Ideas Lab

Office workers struggle to automate repetitive Excel tasks without coding. Need simple UI for automating data entry, calculations, and exports. [Google Search suggestion]

Builders and metalworkers need instant calculations for bending angles, force requirements, and material properties. Current solutions scattered across PDFs and spreadsheets. [Google Search suggestion]

Content creators, students, and professionals need reliable video transcription without manual typing. Current solutions expensive or require uploading to large platforms. [Google Search suggestion]

Healthcare professionals need easy access to MHRA/regulatory safety warnings for botulinum toxin products. Current solutions scattered across government sites, community channels. A centralized alert dashboard could notify clinics of rare adverse events. [Trending: "mhra botulinum toxin warnings" with 200+ searches in GB]

Teams struggle to document, update, and enforce standard operating procedures. Needs AI-assisted creation and low-code automation of routine tasks.

Sales teams waste time manually routing inbound leads to the right rep based on territory, industry, or account fit. Needs intelligent, automated distribution.

Marketers need simple, low-code tools to manage and segment push notification campaigns without deep technical knowledge.

Hi HN, we're Kiran and Vijay!Over the past two years, we have built a columnar storage engine for observability: logs, metrics, and traces. Today, it's exciting for us to show what we've built on top of that foundation: LLM Agent Observability.Given how non-deterministic agents are, storing all traces without sampling was critical for us. But these traces tend to be in the MBs, sometimes GBs - we needed to store them inexpensively. We also needed the queries and analyses to be fast. To meet both these goals, we store them in S3 in our own parquet-like file format, and query them using AWS Lambda.Since we process each span of every trace, instead of running LLM-based evals on each, we first analyze them using deterministic techniques. We detect tool failures, retries, loops, abnormal token usage, latency regressions, schema violations, sentiment, and other production signals. We've written more about the approach here: https://blog.oodle.ai/you-cant-sample-your-way-to-reliable-a...The combination of our own engine, no sampling, and deterministic processing before LLM-for-evals allows us to price at $10 per million traces, provide sub-second p99 query latency, and have healthy margins. Before building this, we used Langfuse for our own agent observability, which was 6x more expensive.Still super early, and rough around some edges, we would love your questions and feedback!

Hi HN :) really excited to share this with you.The one thing AI reliably does is generate noise. Half the tools I see launch are just machines for producing more noise across more channels. And people are starting to see this in the form of emails in their inboxes as spam filters are struggling.There used to be a useful signal in email: the effort a sender put into customizing a message was a rough proxy for how relevant it actually was. AI killed that. Now it's customized slop with the appearance of effort with none of the cost. It is painful that the open internet / open channels have been abused like this.Captchainbox applies the idea of proof-of-work to email. If a sender is willing to do a bit of work to reach you, the message is more likely to be worth your time and the sender more likely to be real. The work is a traditional captcha. You can also set a pay-to-deliver amount if you want more friction. The proceeds of the delivery payment after transaction costs go to the Internet Archive and the EFF. The tool currently works by authing with your Gmail or Outlook and during launch time I make this completely free as a lifetime deal (with optional payment if you wanna support).How it works: Captchainbox builds a whitelist automatically from the metadata of your past correspondence. If you've emailed an individual address, that sender can reach you. If you talk to several people at the same domain, we whitelist the whole domain. If one transactional-looking sender has sent you more than 10 emails, we treat it as a transactional domain and let it through. This whitelist is for you to change whenever you want. It continues to build organically as you converse with more addresses.Incoming mail is checked against that whitelist. Senders already on it land in your inbox as normal. Anyone else gets archived (never deleted) and is sent a challenge. This can be the captcha or the payment link. Once they solve it, their email is pulled out of the archive an

Hi HN folks ! I am the author of AVA, a self hosted AI Voice Agent that plugs into Asterisk/Freepbx so you own all the aspects of an AI Voice agent in your own infrastructure. It uses Asterisk native Audiosocket/RTP with python engine to run STT,LLM and TTS loop. The project support several full providers openai, gemini, grok, elevenlabs out of the box and also provides options to build custom pipelines by choosing different stt tts and llm.It also supports full local agent if you have a GPU with 25GB RAM which enables realtime conversation along with tool calling.I started this as a hobby project last year when I started exploring voice agents and every saw every Saas tried to lock you in their eco system. Since then project has taken off and a lot of asterisk people started using it due to ease of setup and wide range of providers and flexibility.Core is MIT: https://github.com/hkjarral/AVA-AI-Voice-Agent-for-Asterisk Free and open source forever.No install Mock UI us hosted at: https://demo.agent6789.comI am also exploring to convert this into a more polished version for Operators to handle multiple customer and multi tenant environment and I would genuinely like to hear feedback on it.Happy to answer any questions and gather any feedback. Thanks.

Tired of manually updating job application spreadsheet after every email, leading to repetitive data entry.

Tired of manually listing products on Facebook Marketplace one by one, involving repetitive form filling and image uploads.

People seeking apps or platforms specifically for meeting gamers and geeks, frustrated by generic social apps filled with people whose only interest is traveling.

Frustration with mandatory apps for simple tasks like TV setup, preferring direct, app-free methods to reduce complexity and data concerns.

Manually verifying derivation paths every time for airgapped hardware wallets after security incidents, adding repetitive security steps.

Users want a way to automatically or easily delete their phone number from others' phone books for privacy reasons, as current manual methods or lack of tools leave personal data exposed.

Users desire a simple app to replace the default iPhone lock screen with a clean to-do list view for better daily productivity and focus.

Users want a dedicated app for community reporting of health outbreaks to enable faster awareness and response beyond news alerts.

Doing hex code extraction manually for astrology Big 3 + Venus because palette websites use GenAI ads that interfere with workflow.