MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Non-intrusive AI agent to automate email driven workflows
by satwik | 2025-05-27 15:24:20+00:00
Hi HN! My co-founder and I spent the last 4 weeks building something we desperately needed ourselves.

The Problem: We spend hours processing emails - scheduling meetings, going through long newsletters, downloading attachments to review, verifying documents like invoices, and of course taking actions on external systems (Salesforce, Asana, Jira etc) based on emails received. A lot of this can be automated with the help of AI agents, saving several hours every week.

Our Solution: Forward any email to a specialized AI agent that completes the task and email you back the results. No integrations, no inbox access, no setup needed to begin with.

How it works:

- Forward a meeting request to schedule@mxtoai.com → get proposed times + Add to calendar links Forward an invoice to ask@mxtoai.com with "how much do I owe?" → get exact amounts and payment details extracted

- Forward a newsletter to summarize@mxtoai.com → get a 3-bullet summary in 30 seconds, set it up with forwarding rules and you'll have auto-summaries!

- Similarly we have aliases for translation, simplification, fact checking, background research, and more. Check a bigger list of use-cases in our docs: https://docs.mxtoai.com/why-use-mxtoai

We handle all attachment types (PDFs, spreadsheets, images) and you can add custom instructions in your forwarded email. So far we've processed 500+ emails in private beta.

Why this approach?

- Privacy-first: We only see emails you explicitly forward (vs. scanning your entire inbox)

- Universal: Works with any email client on any device – Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, anything

- Zero friction: No OAuth flows, browser extensions, or app switching

What's next?

- We'll be supporting dedicated aliases for users, so that you can map your own instructions to these aliases.

- We're working on adding integrations for day-to-day external apps (Github, Asana, Linear, and so on), so that those can be automated too.

- We're building a browser extension for smoother forwarding experience along with custom workflow automation.

- We'll open-source the core engine while offering hosted + self-hosted options.

Asking HN for:

- What do you think of the overall solution & approach?

- What email workflows would you automate if you could?

- Any specific feature that you're looking forward to seeing?

- Any other feedback?

Try it free at https://mxtoai.com (just whitelist your email, no signup needed, forward only what you want to)
by dkdcio | 2025-05-27 15:24:31+00:00
This looks awesome. One of my biggest gripe's personally with Iceberg (less-so Delta Lake, but similar) is how difficult it is to just try out on a laptop. Delta Lake has vanilla Python implementations, but those are fragemented and buggy IME. Iceberg has just never worked locally, you need a JVM cluster and a ton of setup. I went down a similar road of trying to use sqlite/postgres+duckdb+parquet files in blob storage, but it was a lot of work.

It seems like this will just work out of the box, and just scale up to very reasonable data sizes. And the work from the DuckDB folks is typically excellent. It's clear they understand this space. Excited to try it out!
by xhkkffbf | 2025-05-27 15:24:45+00:00
This is kind of a cute thing that wanna-be-rebels may enjoy trying on, much like some hipster who buys a leather jacket. But you don't. Believe me. You don't.

But for fun, go pay for a legit ticket to watch a movie like "The Godfather" or "The Irishman." Count the dead bodies.
by onetimeusename | 2025-05-27 15:24:51+00:00
I think we should not suspend rights at any point. There should be due process. What I am opposed to is excessive/disproportionate litigation over due process. The type of thing that seems like dragging of feet rather than assuring due process.

I personally suspect the lawyerly class of people might be sympathetic to less stringent immigration laws. Another thing I think is demonstrably true is that in constitutional/civil law, meaning the cases that greatly impact the country involving the government, the top law schools seem to have much more voice. So for example Garcia's lawyer is a Yale law grad well known in the NGO sector and his cases have been heard in front of high courts like the SC who themselves are usually Ivy grads. So it's quite likely such people are not an independent group but may share a lot of opinions. I don't think that's a stretch to say. If they collectively lean towards making immigration easy and deportation hard, we might see that reflected in legal cases.

