MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built an open-source Gmail productivity app that auto-labels emails
by mafia15 | 2026-02-08 14:20:19+00:00
I was drowning in email. Not the usual "too many emails" problem , I had a system, I had labels, but I was manually dragging hundreds of emails into folders every single day.

Gmail filters work great if your emails follow predictable patterns. But my inbox doesn't. Client emails, project updates, newsletters I actually want to read, invoices, meeting notes, they all come from different senders with different subject lines. Writing regex patterns for everything felt like a part-time job.

So, I built NeatMail.

Here's how it actually works:
You define labels in plain English. Not regex, not complex filter rules – just describe what you want labeled.
Example: "Label all emails about invoices as 'Finance'"
Or: "Anything from clients asking for updates goes into 'Client-Urgent'"
The AI reads incoming emails and applies your custom labels directly in Gmail. That's it. No learning period, no training data, no analyzing your email history. You tell it what you want, it does it.

The part that surprised me:
I added an auto-draft feature almost as an afterthought. It reads emails that need replies and drafts responses in your tone (you can set the tone: professional, casual, friendly, etc.). I thought I'd never use it.
I use it every day now. Even if I don't send the draft as-is, having a starting point saves 5-10 minutes per response.

Why open source:
Because I'm handling your email. That felt too personal to keep closed. You can see exactly what it's doing, modify it, host it yourself if you want. The code is straightforward – no black boxes.

Current limitations:
Gmail only (that's what I use, so that's what I built for)
The label suggestions can get overly specific sometimes
Draft tone matching is decent but not perfect
Rate limits with Gmail API mean very high-volume users might hit delays

Tech stack:
Built with Next.js, uses OpenAI's API (you need your own key), integrates via Gmail API. Setup takes maybe 10 minutes if you've used OAuth before.
I've been using it for 3 months. My inbox actually stays at zero now. Not because I'm more disciplined – because the boring part is automated.

GitHub: https://github.com/Lakshay1509/NeatMail
Happy to answer questions about how it works or why I made certain decisions. Also genuinely curious if anyone has suggestions for improving the label accuracy.
by wtetzner | 2026-02-08 14:20:21+00:00
This is the best description of value from AI that I've seen so far. It allows people who don't like writing code to build things without doing so.

I don't think it's nearly as valuable to people who do enjoy writing code, because I don't think prompting an agent (at least in their current state) is actually more productive than just writing the code. So I don't see any reason to mourn on either side.
by bpt3 | 2026-02-08 14:20:39+00:00
> Presumably you think it's not good for land owners of "desirable areas" because local laws create a monopoly that allows the landowners to extract wealth from others, through restriction of land use?

I think individuals should reap the rewards or suffer the losses from their individual decisions. If a community generates value, they are entitled to the rewards. If they run things into the ground (see Detroit as a notorious example), they're left holding the bag.

> Can you see why there might be laws against that?

Can I see why people would want to force themselves into a desirable situation that they had no part in creating? Sure. That doesn't make it right.

> It is pretty well established that zoning was invented and is justified merely to enforce economic segregation. That economic segregation is perhaps the interest of landowners in these "desirable areas"?

Citation needed on the first claim, but yes economic segregation is desirable to most people. That's not news.

> I think by surfacing the true motivations of what's going on, it will become very clear why municipalities must be subjected to laws to enforce better behavior.

The true motivations aren't hidden. Have nots are trying to get a piece of something desirable, and the people who already have it want to keep it.
by JCattheATM | 2026-02-08 14:20:50+00:00
I'm still running this on my OnePlus 6T, purchased refurbished from ebay for $60. Runs fine. Using it degoogled, I'm not sure if e/OS or similar alternatives have any advantage.

It can run PostmarketOS as well which I might play with at some point.

The 6t allows bootloader locking if I sign it with my own keys, but I haven't tried that yet.

