Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) • Hacker News Board

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

#671

Post by rovr138 » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

amitprayal wrote: post #648

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…

No to discourage you ,but how do you handle a real world cluttered room where mosquito's will be able to shelter in the clutter, under table, drawers etc.

Not OP, but they have to come out to be a problem.

If they're out of sight and not bothering me, I don't really care. If they're out and possibly annoying and biting me, that's a problem.

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

#672

Post by cpetersen » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

I've been working on Red Candle, a Ruby gem that runs LLMs (Llama, Mistral, Gemma, Phi) directly in your Ruby process through Rust bindings (based on the candle crate from Hugging Face). No Python, no servers - just FFI with Metal/CUDA acceleration.

It's been useful for adding AI features to Rails apps without the complexity of managing separate services. Would love feedback from anyone working with LLMs in Ruby.

GitHub: https://github.com/assaydepot/red-candle

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

#673

Post by prithsr » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

An iOS app to help manage Yard Sales. There's a lot of clutter at home that we don't need or use; using that as inspiration to work on an app that can help with cataloguing and selling in-person, and in v2 turn into some sort of facebook marketplace where users can 'find yard sales' near them (and potentially even look up all items being sold at x yard sale, prior to showing up).

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

#674

Post by jonhohle » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

andyferris wrote: post #416

wrboyce wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I’d say some of the downsides on the modern internet become much starker when your kids come up against them. As adults growing up through the birth of the internet we are kinda inoculated to it. I suspect the lack of privacy is because the target audience is “kids” not “teens”. When my kids first discovered group chat in iMessage with their cousins it was fun for literally 30 minutes before it was tears and abuse -…

Most teens are kids.

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

#675

Post by woadwarrior01 » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

deruta wrote: post #638

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #635

I'm currently polishing up an on-device app that I wrote for myself a few months ago to safely expand shortened links and to get rid of tracking parameters from URLs and QR codes for release as a free app ( https://cleanlinks.app ). My other app ( https://slopornot.app , an on-device AI generated text and image detector) has been stuck in App Store review limbo for almost a month now. Probably because it's an on-devi…

Scunthorpe problem seems to be showing in the latter case.

Indeed! :) I noticed it too and decided it was worth the risk. The name was too good to pass up.

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

#676

Post by tmdetect » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

I’m working on https://tempmaildetector.com and more specifically a Wordpress plugin to support it: https://wordpress.org/plugins/temp-mail-detector-block-tempo...

The plugin offers users a way to input their own block lists, a pre-existing one, or make use of the API which is constantly getting updated.

As a first time Wordpress plugin developer, the approval process was a bit slow but it’s like that for a good reason.

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

#677

Post by dartharva » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

contingencies wrote: post #123

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…

Please make sure it is specific to mosquitos and does not attack other insects. Insect populations worldwide are experiencing significant declines in both abundance and diversity, with several studies reporting reductions ranging from 40% to 75% over recent decades. Estimates suggest that 5%–10% of all insect species have disappeared in the last 150 years, and some global meta-analyses indicate terrestrial insect pop…

I mean.. if they venture into human indoors they are already doomed in the first place. Not much scope of proliferating in such an artificial environment.

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

#678

Post by brynet » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

Making rent as an open source developer.

Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my really bad HTML skills.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

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

#679

Post by dartharva » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:11 PM UTC

acyou wrote: post #452

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…

Surface level thinking, ecological disaster in the making. Birds and bats and other bugs eat mosquitoes to live. Killing all the mosquitoes is like the Chinese killing all the sparrows. We do not understand, and we do not want to understand, the deep consequences of our actions. People who think we can reengineer and shape ecology by eliminating key species are here on the dunning Kruger curve. Better option, if you…

Mosquitos can thrive and play their part in the food chain as much as they want.. outdoors.

What bird or bat or other bugs is getting their food needs fulfilled by hunting mosquitos inside your house?

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

#680

Post by stillsut » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

Working on a script to let people launch claude code, gemini cli, and aider agents on the same task and compare results. Handles all the git worktree stuff for you so they can run in parallel. Kind of like OpenRouter but for CLI agents.

What feels really cool is using the framework to build framework, I've got 150 ai generated commits stacked on top of each other, you can see every prompt and accepted solution in the dev logs I produce: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1...