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Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

#311

Post by system2 »

alextousss wrote: post #24

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…

Super cool. I made myself laugh thinking it would ram into someone's nose while they are snoring at night.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

#313

Post by agotterer »

I replied to a similar discussion in April 2023 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567822#35568411) about a dinner club a friend and I host in our free time.

We work with a single restaurant each month to create a 10-20+ course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.

Here’s the 2024 update (I haven’t run the year to date cumulative numbers yet):

* Grew to over 900 members

* Hosting 2 seatings per month

* Served 1,300 guests

* Generated $140k revenue

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

#314

Post by bbkane »

atxtechbro wrote: post #309

Lately I’ve been heads‑down on a complete rethink of my dotfiles setup. It’s not just a `.vimrc` collection – the goal is to treat the dev environment like any other project: reproducible from scratch, automated, and designed to scale as AI becomes a bigger part of daily work. The core of the project is a “Spilled Coffee Principle,” which basically says that if I spill coffee on my laptop, I should be back up in an a…

I've actually settled more on the opposite approach - my tool usage changes enough that I generally only care to configure the latest subset of tools when I get a new PC, and of course the others are there if I need them.

To that end, each tool has its own subdirectory in my dotfiles repo ( https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/ ), and I add READMEs to each subdirectory explaining what dependencies are necessary for this tool, what keyboard shortcuts this tool uses, etc.

This approach has been pretty resilient against my changing needs, changing operating systems, and changing tool versions; even if doesn't optimize for a single invocation of ./setup.sh

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

#315

Post by davidsojevic »

I've been working on a "businesses for sale" aggregation/search engine that sources data from all of the major "business for sale" type platforms in Australia and de-duplicates listings, extracts data like revenue/profit/etc, and normalises it all for quick browsing.

I have a couple of family members and friends who are looking to buy businesses (separately), and it's been much more time-consuming than you'd expect just to browse through listings to determine if they're relevant to you or not.

The platforms seem to mostly follow the same format as real estate listings (as the brokers seemingly rely on the same software/data formats), with one big blob of freeform text that contains the various information that you'd ideally just be reading at a glance.

Add to the fact that there are over 15 "business for sale" type platforms in Australia where they have a minimum of 1,000 listings and at least 10 platforms with between 100-1,000 listings, you can easily burn hours looking through them individually.

I'm currently covering 12 of the top 15 (ranked by number of listings they contain) platforms and I just tinker away once or twice a month, adding support for new platforms.

I should probably release it and get some feedback at some point, but I suffer a bit from "it needs more polish before I let people other than my family and friends use it"

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

#319

Post by declan_roberts »

alextousss wrote: post #24

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…

Props to you for not using a UV light to attract moths and calling it a mosquito killer.
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