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alextousss
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...
contingencies
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.
jcalx
From the linked Hackaday article:
> 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.
dwattttt
Imagine the sound a mosquito makes when it flies near your ear; it's quite distinct. I'm sure it's possible to distinguish mosquitos based on that (which is a factor related to the doppler signature mentioned).
BoiledCabbage
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.
dartharva
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.
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
nine_k
A 40-gram device is unlikely to pack any punch, except against a mosquito.
It could be a great reconnaissance tool though.
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
herval
Holy wow, if this works well, I’d like to order a dozen!
undefined
teruza
Very cool idea. What is your estimated price? This could work well in many African countries if the price is low.
alextousss
Long term, around $300/unit
Breza
If it worked in my DC backyard, I'd pay that in a heartbeat.
declan_roberts
Props to you for not using a UV light to attract moths and calling it a mosquito killer.
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
taneq
I seem to recall reading that mosquitos mainly seek out carbon dioxide...
laurent_du
I read this as well, and tried holding my breath (I can hold it for several minutes) while walking in the forest, and the mosquitoes still bit me.
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
wonger_
Clever seams. Have you tried washing any of the garments?
m-a-t-t-i
Yeah, I've been wearing and washing the prototypes for years now.
lastcoyotes
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.
adityaathalye
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.
m-a-t-t-i
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
adityaathalye
So cool! So, I buy this brand of thin-sole shoes called Xero. Their Do It Yourself kit is a simple Vibram sole I can cut to size, a hole punch to find the right fit, and a long lace that I can tie in many different ways, including as a slipper, or sandal, or greek-style laced-up huarache. Tie style, with different colour combinations of sole and lace make for distinctive personalisation.
Your stuff takes it to a whole other level. It makes me imagine a constructible footwear that can morph from a flip-flop (band across foot) all the way up to an all-weather knee-length boot.
No doubt you have already imagined how experimentation with materials and sealing/binding techniques could yield a design system that everyone can make their own; from the multi-spectral La Sape, to baby wear for those fast-growth years, to field equipment for the extreme adventurer.
(edit: fixed broken sentence)
1zael
This is insanely amazing. The youtube video is so well-created. I hope to see this become successful!
agcat
This is actually very therapeutic to watch! All the best
oidar
I would like sign up for your newsletter.
motohagiography
this is a really important and disruptive idea. amazing.
what do you need to scale this?
m-a-t-t-i
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.
zakqwy
ah this is fascinating!!!! Any more info anywhere?
m-a-t-t-i
Here's a recent interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85fy8cXpkyk
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
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 ;-)
undefined
n_u
Which part of the index are you putting in the buffer pool here? The postings list, the doc store or the terms dict?
Is it being cached for future queries or are you just talking about putting it in memory to perform the computation for a query?
marginalia_nu
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.
n_u
Ah interesting. Is your keyword-document map (aka term dict) too big to keep in memory permanently? My understanding is that at Google they just keep it in memory on every replica.
Edit: I should specify they shard the corpus by document so there isn't a replica with the entire term dict on it.
winrid
This is basically what everyone that tries to use mmap in their database realizes.
james_chu
What kind of structure does Marginalia Search help people to obtain?
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.
Jabbles
kaspermarstal
Yes exactly like that!
duskhat
Somewhat similar is https://paradigmai.com.
kaspermarstal
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
duskhat
Totally agree! And to be clear, I'm not intending to discourage you (or anyone else) from working on it. A bunch of smart people separately working and iterating to create the best version of spreadsheet + LLMs makes me a happy user
lippihom
Kind of looks a bit like what Clay is built to do...?
kaspermarstal
Okay, I'll bite. There are many clever people out there who figured out that spreadsheets is a great UI paradigm for building low-code AI workflows. That is good for users. And I find it is good for me. Thanks for validating the idea guys.
juxtaposicion
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)
kaspermarstal
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!
lippihom
Will keep an eye out for this when it launches.
rrr_oh_man
Do you have paying users?
I built something like that for Google Sheets in early 2024 and now I'm thinking whether I missed an opportunity.
kaspermarstal
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 :)
mceoin
Hey Kasper - would love to grab a coffee sometime (on the Internet : )
kaspermarstal
Hey, sure! Send me an email at kasper at getcellm dot com and let’s find a time
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.
bravesoul2
A way to single click install stuff like this (a moderner cPanel) would be excellent for letting non backed people deploy apps like this.