So we had a situation where asylum was granted on a broad class basis like with the CHNV program that granted asylum to people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela without a hearing. Trump attempted to revoke that status and the courts ruled he could only revoke it on a case-by-case basis (https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-blocks-trump-revoking...).

I will also add that it's very unlikely Trump's mass deportation materializes because it's too logistically and legally costly. He said something about how it would take 200 years to complete the deportation hearings. This is the disproportionate situation I am opposed to. If it's easy in then it should also be easy out. So in short I am accusing lawyers of laundering an agenda through the courts. Originally asylum law was meant specifically in the context of WWII but it has expanded so that people fearing crime in their home countries are also included. This was done by courts through trials.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-27 15:25:12+00:00
I don't see how a short consultation on the matter would exceed 3-4 digits. It's maybe an hour from a specialist to see what is needed. Saving your bacon later on is worth some cost.

Worst case, you might also have existing recommendations or fire code/regulations for battery energy storage systems in your area, and while those specifically may be overkill they give an idea of what is considered necessary. Maybe you could consult your local fire department, depending on how things work in your area.
by Marbling4581 | 2025-05-27 15:25:18+00:00
I don't use it, but have been keeping an eye on it.

At launch, they limited the number of affected tuples to 10000, including tuples in secondary indexes. They recently changed this limit to:

> A transaction cannot modify more than 3,000 rows. The number of secondary indexes does not influence this number. This limit applies to all DML statements (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE).

There are a lot of other (IMO prohibitive) restrictions listed in their docs.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/wor...
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-05-27 15:25:49+00:00
> Implicit in this article is the idea that you have to use Google, and that Google Search equals “the web”. I’ll be the boring nerd, I guess, who has to be the one to say there are many other search engines out there.

This is true for us, but a majority of non-software savvy people associate Google/Chrome (search implictly) with "the internet".
by Festro | 2025-05-27 15:26:18+00:00
Meta's Reality Labs arm operates at a loss currently. Meta have yet to bring to market a product or service, from ideation to launch, that has garnered any degree of positive reception or reach.

Yes, there's the Oculus line (now Meta Quest), but this was an acquired company and not indicative of Meta's own VR/AR initiatives. That they have continued to produce competitive products since the acquisition is a positive sign.

The dream for Meta appears to be to resurrect the golden era of social media in VR. To recreate the success of Facebook in a deeper interactive environment. They have the resources and the hardware but they are struggling to get people into their software. Horizon Worlds has launched fiarly quietly, struggled to maintain users, and been plagued by issues and controversy. If they can get it to succeed then they can monopolise a space where your every action can be turned into monetised ad data for companies to buy into and target. That's the goal.

As VR gets better, and VR environments improve, it feels logical that there will be a large social space online where people will spend large amounts of time. Whether that's Meta's Horizon Worlds or a competing space, or an open source solution, remains to be seen.

I'd use your personal intuition to gauge whether you think Meta are in this for the long haul (they've certainly committed hard to the goal) or whether they're realising they can't force the outcome they want by throwing money at it.

Defence work is always stable. If you can put aside your moral concerns (if you have them).
by freedomben | 2025-05-27 15:26:22+00:00
There is plenty they can still do to push boundaries and be activists, but their decision was really quite reckless. At their current level of importance, they need to be progressives, not revolutionaries. They essentially took up arms against the industry using covid as an excuse. Well, I personally despise the IP industry and think that it needs radical reform, if not complete destruction, we have to live to fight another day as well. Unless they really thought covid was truly going to kill us all and wipe us all off the planet, it was a short-sighted move on their part.

