MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Launch HN: April (YC S25) – Voice AI to manage your email and calendar
by nehasuresh1904 | 2025-08-25 15:56:26+00:00
Hi HN, we’re Neha and Akash from April (https://tryapril.com). We are building an AI executive assistant to help you get through emails and manage your schedule, hands-free while you drive to work, or whenever else you prefer voice interaction.

Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISKwEyuQQEo#t=50

...and here's a second one showing more complex use cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8APprJ3-eY.

While driving 40 mins daily from SF to Berkeley, my inbox would flood to 30+ emails and I'd have back-to-back meetings lined up. I'd reach work already behind, then spend another hour just catching up. We figured with recent advances in voice AI, we could solve this dead time problem and start doing things on the go.

You can just speak to April and it can:

- Summarize important emails and flag what needs attention

- Send replies that I dictate (it handles the formatting and tone)

- Review my calendar and reschedule meetings on the fly

- Pull context from email threads for each meeting

- Archive/organize emails into folders

April is built using Deepgram for STT. Eleven Labs for TTS - built on top of LiveKit. We built our own MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers for Google integration, which handle auth, rate limiting, and maintain conversation context across email threads.

The most interesting part has been optimizing for lowest latency given we are a tool call heavy application. We are also trying to optimize the interruption handling and turn taking to make it feel more natural.

April is available on the AppStore (iPhone/iPad). You can try us out here https://apps.apple.com/us/app/april-ai-executive-assistant/i...

Free 3-day trial, then $14.99/mo. We'd love feedback on: Which email /calendar workflows are most painful for you? What tools beyond Gmail & Google calendar would be most valuable with a voice interface?

We’ll be in the thread all day to answer any questions, share more technical details and learn what would make April most useful to you. Comment away!
by kiitos | 2025-08-25 15:56:58+00:00
this is a completely fair point, it may be the case that AI scraper bots have recently made the magnitude and/or details of unwanted bot traffic to public IP addresses much worse

but yeah the issue is that as long as you have something accessible to the public, it's ultimately your responsibility to deal with malicious/aggressive traffic

> At some point impacting my services with your business behavior goes from "it's just the internet being the internet" to willfully malicious.

I think maybe the current AI scraper traffic patterns are actually what "the internet being the internet" is from here forward
by MangoToupe | 2025-08-25 15:57:04+00:00
I grew up drinking from well water. People are seriously overestimating the amount that certain services need to be provided by a municipality.

Arguably, the issue here is that we're going to need to deal with the fact that many americans are bad at assessing personal risk. Living in the country is in fact expensive—there are fewer people to amortize costs across, especially in societies that don't have market-based housing (which is arguably why country living is considered cheaper). Water and electricity might be the easiest ways to see this, but it's stuff like "access to a hospital" that causes the most harm—a largely invisible cost until you actually need a hospital (or emergency response, or clearing roads from snow, access to postal delivery, etc etc....). At least you'll notice immediately if you don't have water.
by dfsegoat | 2025-08-25 15:57:06+00:00
Colorado Water access law is truly crazy and arcane in some cases (such as this, it would seem).

Source: Had a friend in college that interned for a group of attorneys in Western, CO whose entire practice was around water access rights.

She explained to me some of the ridiculous things that neighbors requiring common water access could do to each other - based purely on who was using the water first.
by skaul | 2025-08-25 15:57:16+00:00
> I haven't seen a single credible technique from anyone that can distinguish content from instructions

You specifically mean that it's ~impossible to distinguish between content and instructions ONCE it is fed to the model, right? I agree with that. I was talking about a prior step, at the browser level. At the point that the query is sent to the backend, the browser would be able to distinguish between web contents and user prompt. This is useful for checking user-alignment of the output of the reasoning model (keeping in mind that the moment you feed in untrusted text into a model all bets are off).

We're actively thinking and working on this, so will have more to announce soon, but this discussion is useful!
by wat10000 | 2025-08-25 15:57:31+00:00
There’s a concept in economics called “revealed preferences.” The idea is that you might not say what you really want, or even know it, but your behavior reveals it.

For example, somebody might say that they hate tiny airline seats and they’d gladly pay substantially extra for more legroom. But then they’ll be presented with a choice of an airline ticket with more legroom, or the exact same ticket but with less legroom for $3 less, and they’ll choose the latter. Their revealed preference is that they don’t actually value legroom very much, despite what they say.

Likewise, if someone says that they support immigration, but you vote for and continue to support someone who opposes immigration to the point of carrying out heinous human rights abuses against legal immigrants, well, actions speak louder than words.