I guess a bunch of yaml for each of the main PaaS services would be nearly that.
rorylaitila
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.
elektor
This may be of interest to you:
The Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA; https://tobacco.stanford.edu/) collection currently contains 62,553 tobacco advertisements.
rorylaitila
Thanks, I'll check it out!
justbees
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.
rorylaitila
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!
kvathupo
This is awesome! Cigarette ads are so seductively cool, yet the embodiment of selling you a fantasy
rorylaitila
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.
motohagiography
superb and immensely valuable, this is a history of desire.
rorylaitila
Indeed :) The aspect I like most is seeing through the advertisers lenses what they thought the public would care about the most.
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
tracker1
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).
aniketsaurav18
Very excited for this. Current client-side DB implementations are hard to work with. Will it support IndexedDB?
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!
rcy
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.
andyferris
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!
rcy
Yeah it is true. I am more or less modelling the interactions my kid has with other kids and the social relationships I have with her friends parents. She doesn't go to anyone's house who's parents I don't know. Obviously that will change as she gets older.
So for now, the social dynamic in the app is for parents to connect first. Once connected, their kids can choose to connect (facebook messenger kids uses this same process I think).
When I talk to less tech-savvy parents in my community, I think many feel quite helpless and unsure how to navigate a lot of this. Consuming youtube kids videos on an iPad is one option, or outlawing screentime entirely is another. Kids want real stuff that they are in control of. I want to build age appropriate versions of this kind of stuff... with the appropriate guards and oversight in place, keeping parents in the drivers seat.
jonhohle
Most teens are kids.
CalRobert
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
rcy
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.
piker
Working on Tritium, the legal IDE in Rust (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
czarofvan
Are you having lawyers getting of MS Word. Ive tried in the past with no success.
But this is really cool. Its definitely a problem they have.
piker
I don't think Word will go away, no.
Some times you need to write a whitepaper, some marketing materials or something that a general product like Word is more suited for. Tritium is however aiming to replace Word as the transactional lawyer's go-to desktop application for the most common workflow.
barrenko
Have you ever thought about a kind of a diff format for legal texts / documents / cases? And what are transactional lawyers btw?
NoboruWataya
Transactional lawyers are lawyers that primarily work on transactions, eg, mergers and acquisition, bond or share issuances, etc. It means they spend most of their time drafting, reviewing and negotiating deal documents rather than, eg, going to court.
I'm not the person you responded to but there are various diff programmes out there that lawyers use. I think they tend to be proprietary formats though. Lawyers pretty much all work in MS Word so any comparison software needs to work with that.
barrenko
Thank you Noboru! So there are proprietary diff formats for text formats?
piker
Thanks for checking it out, and yes!
If you type some text into one of the documents in the web preview, click the triangle and click the name of that document, you'll get a redline. That's the current industry-standard diff format. Redlines don't standardize around any kind of metadata format, though, so parsing them (unlike a diff) is non-trivial. There's an opportunity for improvement.
As mentioned elsewhere, transactional lawyers are corporate lawyers who work on deals (think drafting corporate documents, M&A or IPOs) as opposed to litigators who go to court and argue cases.
barrenko
Thank you. So this red squigeee line is the industry standard?
I built a simple "gpt wrapper" focused on legal - in the process of fine-tuning an llm, I've noticed that Gemini / Google scraped the hell out of a certain legal forum (phbb board) in my country. After that I've started focusing on court legal cases entries (since there's a public website for that) and thinking a bit about what would a diff in a court case ideally look like, and it's an interesting problem.
Your product reminds me a bit of quantus.finance (also here on HN) even though the space is not really related, but it caters to a business area in an interesting way. What are you planning on doing next (on a high level)?
tombert
I have been unemployed for the last few months, and there's only so much TV and YouTube I can watch without going utterly insane between interviews,
Since WGU just started doing masters degrees in CS, I decided it would be a way to kill large amounts of time while getting at least a little out of it, so I registered for it.
I've been a professional software person for like fourteen years, so I was able to knock it out extremely quickly due to WGU's competency based stuff, so now I finally am able to put "MS" after my name.
hmottestad
Good for you. Cross my fingers that you'll land a good job soon. Or create your own job.
tombert
I have a few prospects lined up.
I'm actually planning on doing a second masters from a slightly more prestigious university with a more theory-heavy degree [1], but it's nice to at least have an official graduate degree now. Hopefully it helps me find work a bit quicker, and if nothing else it's just kind of fun to pile up degrees.
yu3zhou4
I was recently looking for a master's degree in math that is:
- 100% remote
- 100% self-paced
- fairly cheap
and it looks like Open University is the best option right now? Did you find any better option?