Now that's sad, I hope they learned their lesson, and I think we should all step up to help defend them. Aside from donations, I think people should be making a large amount of noise at their elected representatives to start reforming the ridiculous IP framework in the United States. The whole point of copyright and other protections was to ensure that there was some incentive to people to produce content and be able to monetize it. I think it's ludicrous to suggest that you need such an utterly long period with a shark full of teeth to go after people in order to incentivize the producing of content.
Show HN: I built an AI tool to generates image slideshows and UGC-style videos
by denizhdzh | 2025-05-27 15:26:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Lungo, a tool that generates image-based slideshows and UGC-style videos using AI. The system creates visuals and assembles them into structured, shareable content based on a text prompt.

What it does: • Generates images from prompts using a custom diffusion model • Constructs slideshows or short-form videos with transitions and optional voiceover • Handles layout, text generation, and multi-language support • Outputs are consistent in resolution and format, ready for distribution

I built with a React, firebase, OpenAI, Runway and ffmpeg. Feedback and questions welcome.
by tgv | 2025-05-27 15:28:37+00:00
10 is a small number. There's a middle ground. When I studied, we had lectures for all students, and a similar amount of time in "work groups," as they were called. That resembled secondary education: one teacher, around 30 students, but those classes were mainly focused on applying the newly acquired knowledge, making exercises, asking questions, checking homework, etc. Later, I taught such classes for programming 101, and it was perfectly doable. Work group teachers were also responsible for reviewing their students' tests.

But that commercially oriented boards are ruining education, that's a given. That they would stoop to this level is a bit surprising.
Ask HN: What is your CPM Target when working with Influencers?
by JanSchu | 2025-05-27 15:30:08+00:00
We are in the process of rolling out our first influencer campaigns (saas finance niche). However, the prices that are being asked of us are simply mind boggling. For a normal in-post feed on Instagram the influencers that we have contacted, ask for prices that convert into a CPM between $35 to $75.

I have to admit that we do not know yet the sales results, but such high CPMs make my head spin from a performance marketing perspective.

Do you have similar experiences? Since for such high CPMs, the conversion rates have to be extremely good to justify the spend.
by formalreconfirm | 2025-05-27 15:30:58+00:00
That's the part I don't really get. In the Manifesto they are talking about scaling to hundreds of terabytes and thousands of compute nodes. But DuckDB compute nodes, even if they are very performant, at the end are single nodes, so even if your lakehouse contains TB of data, you will be limited to your biggest client capacity (I know DuckDB works well with data bigger than memory, but still, I suppose it can reach limits at some point). At the end I think DuckLake is aimed at lakehouses of "reasonable" size the same way DuckDB is intended for data of "reasonable" size.
by iteria | 2025-05-27 15:31:29+00:00
The problem with that idea is that you need evangelists. It's not something that Nintendo will feel now, but I have successfully converted 6 families into PC gaming with my kid. I caught them at kindergarten and now they are in Valve's garden. My sister's family and her circle is all Playstation. Her kids have never touched Nintendo.

Sure there are people who don't care, but those people don't bring people into the fold. It's a slow erosion. It's how Microsoft is losing ground to Chromebooks and Macs. People who don't know aren't hearing that they need a windows machine as much. They hear they need a Mac for security/ease of use or all they need is a Chromebook because they just surf the web anyway.

Microsoft of course will be fine because they have business on lock, but they used to have consumers as well.
by pie_flavor | 2025-05-27 15:32:00+00:00
The first time I visited https://svelte.dev , the non-flat-vector banner instantly won me. It just stands out from the world around it. I just sort of assumed the engineering was superior to the competition if they were going to lead with crimped metal (and was right).

Flat design has always struck me as an extremist response to an issue. Windows Vista required everyone to be on the same page design-language wise in order to look good, but can the same be said of Windows XP? You can make just a few parts of your app drop-shadowed, you can add some slight reflection gradients while keeping the whole thing matte, you do not need to get rid of all visual depth just to avoid the feeling of zeerust.
by ayrtondesozzla | 2025-05-27 15:33:01+00:00
I'd change that line near the end to:

The only people that often value quality are engineers.

