MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Email MCP Server (Works with Claude/VS Code/Cursor/Windsurf)
by slonik | 2025-12-21 13:45:41+00:00
Hi everyone! I’m Kristyna, building Sidemail.

My goal is to make emails as easy as possible for startups.

Made an email MCP server (open-source). It enables programmatic setup of transactional email sending, writing newsletters, managing contacts, and configuring sending domains – all from MCP agent mode in VS Code, Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, and other MCP clients.

That means you can say things like: - Write a product update from our changelog and schedule a delivery to our paying customers for tomorrow at 2 PM - Add these users who signed up today to the Early Adopters group - Create a new sending domain for myproduct.com

The AI agent handles the steps – it retrieves data, calls the corresponding API, and asks for confirmation before final actions.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thank you!
by WillAdams | 2025-12-21 13:46:43+00:00
It's native and more direct.

Rather then adding an additional compile cycle:

- run Python code to generate OpenSCAD code

- render OpenSCAD code to see output

OpenPythonSCAD creates a .py code window in the OpenSCAD interface which one interacts with in the same way as a .scad code window (there's even basic support for the Customizer).

I suspect it would be really easy to port SolidPython to work w/in OpenPythonSCAD (if it hasn't already been done)
by Mkengin | 2025-12-21 13:48:02+00:00
No, I am not affiliated with the website, I just want to see more discussions based on uncontaminated benchmarks and feel that people rely too much on benchmarks that companies can conduct themselves. If that is the case, I don't feel I can trust them. For general LLM capabilities, for example, I would also tend to rely on dubesor [1] rather than artificial analysis or similar leaderboards.

[1] https://dubesor.de/benchtable
by spaceman_2020 | 2025-12-21 13:49:47+00:00
While I don’t disagree with the author, these are simply two completely different tools with different use cases. Nano Banana Pro throws out fantastic images you can actually use in your marketing right away. It’s not an art tool - it’s a business tool

As long as the older tools still exist to make art, I don’t see what the problem is. Use NBP to make your marketing pics, MJv2 for your art
by culturestate | 2025-12-21 13:50:46+00:00
> That is not sane, it is dumb.

I understand where you’re coming from, but it’s perfectly sane if your legal system recognizes and accepts that speed detection methodologies have a defined margin of error; every ticket issued for speeding within that MoE would likely be (correctly) rejected by a court if challenged.

The buffer means, among other things, that you don’t have to bog down your traffic courts with thousands of cases that will be immediately thrown out.
by scotty79 | 2025-12-21 13:51:15+00:00
> As shown above, when we fit a similar trend to just the 2024 and 2025 data, this shortens the estimate of when AI can complete month-long tasks with 50% reliability by about 2.5 years.

I don't think I have 50% success rate at month long tasks.

Anything that exceeds one day is pretty hard.
by pdimitar | 2025-12-21 13:51:32+00:00
I never understood the argument of a senior IT person's salary competing for the cloud expenses. In my contracting and consulting career I have done all of programming, monitoring and DevOps many times; the cost of my contract is amortized over multiple activities.

The way you present it makes sense of course. But I have to wonder whether there really are such clear demarcation lines between responsibilities. At least over the course of my career this was very rarely the case.
by drysart | 2025-12-21 13:51:58+00:00
I've never liked the argument that there's some imaginary line between the acceptibility of AI as a tool for creating art and Photoshop/Krita/Procreate/etc as a tool for creating art.

Rubbing a brush on a canvas was good enough for the renaissance masters, why are we collectively okay with modern "artists" using "virtual brushes" and trivializations of the expressive experience like "undo" when it's not "real art" because they're leaning so heavily on the uncaring unthinking machine and the convenience in creation it offers rather than suffering through the human limitations that the old masters did? Are photographers not artists too then, because they're not actually creating, just instead capturing a view of what's already there?