Simon_O_Rourke
Best of luck on your job search, hope you land something soon!
hx8
Do you feel like you picked up additional knowledge and skills? The pluses you mentioned are fighting boredom, being affordable, and being credentialed.
tombert
Not really, no. I was a bit underwhelmed by the whole thing; it didn't feel like "computer science", it felt like light software engineering, and since I've been doing software engineering for awhile I was able to fly through the work.
I did have a bit of fun learning about some of the more "platform as a service" parts of AWS, that has been something I've been putting off at learning more about for awhile, but overall I don't feel like I learned a ton.
I registered for another masters degree from a different online school to start in October that I think I'll enjoy and learn more from.
lotsoweiners
What did the total cost for your MS?
tombert
Not very much, around $4,400. https://www.wgu.edu/online-it-degrees/computer-science-maste...
WGU charges "per term", and you can take as many courses as you'd like per term, as long as you can complete them.
saf12
So you completed 10 courses within the span of 6 months? Did you find the workload to be heavy?
rpastuszak
Because of a HN post(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44421776), I've got a ton of feedback for Ensō: my writing app for flow/stream of consciousness writing. So, I'm wrapping up the release and adding good support for non-Latin, esp. RTL languages (Arabic, Persian, Hebrew) + pinyin and Japanese input methods.
Recently I also made a font for it! https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/433-how-to-make-a-font-that...
I'm also thinking about organising the usage patters, because over the past few years I've collected a few interesting groups: mental health focussed users, script writers, neurospicy folks, bloggers, squirrel enthusiasts. I'm thinking about this here: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/how-people-use-enso/
screaminghawk
Love this idea. I like to use voice recording and transcription for the same thing, but having a text interface is nice for public spaces!
rollinDyno
Have you ever wanted to write your life story but found it too overwhelming? I’m developing an app that acts as your personal interviewer, guiding you through your memories and helping you share them with your loved ones.
The app is designed for older adults who enjoy reminiscing but struggle to organize their thoughts into a coherent narrative. The goal is to preserve their hard-won insights and pass them down—to family members who may be too busy to ask the right questions now, and to future generations who would otherwise never hear these stories.
I have a working prototype that allows me to test the interview flow, and I’ll soon be sharing it with friends and family for initial feedback. I’m now looking for a designer to collaborate on the next phase.
Design will be a critical part of this app. The way stories are visually presented will be central to the user experience and will likely determine the app’s success. If you’re a designer interested in this kind of work, I’d love to hear from you. Given the text-heavy nature of the app, experience with typography and content-focused design will be especially valuable.
raudette
I love this.
My great grandmother, who lived into my 20s, wrote a 10 page memoir about growing up - life stories, people, places etc... And I found it super interesting - I built a vacation around the places last summer.
I asked her daughter/my grandmother to do the same, but she wasn't interested. And then I've thought about the exercise myself - it's hard to think of things in my life that a future great-grandchild might find interesting. And it's not clear if my great-grandmother's story I find interesting, in contrast with financial hardships I did not face? How do you pick out the interesting from the mundane? What is most interesting about today 100 years from now?
And I can see the potential for core interview questions to help draw it out.
fnands
Interesting! I built something similar at a hackathon a while back: https://fnands.com/blog/2024/factory-hackathon/
We called it Journalaist, and billed it as a personal ghostwriter. What we found is that it lives or dies by the quality of the interview
rollinDyno
Thanks for sharing! Yes, I quickly came to that conclusion as well. It's put me in the novel position whereby product development is about finding the right prompt, and maybe even about finetuning.
avyfain
Very cool! Would love to check this out. Have been meaning to interview my aunts for years to write down my family history now that my dad is no longer with us. A tool like what you describe could be super helpful.
sgoto
This sounds super interesting! I'd love to beta test it if you are looking for people to try!
You can find me at:
rollinDyno
Sure, I'd love to have your feedback. Let me package this into my first beta and I'll reach out.
DeltaCoast
Would love a link to the demo if and when you’re open to sharing. I’m a product designer but not looking for projects, I’m mostly curious - this is one of the more unique ideas I’ve heard.
rollinDyno
Yea, let me send it your way once I have it! Please update your profile with contact info.
Fripplebubby
Have you heard of https://www.autobiographer.com/ ? Is it similar, different?
rollinDyno
It's pretty much the same, but I have a few ideas to make my app stand out. Thanks for sharing! Nice to see the idea has potential.
zer-0-ne
[dead]
lobsterthief
Sounds really cool! Best of luck. Do you have a website or samples/demo yet?
rollinDyno
Nothing yet, but I can keep you posted. Please update your HN profile with contact info.
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What are you working on? Do you have any new ideas you're thinking about?