I might even add that the overwhelming majority of engineers are happy to sacrifice quality - and ethics generally - when the price is right. Not all, maybe.

It's a strange culture we have, one which readily produces engineer types capable of complex logic in their work, and at the same time, "the overarching concern of business is always profit" seems to sometimes cause difficulty.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-27 15:33:06+00:00
It's always odd to see this dichotomy on HN comments:

1) I'm amazing, I can solve any problem, I'm enlightened by my own intelligence, I'm the mover and shaker who drives all worldly productivity, and I do it by wrangling the newest technologies in the most imaginative creative and intelligent ways, no problem is too great for my superior intelligence!

2) Pay taxes? Ah but, uhh, that's impossible; like ... who decides? There, there's a dealbreaker for you! Hah! And anyway how much? I.. I... there's complexity, don't you know how difficult and complex it is to ... own a forest? Nobody could make a decision, I can see already that the combined might of a nation's experts could not come up with a figure, forget AI, this is just ... give up already, come on, some problems are forever out of reach.
by dkarl | 2025-05-27 15:33:16+00:00
What I don't like about building systems at the REPL is that when I investigate a possibility and it works out, I have to identify the code that's actually needed, clean it up, and turn my ad-hoc tests in the REPL into unit tests. There's a trade-off between quick experimentation and the mess I create in search of immediate feedback.

I think an LLM could help with that. Ideally, I could say, "Please add the widget-muckle-frobnicate function from the current REPL session to the codebase. Fix or flag any shortcuts I took in its implementation, such as hardcoding configuration and naming functions 'foo' or 'bar', and add unit tests that include the examples I tried in the REPL as well as property-based tests to exercise edge cases."
by plantwallshoe | 2025-05-27 15:33:29+00:00
I’m enrolled in an undergraduate CS program as an experienced (10 year) dev. I find AI incredibly useful as a tutor.

I usually ask it to grade my homework for me before I turn it in. I usually find I didn’t really understand some topic and the AI highlights this and helps set my understanding straight. Without it I would have just continued on with an incorrect understanding of the topic for 2-3 weeks while I wait for the assignment to be graded. As an adult with a job and a family this is incredibly helpful as I do homework at 10pm and all the office hours slots are in the middle of my workday.

I do admit though it is tough figuring out the right amount to struggle on my own before I hit the AI help button. Thankfully I have enough experience and maturity to understand that the struggle is the most important part and I try my best to embrace it. Myself at 18 would definitely not have been using AI responsibly.
by Nullabillity | 2025-05-27 15:33:49+00:00
> Just loaded up the Airbnb site and… it’s new icons. The actual UI I’m interacting with hasn’t changed a jot, though.

Don't undersell it. It also manages to run like ass on a desktop with a modern gaming GPU, and takes 5 years to load on a gigabit connection.

And got my location wrong. And decided to machine-translate everything away from my native language.
by tgv | 2025-05-27 15:34:17+00:00
> The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how much

you still have to learn. The goal of learning is not to do a job. It's to enrich you, broaden your mind, and it takes work on your part.

In similar reasoning, you could argue that you can take a car to go anywhere, or let everything be delivered on your doorstep, so why should I my child learn to walk?
by JoshTriplett | 2025-05-27 15:34:32+00:00
> My take is that we need to tread a thin line such that we teach young people to accept that life is inherently unfair, while at the same time doing what we can as a society to make it more fair.

Agreed. Teaching that life is unfair (and how to succeed despite that) is an important lesson. But there's an object-meta distinction that's important to make there. Don't teach people that life is unfair by being unfair to them in their education and making them figure it out themselves. Teach a class on the topic and what they're likely to encounter in society, a couple times over the course of their education.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-27 15:34:41+00:00
Google is in that camp, and I would bet they don't skimp on lawyers https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

I didn't spot it previously but they've even gone so far as to treat it like an actual virus https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

FWIW they have a similar stance about SSPL https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/thirdparty...
by WillAdams | 2025-05-27 15:34:48+00:00
The difference here is that orders placed by USPS mail were subject to mail fraud regulations _and enforcement_ --- that was _not_ in place for early internet ordering.

