Show HN: This Idea Does Not Exist | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: This Idea Does Not Exist

thisideadoesnotexist.com

24 pointstectonic32 comments

Looks to be completely overfitted on the training set. 10/10 "ideas" displayed to me do exist.

There’s a simple fix for that. Rename site to “this idea, but you can solve it better”.

So the idea exists, but maybe the person reading it can implement a better solution for the idea.

Youcansolveitbetter.com they could call it

Should maybe have thumbs up/down and use that to maybe better 'train' the algorithm... on whether it exists/doesn't exist.

Indeed so... the first one recommended to me was "An online course that teaches basic programming skills."

After seeing your comment, I tried another 9 out of curiosity... and they all exist.

> A pediatrician that helps you monitor your kid's health.

I think that idea exists. It's called a pediatrician.

I have a 15 month old and I’m not so sure about that lol. Our pediatrician seems to mostly be on the lookout for serious illnesses, which is fair enough I guess? Maybe if we got concierge or lived in another country.

Agreed. Two kids here. The pediatrician is seen ~annually. (more during infancy) Not enough for what I'd call "monitoring".

There's a diminishing (and potentially hazardous) return to health screening past a certain point. At the very least, more screenings raises costs without necessarily improving outcomes. At worst, it can generate false positives that lead to unnecessary interventions, or false negatives where a serious issue is ignored because "the doctor didn't bring it up".

Maybe a dumb observation, but pressure pads wrt beds are great for sleep monitoring. As babies stereotypically spend a lot of time in cribs, wouldn’t something similar have potential for noticing unusual behavior?

Judging by these comments and my own results, perhaps this is a joke. We see these ideas turned into enterprises/ventures all the time. It's as if the people who come up with them are unaware of the fact that these things have been done many times before. Even with that knowledge, some people have motivations to do the same thing again - maybe because it looks like it could be profitable, maybe for the prestige, who knows? At face value, some "launches" seem more like "rehashes", but I can't tell if that's the author's cynicism or my own.

> A company that turns your Spotify playlists into a radio station that plays similar music based on your tastes.

"It's like Spotify for Spotify."

A bit of a tangent, but I liked the Rdio model where you could configure how "close" did you want music suggestions to be. Sometimes when I play a band I want to only listen to their music and some very similar music, othertimes I want to discover something different.

Another great functionality is what Last.fm had way back in the 2003-2004 where you could input 2 or 3 different artists and it will generate a "radio" playlist of music similar to them. The closest thing I've found so far is https://www.gnoosic.com/, alas, they don't generate a playlist.

Yeah, I remember Last.fm being pretty good at that. Also, Pandora seemed like magic back when it first came out.

Almost all of the nonexistent ideas I saw have companies that service them…

For example, it thinks there’s no website which, given available ingredients, suggests recipes.

You didn't see "make a site that claims to provide endless new tech ideas" on it though did you

> A company that creates educational material for children.

(looks up school textbook publishers.)

> A company that lets you rent out your car's battery when you aren't using it.

I don't see that one happening. Ever.

> A website that lets you order and purchase local food in your area.

You don't watch TV, do you?

> > A company that lets you rent out your car's battery when you aren't using it.

> I don't see that one happening. Ever.

It is happening, e.g. https://www.octopusev.com/powerloop

Those solutions (car battery storage like a Tesla powerwall) is not what comes to mind with the words "rent out your car's battery". More like: I'm not using my car, here's its battery for you to do whatever with.

You do realise this is computer generated. Who are you refereing to by saying "you"?

I’m not convinced that’s true, and if they are they’re heavily curated, and come from a small enough pool that I see regular repeats. I’d expect at least _something_ interesting to pop up if these were truly raw model outputs.

I clicked through 15 of them and they all exist.

“A website that helps you sell used items.”

Yea, I think that has been done.

> A website that lets people order their groceries online and then pick them up at a central location.

Side note, there was one time I "sold an idea" to a website unrefundable for $99 that was hilarious, in the process I overdrafted my bank account too, ahh. Props to the person that made that site.

"An online virtual reality surgery training simulator."

Sounds like great fun if it's open to the public :D

Is this generated by AI or are these generated by a person? Some context would be helpful here.

* some of these ideas may actually exist.