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.
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 populations are declining by close to 9% per decade.
> If you don’t want to kill flies, wasps, bees, or other useful pollinators while eradicating the tiny little bloodsuckers that are the drone’s target, you need to be able to not only locate bugs, but discriminate mosquitoes from the others.
> For this, he uses the micro-doppler signatures that the different wing beats of the various insects put out. Wasps have a very wide-band doppler echo – their relatively long and thin wings are moving slower at the roots than at the tips. Flies, on the other hand, have stubbier wings, and emit a tighter echo signal. The mosquito signal is even tighter.
Fascinating engineering! Doesn't seem like it would be possible but it apparently is. There's also more visuals at about 17 minutes in the video embedded in that article, the signatures seem fairly distinct.
Don't want to underestimate how disastrous this could be for other insects. Even ignoring the impact on them, the impact on our needs to maintain pollinator populations.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are bio solutions, e.g. my city puts mosquito-larva-killing bacteria in the river and the lakes.
It works okay, but they are unable target _all_ water surface. They use drones, they give out these bacteria to people so they put it in the rainwater tanks, etc.
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.
Ans there is also a recent post where someone use a similar device to light the mosquito https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005200 (20 points | May 2025 | 5 comments) and you must give the final bow that sound safer. (Protip: Buy an Electric Fly Swatter)
there is a crowdfunding effort for one going on right now for such a device. I think the price is around $500. the videos are equally awesome and hilarious as they vaporize into a little puff of smoke
How does this compare in reducing mosquito populations over something braindead like putting some yard waste and water in a bucket for a few days and either adding mosquito dunks or pouring the larvae out?
Or is this more like a stand-in for bug spray/smoke?
Duuuude! Give me this. Please.
We have these mosquito bats/racquets that I've to use every day in a futile attempt to keep my family safe. I need something like what you're building. I looked up even laser mosquito killers.
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 really want to fight malaria go fight that directly, leave mosquitoes out of it.
In general I agree that messing with ecosystems sometimes has unpredictable consequences.
In the case of mosquitos, though, they cause so much suffering, that it would be stupid to not work on eradicating them because of possible negative consequences.
We have to be careful, of course (widespread use of insecticides is a problem), but targeted measures are really unlikely to cause more harm than mosquitos already do.
Yeah well mosquitoes should definitely be made extinct btw but there’s no way a robot that kills bugs in your back yard is going to accomplish that so you can put your pitchfork down
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.
I would love a set of these! I've seen a few "legos of clothing" ideas out there but I believe this is my favorite execution of it so far. It lends itself to the "gorpcore" style of clothing like Cotopaxi where its blocks of different color. Even with the monochrome examples in your video, I love the texture inherent to its linkage.
Brilliant work! Zippers got nothing on this! I am particularly taken by how the "stich" weaves into itself, to flatten the seam.
Now, what about footwear, I'm thinking. Stitched soles + uppers are so much more durable. If you could cut a sole to a person's foot size, then they could construct the upper to their best-fit, best-colour-combo design.
I've tried some footwear! These had a really soft rubber soles, but I've also made ones where the soles were cut from a sheet of hard Vibram rubber: https://self-assembly.fi/canvas-shoes
I needed my own CAD setup that can draw the detailed assembly instructions as 3D vector drawings. And that can also derive the assembly order from a graph based garment representation automatically. I'm almost finished with those, so after that I just need more large format laser cutters and customers.
Also, I've been working on this for a while under a beta version called Self-Assembly, which was a bit more fashion oriented. New i-t-s-e rebranding is to be more Lego like. Here's the old website: www.self-assembly.fi
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.
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 ;-)
I'm primarily looking at document lists and possibly the keyword-documents mapping.
Caching will likely be fairly tuned toward the operation itself, since it's not a general-purpose DBMS and I can fairly accurately predict which pages will likely be useful to cache or when read-ahead is likely to be fruitful based on the operation being performed.
For keyword-document mappings some LRU cache scheme is likely a good fit, when reading a list of documents readahead is good (and I can inform the pool of how far to read ahead), when intersecting document lists I can also generally predict when pages are likely to be re-read or needed in the future based on the position in the tree.
Will definitely need a fair bit of tuning but overall the problem is greatly simplified by revolving around very specific types of access patterns.
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.
Looks very similar yes, it is a great UI paradigm for running many prompts. I think of spreadsheets as the OG low-code tool and with just a sprinkle of LLMs, people can do so much more with tools they already know
That’s pretty interesting. I’ve using Airtable’s “field agents” for a similar use case, but would love to use this instead. Does it automatically cache values? (Don’t want to pay for repeat prompts just because one input cell updated)
Yes it does, you can toggle it on and off. Send me an email at kasper at getcellm dot com or sign up to the waitlist on getcellm dot com and I will personally onboard you!