My kids were quite amazed when they found my copy of a book whose approximate title was _Specialty Mail Order Catalogs_, which is apparently so obscure I'm not finding it on Goodreads or Abebooks --- will have to check the ISBN the next time it comes up and add it to the former.
by cheema33 | 2025-05-27 15:35:05+00:00
The Javascript ecosystem is quite large. And does provide a massive library of "standardized parts". To some degree that dream has been realized. A semi-skilled person can build simple applications in a very short amount of time. This was not possible in the early days.

However, if the tooling has improved 10x, then the product complexity has gone up 100x. Nowadays, you can one-shot a Tetris game using an LLM. Back in the day this would take weeks, if not months. But now, nobody is impressed by a Tetris level game.
by cubefox | 2025-05-27 15:35:09+00:00
Well, natural deduction is one specific form of proof theory (it's a kind of proof system), but there are others. Moreover, proof theory and model theory are independent (neither relies on the other) and various logicians would say that we don't really need one of them, though they would disagree on which. Proof theorists tend to be skeptical of the necessity of model theory, model theorists tend to be skeptical of the necessity of proof theory. Mathematicians tend to be skeptical of both.

But yes, to the degree that any such theoretical parts are part of predicate logic, they are already part of propositional logic. The former is an extension of the latter. Perhaps similar to how higher-order logic (simple type theory) extends or generalizes both propositional and first-order predicate logic.
by LiamPowell | 2025-05-27 15:35:40+00:00
This isn't an issue as SQLite doesn't accept contributions because they don't want to risk someone submitting proprietary code and lying about its origin.

I've never understood why other large open-source projects are just willing to accept contributions from anyone. What's the plan when someone copy-pastes code from some proprietary codebase and the rights holders finds it?
by ModernMech | 2025-05-27 15:35:54+00:00
You're reinforcing the disparity that I'm pointing out in my original reply. My expectations for AI are calibrated by the people selling it. You say "AI progress is very fast" but again, I'm not seeing it. I'm seeing the same things I saw years ago when ChatGPT first came on the scene. If you go back to the hype of those days, they were saying "Things will change so rapidly now that AI is here, we will start seeing exponential gains in what we can accomplish."

They would point to the increasing model sizes and the ability to solve various benchmarks as proof of that exponential rise, but things have really tapered off since then in terms of how rapidly things are changing. I was promised a Ph.D. level researcher. A 20% better result on your OCR is not that. That's not to say it's a good thing and an improvement, but it's not what they are selling.

> Blackwell is the first chip to hit the lower estimation for brain compute performance.

What does that even mean? That's just more hype and marketing.
by nextn | 2025-05-27 15:36:03+00:00
If you resell, you're a scalper.

If you return the ticket to the venue/band, you get your money back, get the bond back, and you're not a scalper.

Charging the ticket buyer the price of the bond doesn't only harm the fans that want to see the show. It also harms the band that won't have fans come see the show. It's an incentive for the band to buy back unused tickets. Bands currently don't do that.

Fans demanding ticket buy backs puts pressure on bands to put an end to scalping. It's fans who pay the entire cost of scalping now, not bands.
by mwigdahl | 2025-05-27 15:36:29+00:00
You are misrepresenting what the original poster said. He did not say that he actually called kids "dum-dums" or that the kids were, themselves, a waste of life. He said that using AI to blast through assignments without learning anything from them was a waste of life.

Frankly I applaud that approach. Classes are to convey knowledge, even if the student only gives a shit about the diploma at the end of the road. At least someone cares enough to tell these students the truth about where that approach is going to take them in life.