The usual response to this is some trite response about how AI is 'different' because you're 'just' throwing prompts at it and its completely creating the output itself -- as if it's inconceivable that there might be someone who doesn't just shovel out raw outputs from an AI and call it 'art' and is instead actually using it in a contributatory role on a larger composition that they, themselves, as a human, are driving and making artistic decisions on.

E33 is a perfect example here. Is the artistic merit of the overall work lessened by it having used AI in part of its creation? Does anyone really, truly believe that they abdicated their vision on the overall work to machines?

Just because someone can drag and drop to draw a circle in an image editing app instead of using their own talent and ability to freehand it instead doesn't mean what they then go on to do with that circle isn't artistic.
by in-silico | 2025-12-21 13:52:10+00:00
> Current AI systems can give best guess statistical answer from dataset the've been fed.

What about reinforcement learning? RL models don't train on an existing dataset, they try their own solutions and learn from feedback.

RL models can definitely "invent" new things. Here's an example where they design novel molecules that bind with a protein: https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/39/4/btad157...
by jeremyjh | 2025-12-21 13:52:54+00:00
> Just imagine if Nixon had been president in today's environment... the public would say "the tapes are a forgery!" or "why would I believe establishment shills like Woodward and Bernstein?" Too much skepticism is as bad as too little.

Today it would not matter in the least if the president were understood to have covered up a conspiracy to break into the DNC headquarters. Much worse things have been dismissed or excused. Most of his party would approve of it and the rest would support him anyway so as not to damage "their side".
by fxwin | 2025-12-21 13:53:06+00:00
I would consider myself pretty embedded in the gaming space, and I hadn't heard of the "Indie Game Awards" before yesterday. Last year's award show has <100k views on youtube, and the first article mentioning this (insider-gaming.com's) is written by one of the judges involved. I'll leave it up to the reader to judge how much of this is genuine and how much is jumping the twitter bandwagon to boost the award show's popularity.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-12-21 13:53:37+00:00
I love debating, but I want debate to learn things, not to walk people into traps.

Obviously the woodworker is a person. And you would be on a team that has woodworking as part of their skillset.

But the way you set up your reductio-ad-absurdum it can be read as implying the AI is a person too. O:-)

You know what, rather than just going for a flip rhetorical takedown, what if we took that implication seriously for a second?

What if you did mean to argue that (the) AI is a proto-person. Say you argue that they deserve to be in the credits as a (junior?) member of the team. That'd be wild! A really interesting framing, which I haven't heard before.

Or the weaker version: Use said framing pro-forma as a (practical?) legal fiction. We already have rules on (C) attribution. It might be a useful framing to untangle some of the spaghetti.
by brap | 2025-12-21 13:53:43+00:00
I’m naturally pretty pale and don’t get much sunlight, I feel like I look like shit unless I get just a little bit of tan. What most people would consider just a healthy looking “baseline”. It also puts me in a better mood although that may be entirely psychological.

When I was younger I used to intentionally tan for short durations, but now I realize that’s harmful so I just embrace the cave gollum look
by dragonelite | 2025-12-21 13:54:12+00:00
When it comes to AI im more of a luddite at the moment, things change like every 6 months when it comes to prompting the models.

But i don't mind people using AI it's their own choice, the focus then just becomes in the curation skill of the individual, team, company etc of the generated AI output. So taking away the award is kind of weak given people enjoyed the game.
by muzani | 2025-12-21 13:55:06+00:00
If anything, I feel it makes my career more secure.

1) Nearly all the job losses I've dealt with was when a company runs low on money. This is because it cost too much/too long to build a product or get it into market.

2) LLMs are in the sweet spot of doing the things I don't want to do (writing flawless algorithms from known patterns, sifting through 2000-line logs) and not doing the sweet spot of doing what I'm good at (business cases, feature prioritization, juice). Engineering work now involves more fact checking and "data sheet reading" than it used to, which I'm happy to do.

3) Should programming jobs be killed, there will be more things to sell. And more roles for business/product owners. I'm not at all opposed to selling the things that the AI is making.