No not yet, we are about to onboard the first users on the waitlist one-by-one and when we have ironed out the major issues that we will inevitably discover, we will open up for paid users after that.
I wouldn’t worry too much about missing out, as you probably very well aware, whatever you choose to work on takes incredible amounts of time and energy to get off the ground. Now you just have more time to out into something else :)
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.
I'm digitally cataloging all US vintage print advertisements I can get my hands on (https://adretro.com). The backend is built on MySQL and Lucee and the full page ads published with Notion and Super.so. I'm using OpenAI vision to extract entity data from the images.
So far I've cataloged about 1500 advertisements out of the ~100,000 in my possession. Of which that is probably only 0.1% of all the major material out there. It's going to take a long time! I'm going at a rate of about 10,000/year. I'm going to have to speed this up :) But I've gotten the process to catalog a full magazine down from a week to a few hours.
I'm thinking of ways to support the archive. I am doing original art from the ads I may sell, or sell really nice copies of rare ads.
The Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA; https://tobacco.stanford.edu/) collection currently contains 62,553 tobacco advertisements.
What about having a contribute button? I know this must be a lot of work and it's such a cool idea! If you had a way to contribute on the join page I would chip in for sure :) My husband is a writer and he uses newspapers.com to research a lot of vintage newspapers for historical context. I can imagine this being a great resource for him.
Thanks I might try that! My impression of donation pages is the conversion rate is extremely low but it will be easy to add nonetheless. I might get better results with offering something in return, like Patreon (not sure what kind of patron content I want to regularly produce though) or products.
There is a much larger database of small ads that I am not publishing on the site, mostly because they add a lot of clutter. But to a researcher they may be valuable. Eventually I want to make the backend database available to people like your husband. Something like newspapers.com makes a lot of sense, thanks for the idea!
Thank you! Yeah the cigarette ads are some of the most consistent. Once I get more in I am hoping to see some trends and themes in the messaging over time.
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).
Interesting, I'll have to look at this in the near future. Definitely like what I see at a glance. One problem I've had with some other client sync/db options is that they don't support the use case for public, shared and private tables/collections. A lot of real world apps may have items that are available to all users (read only or not), some users (by group or management chain) or private (but reassignable by managers) in order to support real world workflows and potentially confrontational work (think avoiding stealing other worker's contacts/commissions).
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.
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!
When my daughter was around 2 years old she would sit on my lap and type letters on my laptop into Emacs. I would change the color of the text and she would type more. I figured there was a simple webapp here, so built various things for her to play with over the next couple years. One let her type words and then fire off a ddg safe image search and return cartoon images in response. She would copy words out of her books to get pictures of dogs and trees and silly things.
We live far away from family, and the idea of having a way for her to communicate with cousins and grandparents became the focus. As well as other kids in town. So I thought about a social version of the experiments I'd been playing with.
I'm inspired by Seymour Papert's thinking, about kids using technology to learn math and logic... living in "mathland" so to speak. But I'm also thinking about positive alternatives to the default social network interactions that are available for kids and families now.
Long term I would love to build a platform that lets kids explore technology and build collaborative spaces.
Keeping parents in the loop of what is going on is important, but balancing that correctly can be challenging, I don't want a "big mother is watching" kind of app, but I think its appropriate for parents to know what their kids are doing and looking at and talking to, especially at primary school age (my daughter is currently 8). What is needed and appropriate always changes.
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 - which was a really instructive lesson for me.
At that (primary school) age parents would almost universally know the parents of your kid’s out-of-school playmates - if only because someone tends to have duty of care at any time and who is where with whom needs to be figured out.
The feature set seems sound and frankly welcome and overdue to me!
Sounds cool, would love a link! I’ve started buying walkie talkies for neighbourhood kids and set up a Minecraft server which has turned in to a sorta social hub for my daughters- we’re trying to delay phones as long as possible - but a purpose built solution would be great
Thanks for your interest. I will send you a link if you want to have a look and try out something that is still rough around the edges. I'm working out some login/connection flow issues and am not ready to publicly share quite yet.
Readit News
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...
https://manifund.org/projects/build-anti-mosqu
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 populations are declining by close to 9% per decade.
> If you don’t want to kill flies, wasps, bees, or other useful pollinators while eradicating the tiny little bloodsuckers that are the drone’s target, you need to be able to not only locate bugs, but discriminate mosquitoes from the others.
> For this, he uses the micro-doppler signatures that the different wing beats of the various insects put out. Wasps have a very wide-band doppler echo – their relatively long and thin wings are moving slower at the roots than at the tips. Flies, on the other hand, have stubbier wings, and emit a tighter echo signal. The mosquito signal is even tighter.