A shame it is less supported on newer devices, but these older devices meet my needs perfectly anyway, so I'm not too worried. People buying a new $800 phone every year are just wasting their disposable income IMO.
by SigmundA | 2026-02-08 14:20:51+00:00
Fun fact Apt pupil has a reference to Shawshank where the main character says he lives off stocks that a banker setup named Dufresne who went to prison for murdering his wife.

King does this all the time in his stories having character connections across different novels, making them set in the same universe Fun, adds some depth to all of it. Like Randal Flagg being the same villain in the Stand and the Dark tower and Eyes of the Dragon.
by kpinkerman | 2026-02-08 14:21:11+00:00
Thanks! You caught us—the blog post is definitely more about the 'Why' (the creative philosophy) than the 'How' (the technical implementation).

Here’s the technical side: I've built a private RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system. We've indexed our 'Lucent Universe' world-bible—which includes everything from character timelines to the specific physical laws of Lucarn shapeshifting (conservation of mass, thermal limits, etc.)—into a vector database.

I essentially treat the world-bible as 'Source Truth' and the draft manuscript as 'Code' to be linted. We run an audit script that cross-references new chapters against the index to flag logical breaks—like a character knowing something they haven't learned yet, or a physical impossibility in a shift.

It solves the massive cognitive load of maintaining 300k words of consistency without the machine ever touching the actual prose generation. If there’s interest, I’d be happy to do a deeper write-up on the stack itself!
by throw234232t3 | 2026-02-08 14:21:33+00:00
On pre-Tahoe macOS there is the “Applications” view (accessible e.g. from the dock). Since the only thing I would use Spotlight for is searching through applications to start, I changed the Cmd+Space keybind to launch the Applications view. The search is instant.

Spotlight, aside from failing to find applications also pollutes the search results with random files it found on the filesystem, some shortcuts to search the web and whatnot. Also, at the start of me using a Mac it repeatedly got into the state of not displaying any results whatsoever. Fixing that each time required running some arcane commands in the terminal. Something that people associate with Linux, but ironically I think now Linux requires less of that than Mac.

But in Tahoe they removed the Applications view, so my solution is gone now.

All in all, with Apple destroying macOS in each release, crippling DTrace with SIP, Liquid Glass, poor performance monitoring compared to what I can see with tools like perf on Linux, or Intel VTune on Windows, Metal slowly becoming the only GPU programming option, I think I’m going to be switching back to Linux.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-08 14:22:21+00:00
This calculation is incorrect because the medicines cost significantly less than $1k per month, and there there would be cost savings from people being less overweight needing less healthcare.

For decades now, every single healthcare study seems to say overconsumption is the root cause, and now that there is a way to combat it, the government is saying the fix to overconsumption at a few hundred dollars per month is not worth it?
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 14:22:22+00:00
No, but you might be the only person here who missed "The team found that the AMOC will only weaken by about 18 to 43 percent by the end of the 21st century."

The idiotic article then downplays this horrific numbers because "Yeah, 43 percent is a lot, but it’s nowhere near what other climate models project". As if even a 20%-25% is not very bad already.

And that's just one cherry-picked study, whereas the majority of the studies predict worse outcomes. But sure, let's pick the sole nicer looking as the comforting winner - the "just" 18%-43% reduction "nice" one.
by athrowaway3z | 2026-02-08 14:22:33+00:00
You'd let the pro blackhat loose in your VM on your own system?

No because it's a dumb question and you don't want any stranger inside your home network regardless of firewall.

The comparison you get to make is in terms of the _extra_ security this project buys you.

Might I remind you of two things:

- You're advocating for installing random (?kernel) level software from the internet. That by itself is a real and larger treat than any potentially insecure things my `llm` user _might_ do in the future.

- User accounts security was the goto method for security for a long time. Further isolation was developed to accommodate: 'root' access for tenants, and finer resource limits controls. Neither I care to give an LLM.

So we only have build in firewall and sandbox duplication as the real feature. For the latter, my experience is that it's useless on a personal device, and slows down building or requires too much cache config. I'm not installing random crap, so i can live with the risk of lan exposure.