4) Also Gustafson's Law. All the cloud stuff led to things like Facebook and Twitch, which created a ton more jobs. I don't believe we'll see things like "vibe code fixer". But we'll probably see things like robotics running on a low latency LLM brain which unlocks a different host of engineering challenges. In 10 years, it might be the norm to create household bots and people might be coding apps based on how they vacuum the house and wipe the windows.

5) I don't take a high salary. The buffer between company profit and my costs is big enough that they don't feel the need to squeeze every drop out of me. They make more profit paying both me and the AI and the colleagues than they would just paying the AI.
by WillAdams | 2025-12-21 13:55:21+00:00
Fair point.

This sounds _fascinating_ have you posted your code or written this up in a math journal? Link?

I don't touch polyhedrons in OpenSCAD because the logic of point placement mystifies me --- a tool such as you describe would make life a lot easier for a lot of folks, esp. if there was a way to use it to import a series of SVG files which could be used to define the points interactively.

I sometimes wonder if the key to future computer usage would be a series of Domain Specific Languages each intended for a given task:

- 3D == OpenSCAD

- 2D == METAPOST

- SQL == databases

- TeX == text/page composition

- sed == text

(and yes, I know this is the Unix ideal)

but such languages seem to be most successful and most approachable to typical users when they are paired with a front-end which affords editing, previewing, and, direct interaction.

I'm actually nuking my Python install right now, because I got it into a state where I couldn't get Fullcontrol G-code to run, so I agree that the state of Python package population is pitiful, hence of course, the XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/1987/
by craftkiller | 2025-12-21 13:56:24+00:00
So the sign says "100", the police read your speed at "112" but the device has a 5% MoE and in this case your actual speed was 107. Seems like you have exactly the same problem because the laws state the actual speed limit was "110" which you are under, despite being over the posted limit and the police reading you as over both the real and posted limits.
by ekidd | 2025-12-21 13:56:43+00:00
In my professional life, somewhere over 99% of time, the code suffering the error has either been:

1. Production code running somewhere on a cluster.

2. Released code running somewhere on a end-user's machine.

3. Released production code running somewhere on an end-user's cluster.

And errors happen at weird times, like 3am on a Sunday morning on someone else's cluster. So I'd just as soon not have to wake up, figuring out all the paperwork to get access to some other company's cluster, and then figure out how to attach a debugger. Especially when the error is some non-reproducible corner case in a distributed algorithm that happens once every few months, and the failing process is long gone. Just no.

It is so much easier to ask the user to turn up logging and send me the logs. Nine times out of ten, this will fix the problems. The tenth time, I add more logs and ask the user to keep an eye open.
by girvo | 2025-12-21 13:59:26+00:00
> Or... you could have the coding agent build it in the background for you in 15 minutes, then spend 30 minutes reading through what it did, tweaking it yourself and peppering it with questions about how it all works

I can only speak for myself, but the only way I've been able to learn things rapidly in this industry is by writing things myself: even rote re-typing of books or SO answers was enough to trigger this for me.

Just querying models and reading output doesn't seem to work for me, but that's maybe down to my particular learning style.
by OJFord | 2025-12-21 14:00:00+00:00
It's absolutely not all, I'm an extremely casual listener, not 'into' music or anything, and I have plenty in a playlist that have disappeared (mostly I don't even know what they are, it's just greyed out with no information) for whatever reason. And that's just the stuff that was there at some point that I liked.

One of them has come back recently. It's still listed as by the wrong artist (same name, but dead, vs. the active artist who actually performed it) but I'm not reporting it again because I suspect I may have made it disappear for a couple of years in doing so before.

It's kind of crap and disorganised after anything more than barely glancing at it really, must be infuriating for (or just not used by) people who actually are into it.
by beAbU | 2025-12-21 14:00:12+00:00
I moved from South Africa to Ireland 2 years ago. It was very noticeable to me how drivers in Ireland have no idea what to do when the lights are out. Absolute chaos!

