831–840 of 900 posts
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…
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…
I guess a bunch of yaml for each of the main PaaS services would be nearly that.
I’m still slowly working on a location intelligence data union ( https://wherelabs.info ) - the idea is people install an app and agree in a very upfront way to have their location tracked over time. The union monetises this by selling privacy preserving aggregates (think ‘where is everyone in London right now’, or ‘where did people commute from?’), and acts on behalf of union members to stop data brokers selling the…
this is a really fascinating idea. I'm reading it as, instead of seeing my individual identity in a location dataset, it will see -DataUnionMember- with no unique identifier? When two members are in the same place at the same time, you don't know which one went in which direction? The question of who can de-identify or unmask the data is there, but I could see the capability being required for gov, military, and poli…
More or less my initial approach to this is you take a grid, and you show movements/density on that grid. If necessary you coarsen the grid to avoid reidentification of individuals, and ultimately to get a good picture of the population given the biased sample which is the union membership, you need a statistical model on top which also helps from a privacy perspective.
State actors demanding individual location history is definitely an issue. I have a few possible approaches in mind to defend against that.
I'm working on an engine for Excel-like formulas, which will be available both as a library and as a service (which I've mentioned on HN a few times before). I originally started work on the engine back in 2008, when our app builder needed it. This is a wheel I see people reinventing all the time, often for use in SaaS applications. The implementations are often underwhelming: function support is limited, documentati…
I wanted three things Pocket didn’t offer:
1. A search-first experience
2. Integration with tools I already use (like Telegram)
3. A way to actually review saved content, with help from LLMs and spaced repetition
Still in beta, but usable. Would love to hear thoughts or your experience on building a product like this.