I'm happy with the maintenance/complexity/threat matrix of useradd.
by aeve890 | 2026-02-08 14:23:35+00:00
>Since I invented the term, I decided I should write something to explain it. But then I realized: I actually already wrote something back in 2021 when I first invented the term.

I've read all Wolfram's books and I really really want he to be successful with a completely computational theory of everything because it would be no doubt an incredible feat and complete paradigm shift in science like no other in the last 400 years maybe.... but holy shit he's insufferable. I hope he finishes his theory before collapsing into the blackhole caused by his massive ego.
by mustafadalga | 2026-02-08 14:24:29+00:00
Location:Estonia Remote:Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: React.js, Next.js,TypeScript, SCSS, CSS3, Tailwind CSS, Redux, Zustand

Part-time/Freelance: Yes

Resume/CV: https://mustafadalga.github.io/cv/

Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mustafadalga/

Contact info: mustafadalga \[at\] gmail \[dot\] com

Front-end engineer with 7+ years of experience in React/Next.js, Vue/Nuxt.js, and TypeScript. Focused on performance and UI modernization, with results such as improving Lighthouse scores from 50→88 and cutting load times by 80%. Experienced in migrating legacy codebases and mentoring teams, and interested in roles involving dashboard rebuilds, performance optimization, and modernization work.
by dangus | 2026-02-08 14:24:34+00:00
I think you should spend some time looking at actual laptop review coverage before asking questions like this.

There are dozens of outlets out there that run synthetic and real world benchmarks that answer these questions.

Apple’s chips are very strong on creative tasks like video transcoding, they have the best single core performance as well as strong multi-core performance. They also have top tier power efficiency, battery life, and quiet operation, which is a lot of what people look for when doing corporate tasks.

Depending on the chip model, the graphics performance is impressive for the power draw, but you can get better integrated graphics from Intel Panther Lake, and you can get better dedicated class graphics from Nvidia.

Some outlets like Just Josh tech on YouTube are good at demonstrating these differences.
by jasonshen | 2026-02-08 14:25:27+00:00
Really appreciate the deep dive here. M&A is the final boss of startups and so rarely do we get any credible, detailed information about how things go down from the founder's perspective, especially at the 9+ figure deal size. Having written a book about pivots, I know how hard it can be to then distill a grueling experience into something digestible. Thank you Derek!
by indemnity | 2026-02-08 14:25:33+00:00
Don’t worry, my new M4 doesn’t feel much faster either due to all the corporate crapware. Since Windows Defender got ported to Mac it’s become terrible in I/O and overall responsiveness. Any file operations will consume an entire core or two on Defender processes.

My personal M1 feels just as fast as the work M4 due to this.
by wtcactus | 2026-02-08 14:26:24+00:00
> 'Protection of the territory of the state' also can be served by an NHS because of the damage and danger of highly infectious diseases.

Let's be honest here. You know the NHS (and various equivalents across the world) go way, way beyond this.

And I'm not even against the existence of a public funded health service within limits. But this is just phonographic. In my country (and from what I've read in the NHS it's relatively similar), in the past 10 years we added more than 90% medical doctors and nurses to the national NHS. The budget for the local NHS increased by 72% in that same period.

And the service has become absolutely terrible and now people (the ones that only benefit from it but don't pay the costs) are asking to raise taxes even more to put even more money into the problem.

Naa, enough is enough. I don't want to support this crap.
by jingkai_he | 2026-02-08 14:26:39+00:00
Creator here.

Agreed, sandboxing by itself doesn't solve prompt injection. If the agent can read and send emails, no sandbox can tell a legit send from an exfiltration.

matchlock does have the network-layer controls you mentioned, such as domain whitelisting and secret protection toward designated hosts, so a rogue agent can't just POST your API key to some random endpoints.