In south africa, traffic lights not working is a daily occurrence. And we've all learned how to navigate a dead intersection wit zero casualties.

Massive 6 way intersections with 2-4 lanes per direction worked perfectly with everyone taking turns to go.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-12-21 14:00:20+00:00
I'd argue that it's not that complicated. That if something meets the below five criteria, we must accept that it is conscious:

(1) It maintains a persisting internal model of an environment, updated from ongoing input.

(2) It maintains a persisting internal model of its own body or vehicle as bounded and situated in that environment.

(3) It possesses a memory that binds past and present into a single temporally extended self-model.

(4) It uses these models with self-derived agency to generate and evaluate counterfactuals: Predictions of alternative futures under alternative actions. (i.e. a general predictive function.)

(5) It has control channels through which those evaluations shape its future trajectories in ways that are not trivially reducible to a fixed reflex table.

This would also indicate that Boltzmann Brains are not conscious -- so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann Brains, which would otherwise be very surprising -- and that P-Zombies are impossible by definition. I've been working on a book about this for the past three years...
by xandrius | 2025-12-21 14:01:14+00:00
Truly amazing work. I couldn't help but being sad of the less popular songs not being currently stored, as those are definitely the ones more in risk of being lost forever.

If you like the goal and you have even a few 100gb available on your server, consider "donating" some of that space to seeding the data (music or books). It's absolutely how we can fight the system, even if just a tiny bit. https://annas-archive.org/torrents
by sevensor | 2025-12-21 14:01:31+00:00
Last time I measured it, handling KeyError was also significantly faster than checking with “key in collection.” Also, as I was surprised to discover, Python threads are preemptively scheduled, GIL notwithstanding, so it’s possible for the key to be gone from the dictionary by the time you use it, even if it was there when you checked it. Although if you’re creating a situation where this is a problem, you probably have bigger issues.
by WillAdams | 2025-12-21 14:01:55+00:00
Same.

Two 3D CAD tools which seem to be focused on ease-of-use are:

- Dune 3D --- this has been discussed here a couple of times (I think I posted the two most active posts elsethread)

- Moment of Inspiration --- created by the developer who created the program Rhinoceros 3D was based on and who was the lead developer for that program for years, it focuses on ease of use and apparently started with the idea of making a CAD Program suited to use on a computer pen tablet --- there's a video series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUilfM8GEmrS3yRLygdFO... which makes it seem very approachable
Show HN: Loan Sweet Spot – Mortgage visualizer vibe coded in 3h with Gemini
by avingardt | 2025-12-21 14:02:14+00:00
Hey HN,

I built LoanSweetSpot.com to solve a personal frustration: standard mortgage calculators give you a grid of numbers, but I wanted to visualize the "knee" of the curve—the sweet spot where a small extra payment saves a disproportionate amount of interest (and time).

The Build Process: This was a pure "vibe coding" experiment. I acted as the product manager/architect, and Gemini acted as the junior dev handling the syntax.

Stack: Zero dependencies (except Chart.js via CDN), single index.html file.

Hosting: Cloudflare Pages (Free tier).

Time: From blank file to production in one sitting (~3-4 hours).

Features:

Interactive Payoff Curve: The graph is the controller. Drag the blue dot to adjust the term.

The "Danger Zones": Vertical red lines appear automatically when your total cost hits 2.0x or 3.0x the principal (predatory interest warning).

Privacy: 100% client-side math.

I’d love to hear what you think of the UX, or your thoughts on this workflow.
by drysart | 2025-12-21 14:02:18+00:00
All of the caveats basically boil down to "if you need to access the private backing field from anywhere other than the property getter/setter; then be aware it's going to have a funky non C# compliant field name".

In the EF Core and Automapper type of cases, I consider it an anti-pattern that something outside the class is taking a dependency on a private member of the class in the first place, so the compiler is really doing you a favor by hiding away the private backing field more obscurely.
by vasco | 2025-12-21 14:02:25+00:00
Can you explain further?

