Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)
299 comments
·July 27, 2025alextousss
My roommate and I are still working on Tornyol, our mosquito killing drone! It uses ultrasonic sonar to detect mosquitoes, and missile control theory to ram into mosquitoes and grind them in its propellers.
Our target platform is a 40 grams tinywhoop so it’s safe to fly everywhere and makes almost no noise :). A Roomba for mosquitoes!
The main plus compared to traditional systems is that a drone can cover an enormous surface in a short time compared to static systems or man-portable insecticide spraying. Our goal is to be competitive with ITNs against Malaria.
Some links :
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/supercon-2024-killing-mosqui...
hiccuphippo
Sounds cooo but doesn't that send mosquito bits flying in all directions?
fancyswimtime
please make something for miggie's - there are currently no specialised products for this baddie
kyledrake
Very interesting idea! I wonder if a political campaign one day will be to start a program that eradicates mosquitos via drone fleets, not just in the context of malaria protection but also in just nuisance reduction. There are similar programs in place in certain metro areas that already do mosquito control (using chemicals of varying toxicity), so it's not as wild of an idea as it probably sounds.
My friend once came up with a joke idea for a solar powered ransomware drone that would fly to a random roof and jam wifi signal until someone paid it to leave.
alextousss
Yeah, it’s one of our goal to work for government agencies at some point to implement city-wide mosquito control. 10 of our drones could cover a square kilometer, so we’d be a lot more efficient working at the city level rather than at the individual household level.
MITSardine
I watched your talk, very interesting! Super inventive idea, I hope it works out.
Is the name a word play with "torgnole" at all, or does it mean something?
alextousss
Yeah, you’re spot on! The original name was « mosquitorgnole »
bebop
This is an interesting idea. One thing that might help targeting is to have some sort of chemical that attracts the mosquitoes. In that way you can bring your target to you.
alextousss
Their velocity is much lower than the one of the drone, so it wouldn’t make much sense to increase efficiency
Galorious
Ha so cool, would love one for in my bedroom ;-)
I know of a Dutch company doing something similar. Focusses on pest detecting/mitigation in greenhouses atm: https://www.pats-drones.com/
alextousss
Yeah, what they do is very cool. Not sure how far they are in the development but the videos are super cool.
atlasunshrugged
Hadn't seen this before, this is awesome! I lived in Cameroon and Kenya briefly doing some consulting work and mosquitos still wreak havoc across the continent (and now living in DC I wouldn't mind having one of these in the summer for my place). I'm curious if you're also thinking about defense applications -- I would imagine that a super low cost drone that could help take out a shahed or other Russian drone that are wreaking havoc on Ukraine would be quite valuable
alextousss
Glad to hear we could be of help! Some of our tech could be used for defense, but traditional defense companies and ukrainian startups already do low-cost shahed interceptors.
atlasunshrugged
My impression is the solutions are still somewhat lacking/necessary -- I know Frankenburg, Eric Schmidt's stealth startup, and surely the primes are all working on it but given how many shaheds are still getting through (plus all the drone action at the frontline) I imagine there's still a market for low-cost; especially if they're largely autonomous
nine_k
A 40-gram device is unlikely to pack any punch, except against a mosquito.
It could be a great reconnaissance tool though.
ridgeguy
I'm building a CVD system to make arbitrarily large single crystal optical quality diamonds. Not a coder, so I'm using ChatGPT and Claude to show me how to integrate microwave power sources, vacuum & gas supply systems, and other subsystems with LabView. As Gust said in Charlie Wilson's War, "We'll see.".
piker
Working on Tritium, the legal IDE (https://tritium.legal)
This month I'm improving CI/CD for e2e testing across Windows, macOS, Linux and Android. Also adding support for unlocking password-protected PDFs and Word docs and improving OCR. OCR runs in the background and leverages native OS OCR where available and a pure LSTM Rust implementation elsewhere. Generally improving the word processor and looking for speedups. Adding a cross-platform spellchecker leveraging native where possible, too.
Play with it online: https://tritium.legal/preview
Download for free: https://tritium.legal/download
rcy
I am working on a site that allows kids to chat and play online with other kids. To connect, kids must have their parents sign up and connect with the parents of their friends. Kids can chat with their parents and family as well as other kids in their network. Messages can be monitored by parents. There are also other activities like a bot workshop where simple llm bots can be "programmed" by creating system prompts (kids create video game helper bots, ice cream shop bots, adventure/dungeons and dragons style bots, etc). There is a sticker book (cartoon image search), and a quiz creator. Many other things are planned!
The guiding principles are to create a fun, positive, safe space for kids and families to socialize and interact as well as empower kids to explore and understand technology as a creative tool and not just as something to consume content.
wrboyce
Interesting goals, and quite different from the norm. I assume you must have somewhat strong feelings about privacy and/or children having access to technology/internet/etc that has driven you to build this platform? As a happily childless late 30s married man, this is quite foreign to me; but I definitely recognise that there is passion driving this project… Could you talk some more about your inspiration and long term goals? I find both the concept and the end goal quite fascinating!
m-a-t-t-i
Working on fabric construction blocks (like Lego of clothing), that you can use to build clothing and accessories completely by hand without any tools or machines.
Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_eKc6c5tDw
1zael
This is insanely amazing. The youtube video is so well-created. I hope to see this become successful!
wonger_
Clever seams. Have you tried washing any of the garments?
mezod
this is simply great! godspeed with the project!
kaspermarstal
I'm continuing the work on Cellm, an Excel extension that let's you call LLMs in cell formulas like =PROMPT(A1, "Rate the sentiment of the customer feedback as positive, neutral, or negative"), and then drag the formula down to apply the same prompt to thousands of rows. I built it after my girlfriend had to manually classify 7,500 research papers. Cellm automates that kind of repetitive work.
Since we added MCP and the use of structured output to "spill" multiple return values into adjecent cells, it is the quickest way I know of to monitor competitors blogs everyday before my 09:00 meeting. And also the quickest way I know of to test new AI models. I have a sheet with SimpleQA, MMLUPro, or GPQA Diamond and testing a new model is a matter of adding a new column. The whole idea is to enable normal people (like, non-techies) to automate manual, repetitive tasks with AI like programmers routinely do.
incognito124
That's a clever project name! :)
ankit219
In my day job, working with biotech and life science research companies to automate FDA compliance. That is automatically generate sections of their submissions based on their results/protocols and FDA rules[1]. Here is a short demo: https://www.loom.com/share/3a5a7f4c1cbe4abe825339c18c7397bf?...
[1]: We work at clioapp.ai w a paragraph more detail under products
marginalia_nu
Optimizing the Marginalia Search index code. The new code is at least twice as fast in benchmarks, but I can't run it in production because it turns out when you do it's four times as slow as what came before it for the queries that are the simplest and fastest to the point where queries exceed their timeout values by a lot.
I'm 97% certain this is because the faster code leads to more page thrashing in the mmap-based index readers. I'm gonna have to implement my own buffer pool and manage my reads directly like that vexatious paper[1] said all along.
[1] https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2022/cidr2022-p13-crotty.pdf
apavlo
> I'm gonna have to implement my own buffer pool and manage my reads directly like that vexatious paper[1] said all along.
You make it sound like I was trying to troll everyone when we wrote that paper. We were warning you.
marginalia_nu
It's annoying because it's right and also describes the exact type of paradoxical performance reversal I'm seeing. (It's also great because it describes the exact type of paradoxical performance reversal I'm seeing, likely saves me a lot lot of head scratching ;-)
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ciroduran
I've been making songbooks for my favourite songs. I am currently working on a songbook for some friends. I've found https://www.chordpro.org/ an amazing CLI tool, under active development. I am using the ukulele, but the program also easily can do guitar or piano. The program reads a bunch of text files and produces a really nice PDF. I've also used pandoc + LaTeX for the front matter.
samwillis
Tanstack DB - a new client side store for web apps, with transactions, optimistic state, and live queries spanning multiple collections.
It's designed for sync, so rather than fetching you can hook it up to a sync engine (any!) to keep your front end in sync with your backend. It's built on Tanstack Query, making the sync engine optional, and a great path for incremental adoption.
The query engine uses a typescript implementation of differential dataflow to enable incremental computation of the live queries - they are very fast to update. This gives you sub ms fine grade reactivity of complex queries (think sql like joins, group by etc).
Having a lot of fun building it!
https://tanstack.com/db/latest https://github.com/TanStack/db
mkw5053
I kept finding myself having to write mini backends for LLM features in apps, if for no other reason than to keep API keys out of client code. Even with Vercel's AI SDK, you still need a (potentially serverless) backend to securely handle the API calls.
I've been working on an open source LLM proxy that handles the boring stuff. Small SDK, call OpenAI or Anthropic from your frontend, proxy manages secrets/auth/limits/logs.
As far as I know, this is the first way to add LLM features without any backend code at all. Like what Stripe does for payments, Auth0 for auth, Firebase for databases.
It's TypeScript/Node.js with JWT auth with short-lived tokens (SDK auto-handles refresh) and rate limiting. Very limited features right now but we're actively adding more.
Currently adding bring-your-own-auth (Auth0, Clerk, Firebase, Supabase) to lock down the API even more.
chazapp
I've been building for some time a local production like environment running in Minikube, deployed in a single `terraform apply` command. The plan is to deploy in one command a couple of home made services, frontend, backend, some websockets in between, and have everything accessible over HTTPS via Ingress resources. That, and all the open source observability tools you can imagine (Grafana/Prometheus/Loki/Tempo), configured and running at once.
See https://github.com/chazapp/o11y.
These last few days I have decided to try getting Kubernetes Gateway API to work, using the implementation of Istio. I have written an `auth` microservices which provides JWTs and published a public JWKS endpoint, and intend to have the API gateway validate tokens and claims to allow access to other services. The plan being to write API services without any knowledge of the authentication systems that happen upstream. If a request reaches them, it's that it had been validated before !
What are you working on? Do you have any new ideas you're thinking about?