I’m pretty sure this is the “virtue signaling” that people are always going on about. Supporting immigration is seen as a good thing, so people say they do. But when it comes down to actual concrete policy, they don’t. This used to be covered by the fig leaf of “we support legal immigration” but that’s gone now.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-08-25 15:58:10+00:00
> governments haven't acted to serve the people

The government in question here is the one representing the tax-paying residents of the town of Fort Garland. They voted to stop selling their scarce water supply to the non-tax-paying residents of unincoporated Costilla County. So it seems to me that the "government" served the interest of their constituents fairly.
by tsuyoshi_k | 2025-08-25 15:58:12+00:00
Thank you again for your perspective — it’s very thoughtful and appreciated.

While OS Yamato embraces fading by default, not everything disappears. For important items like notes, photos, and contacts, I’ve made it possible to export and download them locally at any time.

The idea isn’t to lock you into loss — but to invite gentle curation. You can always choose what to keep.

This balance — between impermanence and intention — is what I’m exploring here.
by Arnavion | 2025-08-25 15:58:28+00:00
Having traits in the stdlib would be nice, but there's also the type parameter pollution that results from mocking which I think is also a turn-off, as TFA says about rsfs.

I have a Rust library to implement the UAPI config spec (a spec that describes which files and directories a service should look for config files in), and initally wanted to test it with filesystem mocks. After making some effort to implement the mock types and traits, plus wrappers around the `<F = StdFs>` types to hide the `<F>` parameter because I didn't want to expose it in the public API, I realized it was much easier to not bother and just create all the directory trees I needed for the tests.
by Bender | 2025-08-25 15:58:30+00:00
They will not cooperate. Ankle trackers mostly work because the general public does not see them. Some of your coworkers could be wearing them and you would not know. AR will be obvious and they would just accept being a criminal is the only viable path.

Meta would probably also lobby against this as it would associate anyone using AR with being felons. People would start actively looking for the glasses. This could lead to violence or at very least Wifi and Bluetooth jammers becoming socially acceptable regardless of legality.

I could however see a middle ground. Put them in a pod (The Matrix) that uses AR and some form of mind / muscle stimulation to keep them from going crazy. It would be something like the show Altered Carbon or The Matrix except that they would be mostly conscious. They could live in virtual worlds that help them function in society and learn new skills. When they revert to violence no real people get hurt. Or if they choose, they could just keep hurting people in the virtual world and that would be fine. They could be utilized later when required for war. Their combat skills could be greatly enhanced. The system could determine when they may be safe to release. We might be in a pod right now.
by david38 | 2025-08-25 15:58:55+00:00
Except they didn’t. A proper municipality decision would have been discussed publicly with advance notice. This is like the board of directors of Toyota deciding to stop selling to the US without advance notice without input from the shareholders, the US, or advance notice.

It is 100% disingenuous. In no municipality in America is the source of water not considered a long term source where change comes with months of notice. In no municipality is said change executed in a meeting without prior notice to the public with public commenting allowed.
by MangoToupe | 2025-08-25 15:59:17+00:00
> It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.

I'm not entirely sure this is true. At least in the west, this perspective seemed to rely on most "public discourse" not being visible to most of the public. Social media has destroyed this illusion.
by jjmarr | 2025-08-25 15:59:29+00:00
Every fast food place I've been to, a "plain cheeseburger" includes cheese. However, at every high-end burger place I've been to, "plain" does NOT include cheese. So there is a somewhat standard meaning.

I have this conversation enough that I now call out "plain no cheese" and ensure "no cheese" is written on the ticket.
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-25 16:00:09+00:00
The 30.0* signs are basically “no trespassing” sign that property owners (stores shops buildings etc) may elect to refuse entry to persons in various modes of carry. Most commonly will allow people to conceal carry with a license. Most places (in mid-large cities) don’t want people walking around openly carrying a gun in their place of business.

The 51% is alcohol & guns don’t go well together. Conservative Texas would probably like to do away with alcohol altogether, they still only allows beer & wine sales on Sunday and only because Sunday Football. Liquor bottles can only be bought at liquor stores (except on sunday). Unlike California where you can pick up some Johnnie & Jameson with school supplies and toilet paper before church.

Most regulations are on when and how you use the firearm. Having a LTC means you have a little more forgiveness for trespassing because the signs were hidden behind the door or plants etc. Constitutional carry will still be charged. But LTC has more penalties for misuse, such as brandishing to intimidate carries greater penalties
by 62951413 | 2025-08-25 16:00:22+00:00
If you have a use-case where you currently allocate ~1K threads mostly waiting on I/O switching to virtual threads is a one-liner ("Thread.ofVirtual()" instead of "Thread.ofPlatform()"). No more golang envy for sure.

Depending on how much memory is used by the Thread stack (presumably 1M-512K by default, allegedly 128K with Alpine base images) that's your 1G-500M heap space usage improvement right off the bat.

The migration from JDK17 to JDK21 was uneventful in production. The only issue is limited monitoring as a thread dump will not show most virtual threads and the micrometer metrics will not even collect the total number of active virtual threads. It's supposed to work better in JDK24.