Maybe I'm too out of this scope but if you want to simulate Universe X plus the computer Y that simulates X then you'd need at least 1 extra bit of memory (likely way more) to encompass the simulation plus the computation running the simulation (X+Y). The computer running the simulation by definition is not part of the simulation, so how can it be that it can truly simulate itself?
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-21 14:02:54+00:00
> Perhaps because humans like things to stay the same, and perhaps because these sorts of natural, inevitable changes aren't that common - most of us don't regularly see fires in our local environment - we label this change in an emotive way: devastating, despite the necessity of the thing.

The problem is different IMHO. Humans have effectively terraformed our surroundings. We (i.e. everyone but the Romans where they had aqueducts) used to build away from forests (or, where necessary, tear down the forests) for as long as we didn't have motorized fire pumps, because it was simply too dangerous to build too near to forests.

Nowadays? Land has gotten scarce, the only place where one still can get land is land that wasn't zoned for residential developments. And now that a lot of this land very close to forest boundaries has been settled, we routinely see devastation from forest fires.

And, specifically to the US, their building style aka wood frames and cardboard makes the situation worse. Here in Europe, we had devastating fires wipe out entire city blocks because embers flying around set other buildings ablaze in the long-distant past - but ever since a lot of our buildings were made out of brick and later on cement, it's rare to see buildings on fire from a forest fire. Even in Croatia, where forest fires are a sad routine every summer (mostly from morons with cigarettes or glowing-hot DPFs parking illegally on dried out bush) and we got a looooot of questionably-legal settlement going on, it's rare that houses catch fire simply because the structure is so much more resilient.
by qayxc | 2025-12-21 14:03:37+00:00
Time and space aren't well defined, but current models indeed put a discrete limit on both: Planck-Length and Planck-Time (~1.9×10^−43s and ~5.7×10^−35m respectively).

Below these limits, physical descriptions of the world lose meaning, i.e. shorter time spans or distances don't result in measurable changes and our models break down. That doesn't mean these limits are "real" in the sense that space and time are indeed quantised, but experiments and observations end at these limits.
by randerson | 2025-12-21 14:03:41+00:00
Plenty of wealthy people are bad at delegating. The part that amazed me is him buying the cheap unpronounceable Amazon brands for medical equipment, like "DEDAKJ Oxygen Concentrator 2-9L/min Adjustable Portable Oxygen Machine for Home and Travel Use". I would've thought a billionaire would be surrounded by the best name brands in everything.

He also seemed bad at delegating his interior decorating to a professional, judging by the photos of his island.
by aristofun | 2025-12-21 14:03:48+00:00
The thing with system design is that all typical problems has been already solved, there are already battle tested patterns and practices for virtually any problem you can face until you're ~ at the scale of Google. You don't need AI for that. And if your problem is new or unique, AI isn't gonna help much.

Preparing docs, requirements and diagrams isn't the time consuming part anyway. Talking to the right people, getting management approvals, changing other teams priorities etc is the time wasting part, the technical one is already solved.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-12-21 14:04:26+00:00
> > I don’t think you’d observe anything different if it were violated.

> If the mods were in the practice of moderating like this, yes, it would almost certainly be noticed by someone whose post/comment got deleted.

“You” in the original was referring to avaer specifically, not the generic “you.” They were the ones making the observation on little to no data.

> HN, like every other community on the Internet, relies on trust between the users and mods.

This is exactly my point. One must trust (or more precisely have faith in) them, because claims like the one up-thread are impossible to verify.
by itishappy | 2025-12-21 14:04:32+00:00
I'd agree if this were about The Game Awards or similar, where indie devs are expected to compete against the AAA goliaths, but I've always understood the Indie Game Awards as being more about the craft then the end product.

From the FAQ:

> The ceremony is developer-focused, with game creators taking center stage to present awards, recognize their peers, and openly speak without the pressure of time constraints.

https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq

Regardless of AI's inevitability, I don't particularly care to celebrate it's use, and I think that's the most reasonable stance for a developer focused award to take.