Fascinating engineering! Doesn't seem like it would be possible but it apparently is. There's also more visuals at about 17 minutes in the video embedded in that article, the signatures seem fairly distinct.
I know of a Dutch company doing something similar. Focusses on pest detecting/mitigation in greenhouses atm: https://www.pats-drones.com/
It could be a great reconnaissance tool though.
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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.
Is the name a word play with "torgnole" at all, or does it mean something?
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.
It works okay, but they are unable target _all_ water surface. They use drones, they give out these bacteria to people so they put it in the rainwater tanks, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis_israele...
Ans there is also a recent post where someone use a similar device to light the mosquito https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005200 (20 points | May 2025 | 5 comments) and you must give the final bow that sound safer. (Protip: Buy an Electric Fly Swatter)
What's the fidelity of the sonar in detection of flying mosquitoes?
Or is this more like a stand-in for bug spray/smoke?
People who think we can reengineer and shape ecology by eliminating key species are here on the dunning Kruger curve.
Better option, if you really want to fight malaria go fight that directly, leave mosquitoes out of it.
In the case of mosquitos, though, they cause so much suffering, that it would be stupid to not work on eradicating them because of possible negative consequences.
We have to be careful, of course (widespread use of insecticides is a problem), but targeted measures are really unlikely to cause more harm than mosquitos already do.
What bird or bat or other bugs is getting their food needs fulfilled by hunting mosquitos inside your house?
Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_eKc6c5tDw
Now, what about footwear, I'm thinking. Stitched soles + uppers are so much more durable. If you could cut a sole to a person's foot size, then they could construct the upper to their best-fit, best-colour-combo design.
what do you need to scale this?
Also, I've been working on this for a while under a beta version called Self-Assembly, which was a bit more fashion oriented. New i-t-s-e rebranding is to be more Lego like. Here's the old website: www.self-assembly.fi
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
You make it sound like I was trying to troll everyone when we wrote that paper. We were warning you.
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Is it being cached for future queries or are you just talking about putting it in memory to perform the computation for a query?
Caching will likely be fairly tuned toward the operation itself, since it's not a general-purpose DBMS and I can fairly accurately predict which pages will likely be useful to cache or when read-ahead is likely to be fruitful based on the operation being performed.
For keyword-document mappings some LRU cache scheme is likely a good fit, when reading a list of documents readahead is good (and I can inform the pool of how far to read ahead), when intersecting document lists I can also generally predict when pages are likely to be re-read or needed in the future based on the position in the tree.
Will definitely need a fair bit of tuning but overall the problem is greatly simplified by revolving around very specific types of access patterns.
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.
https://github.com/getcellm/cellm
I built something like that for Google Sheets in early 2024 and now I'm thinking whether I missed an opportunity.
I wouldn’t worry too much about missing out, as you probably very well aware, whatever you choose to work on takes incredible amounts of time and energy to get off the ground. Now you just have more time to out into something else :)
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.
GitHub: https://github.com/Airbolt-AI/airbolt
I guess a bunch of yaml for each of the main PaaS services would be nearly that.
So far I've cataloged about 1500 advertisements out of the ~100,000 in my possession. Of which that is probably only 0.1% of all the major material out there. It's going to take a long time! I'm going at a rate of about 10,000/year. I'm going to have to speed this up :) But I've gotten the process to catalog a full magazine down from a week to a few hours.
I'm thinking of ways to support the archive. I am doing original art from the ads I may sell, or sell really nice copies of rare ads.
The Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA; https://tobacco.stanford.edu/) collection currently contains 62,553 tobacco advertisements.
There is a much larger database of small ads that I am not publishing on the site, mostly because they add a lot of clutter. But to a researcher they may be valuable. Eventually I want to make the backend database available to people like your husband. Something like newspapers.com makes a lot of sense, thanks for the idea!
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/latesthttps://github.com/TanStack/db
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.
We live far away from family, and the idea of having a way for her to communicate with cousins and grandparents became the focus. As well as other kids in town. So I thought about a social version of the experiments I'd been playing with.
I'm inspired by Seymour Papert's thinking, about kids using technology to learn math and logic... living in "mathland" so to speak. But I'm also thinking about positive alternatives to the default social network interactions that are available for kids and families now.
Long term I would love to build a platform that lets kids explore technology and build collaborative spaces.
Keeping parents in the loop of what is going on is important, but balancing that correctly can be challenging, I don't want a "big mother is watching" kind of app, but I think its appropriate for parents to know what their kids are doing and looking at and talking to, especially at primary school age (my daughter is currently 8). What is needed and appropriate always changes.
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 - which was a really instructive lesson for me.
At that (primary school) age parents would almost universally know the parents of your kid’s out-of-school playmates - if only because someone tends to have duty of care at any time and who is where with whom needs to be figured out.
The feature set seems sound and frankly welcome and overdue to me!