The unsafe tool call/HTTP request problem probably needs to be solved at a different layer, possibly through the network interception layer of matchlock or an entirely different software.
by falloutx | 2026-02-08 14:27:13+00:00
No, dont trust the supposed "staff engineer" types, Many had forgotten how to write code and now they can finally live the fantasy of being architects. So for them its like winning a jackpot. For people who could always write good code, the basics are still same, a good dev is still a good dev, and its even more important to be able to read & critique code.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-08 14:27:14+00:00
Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage. Even the old M2 is at 1400 MB/s write speed [2], M5 is at 6068 MB/s [2]. Meanwhile in the Windows world, supposed "gamer" laptops struggle to get above 3 GB/s [3]. And on top of that, on Apple devices the storage is directly attached to the SoC - as far as I know, no PCIe, no nothing, just dumb NAND. That alone eliminates a lot of latency, and communication data paths are direct as well, with nothing pesky like sockets or cables degrading signal quality and requiring link training and whatnot.

That M2 MBA however, it only feels sluggish at > 400 Chrome tabs open because only then swapping becomes a real annoyance.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/07/14/m2-macbook-air-slower-ssd-bas...

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-pro...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/AcerNitro/comments/1i0nbt4/slow_ssd...
by jwarden | 2026-02-08 14:28:02+00:00
Capitalism just means private citizens can own the means of
production (e.g. start a business, buy stock) and earn a return on investment. It doesn’t mean only the rich must get richer. It means anyone who saves and invests their money instead of spending it gets richer.

However capitalism is perfectly compatible with a progressives taxation system such that the rich get richer at a lesser rate than the poor get richer.
by willj | 2026-02-08 14:28:23+00:00
If you’re using a model from a provider (not one that you’re hosting locally), greedy decoding via temperature = 0 does not guarantee determinism. A temperature of 0 doesn’t result in the same responses every time, in part due to floating-point precision and in part to to lack of batch invariance [1]

[1] https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...
by jmull | 2026-02-08 14:28:29+00:00
It doesn't look like you addressed issues raised in the article. E.g., see the "my experiences interviewing candidates" section where we can see this isn't just a problem of the author's (just one example in one section of an article that covers various things).

I always wonder what the purpose of posting these generic, superficial defenses of a certain form of LLM-based coding is?
by jacquesm | 2026-02-08 14:28:51+00:00
Sorry, not going there. The physics of the impossible are not for me to take apart but for you to show. I've postulated ways in which you could get to other solar systems, I don't see anything here that would lead to a dragon as it is commonly described in fiction. Fire spewing, heavier than air, intelligent and willing to let themselves be mounted and directed by humans, that's the bar.

Archaeopteryx would have you for lunch long before you realized that it doesn't spit fire.
by HackerThemAll | 2026-02-08 14:28:55+00:00
If my aim was to be a manager, I would have graduated a business university. But I want to have my hands and head dirty of programming, administering, and doing other technical stuff. I'm not going to manage, be it people or bots. So no, sorry.

And 99% those AI-created "amazing projects" are going to be dead or meaningless in due time, rather sooner than later. Wasted energy and water, not to mention the author's lifetime.
by deaddodo | 2026-02-08 14:29:00+00:00
No, the AMD headliners still dominate for single-core performance[1]. Even if you normalize for similar/"same" chips; which really just means you have five cores each generation: AMD's, Intel's, Apple's, and ARM Cortex-A and Cortex-X.

Obviously it's an Apple-to-Oranges (pardon the pun) comparison since the AMD options don't need to care about the power envelope nearly as much; and the comparison gets more equal when normalizing for Apple's optimized domain (power efficiency), but the high-end AMD laptop chips still edge it out.

But then this turns into some sort of religious war, where people want to assume that their "god" should win at everything. It's not, the Apple chips are great; amazing even, when considering they're powering laptops/phones for 10+ hours at a time in smaller chassis than their competitors. But they still have to give in certain metrics to hit that envelope.

1 - https://thepcbottleneckcalculator.com/cpu-benchmarks-2026/
by sanex | 2026-02-08 14:29:13+00:00
This is a pretty simple thing to boil the ocean over but it was fun nonetheless.
I've been applying for jobs but I don't want Gmail notifications on my phone because of all the spam, I'm really picky about push notifications. I told my openclaw adjacent ai bot to keep an eye and let me know if any of the companies I applied to send me an email. Worked great. CEO LARPing at its finest.
Also a big fan of giving it access to my entire obsidian vault so if I'm on the go instead of trying to use obsidian on the phone I just tell it what I need to read or update.

