravity [1]. It's just that it's not as accessible as you and I would like it to be [2]. Unfortunately, you cannot argue aesthetics with the laws of nature.
[1] Source: When majoring in physics, one of my exams was on general relativity theory.
[2] As in: Even solving simple symmetrical problems requires dealing with some quite frustrating differential equations.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#68Open 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.
The main reason for the commercial success of Pokemon is the huge array of readily available merchandise and anime/movie tie-ins. How would you go about replicating that with a crowd-sourced competitor? How would I be able to obtain a plushie for my favorite crowd-sourced character without paying the high prices associated with custom commissions?
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#69Creating a desktop OS that feels free to break past UNIX standards and start from a clean slate
Temple OS seems impossible, and yet exists.
Re: Ask HN: Impossible Ideas?
#70Open 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.
The main reason for the commercial success of Pokemon is the huge array of readily available merchandise and anime/movie tie-ins. How would you go about replicating that with a crowd-sourced competitor? How would I be able to obtain a plushie for my favorite crowd-sourced character without paying the high prices associated with custom commissions?
It'd be open source so you'd get plushies, figurines, videos etc after someone else made them because permissive licensing let them use the art and ideas to do whatever they want. There would be nothing preventing a plushie company or a person or a DIY project making them affordable.