I'm not running openclaw itself. I am building a simpler version that I trust and understand a lot more but ostensibly it's just another always on Claude code wrapper.
by pocksuppet | 2026-02-08 14:30:21+00:00
It can generate useful documentation or useless documentation. It doesn't take very long to instruct the LLM to generate the documentation, and then check if it matches your understanding of the project later. Most real documentation is about as wrong as LLM-generated documentation anyway. Documenting code is a language-to-language translation task, that LLMs are designed for.
by wtetzner | 2026-02-08 14:30:57+00:00
> The reason I'm not in favor of natural language programming has nothing to do with its probabilistic nature and everything to do with its lack of precision

Yeah, even if they're made to be 100% deterministic, you've now got a programming language whose rules are deterministic, but hard to understand. You've effectively pinned the meaning of the natural language in some way, but not a way that anyone can effectively learn, and one that doesn't necessarily match their understanding of the actual natural language.
by roter | 2026-02-08 14:31:24+00:00
> ... potential collapse of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC.

The Gulf Stream is not also known as the AMOC. The nature of the Gulf Stream (intense surface current flowing off the eastern coast of North America) is largely driven by wind torque (westerlies in the mid-latitudes, easterlies in the tropics and polar regions) with the intensification due to Coriolis and coastal friction. What we're talking about collapsing is the overturning part largely driven by the differences in salt & temperature between the surface and the abyss. This overturning intensifies the heat transport from tropics to poles and pulls the Gulf Stream farther north:

All Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream
-- Ulysses, James Joyce
by indemnity | 2026-02-08 14:32:19+00:00
You’re still looking at the multi core score, you want this one:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/

Where the M5 (non-pro, the one that will be in the next MacBook Air) is on top.

When the M5 multicore scores arrive, the multi-core charts will be interesting.
by dijit | 2026-02-08 14:32:32+00:00
The tone matched the engagement I received. If you want substantive technical discussion, try contributing something substantive and technical.

I've explained the same point three different ways now. Not one person has actually demonstrated where the technical argument is wrong, just deflected to TOFU comparisons, philosophical ownership debates, and now tone policing.

If Aachen has an actual technical refutation, I'm all ears. But "read the definition" isn't one, and neither is complaining about snark whilst continuing to avoid the substance.
by afavour | 2026-02-08 14:32:47+00:00
> If we consider the prompts and LLM inputs to be the new source code, I want to see some assurance we get the same results every time.

There’s a related issue that gives me deep concern: if LLMs are the new programming languages we don’t even own the compilers. They can be taken from us at any time.

New models come out constantly and over time companies will phase out older ones. These newer models will be better, sure, but their outputs will be different. And who knows what edge cases we’ll run into when being forced to upgrade models?

(and that’s putting aside what an enormous step back it would be to rent a compiler rather than own one for free)
Show HN: I built a free, open-source macOS screen recorder with modern features
by jsattler | 2026-02-08 14:32:48+00:00
I built a screen recorder for macOS because the one I used before broke with macOS 26 and seems to be not well maintained.

I think it turned out pretty cool, so I'm sharing it here:

It uses ScreenCaptureKit and SwiftUI, supports ProRes 4444/HEVC/H.264 including alpha channel and HDR, and records system audio and mic at the same time. No accounts, no analytics. Recordings stay local. MIT licensed.

Feedback and contributions are welcome!
by kgeist | 2026-02-08 14:33:10+00:00
Can't Windows/Linux pin background threads to specific cores on Intel too? So that your foreground app isn't slowed down by all the background activity going on? Or there's something else to it that I don't understand. I thought E cores' main advantage is that they use less power which is good for battery life on laptops. But the article makes it sound like main advantage of Apple Silicon is that it splits foreground/background workloads better. Isn't it something that can already be done without a P/E distinction?