The Spring Framework directly supports virtual threads with "spring.threads.virtual.enabled=true" but I haven't tried it to comment.
by nottorp | 2025-08-25 16:00:22+00:00
Not for power users, for governments :)

I keep the official adobe reader around because it's the only way i can sign some crap for the gov.

It's like a virus, I had to remove update daemons and spam daemons and stuff by hand.

Btw the article says it has "AI" now. Where will it send my tax forms?
by ozim | 2025-08-25 16:00:24+00:00
I don’t really see this as universal truth with corporate customers stalling process for up to 2 years or end users being reluctant to change.

We were deploying new changes every 2 weeks and it was too fast. End users need training and communication, pushback was quite a thing.

We also just pushed back aggressive timeline we had for migration to new tech. Much faster interface with shorter paths - but users went all pitchforks and torches just because it was new.

But with AI fortunately we will get rid of those pesky users right?
by whalesalad | 2025-08-25 16:00:36+00:00
At least for Postgres, this won't work the way the author describes.

> And then by magic the results of this query will just always exist and be up-to-date. You can just query it and it’s instant;

This is not true of a materialized view, which needs to be refreshed after changes. PostgreSQL does not support incremental refresh out of the box, so you must refresh the entire view. A standard view would be "magically" up to date, as it is going to defer execution to runtime.
Show HN: Human-like RAG — no vectors
by page_index | 2025-08-25 16:00:38+00:00
Not all improvements come from adding complexity — sometimes it's about removing it.

PageIndex takes a different approach to RAG. Instead of relying on vector databases or artificial chunking, it builds a hierarchical tree structure from documents and uses reasoning-based tree search to locate the most relevant sections. This mirrors how humans actually read: navigating through sections and context rather than relying on embedding similarity.

As a result, the retrieval feels transparent, structured, and explainable. It moves RAG away from approximate "semantic vibes" and toward explicit reasoning about where information lives. That clarity can help teams trust outputs and debug workflows more effectively.

The broader implication is that retrieval doesn't need to scale endlessly in vectors to be powerful. By leaning on document structure and reasoning, it reminds us that efficiency and human-like logic can be just as transformative as raw horsepower.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-25 16:00:43+00:00
"but it's hard to empathize with them when the municipality they're not paying into makes a decision on behalf of their own voters/taxpayers."

They're paying for the water. It's not like they're getting it for free. Sure, the municipality could just not sell outside the municipality, but most utilities are forbidden from suddenly cutting off service due to health and safety concerns.
by prasadjoglekar | 2025-08-25 16:00:43+00:00
This is one example of why I've stopped listening to climate change alarmists. Instead of doing the grunt work of local utility maintenance, it's so much easier to blame "climate change". The climate may be changing, but it's a convenient excuses to not do anything.

Another example - in NYC a few years back, several people died when floodwaters entered their basement homes.

Mayor De Blasio: Climate change.

Local resident: you guys didn't clean out the drains, it's all clogged.
by crashprone | 2025-08-25 16:00:53+00:00
Hey sorry I missed these links when looking at the exercises. I guess anyone who is interested in actually understanding the concepts will click on the Learning tab and be led to those resources. As a user I would like to be inspired by what's possible with shaders, so I would prefer to have links to various ShaderToy examples on the homepage. However, that's just me, maybe others might find it overwhelming and prefer the simpler, easy to grasp examples. Thanks for your response to my feedback, wish you both the best for your product!
by os2warpman | 2025-08-25 16:01:01+00:00
One of my favorite genres of non-fiction is when people who claim they value independence and off-griddyness are forced to be independently off-grid.

"No no we meant off-grid in every aspect save one!"

I know these people, half my family is these people. I've listened to them rail against the man for decades and decades and decades.

When you tell them that the invisible hands of the free market will gladly sell them the bootstraps they require, they get mighty angry.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-25 16:01:07+00:00
Was it? The USSR didn't even make it to its 70th birthday. The leaders of the next generation are brought up in the current. Gorbachev essentially destroyed the USSR, but that's probably in large part because his formative years where under Stalin. His first major foray into politics was as as a rather enthusiastic advocate of the de-Stalinization that happened after Stalin's death. So the leader of a system was somebody who lived under, suffered under, and likely loathed, even if secretly, that system.

This is one of the many examples of the consequences of actions stretching out much further than many realize. A famous quote from Stalin is that, "I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy." His Machiavellian vision likely had him seeing himself as the savior of the USSR, when in reality his actions are almost certainly a key reason that it no longer exists today.
by skaul | 2025-08-25 16:01:18+00:00
You're right that if the user logs into a sensitive website, the "isolated browsing" mitigation stops helping. We don't want the user to accidentally end up in that state though. Separately, I can also imagine use-cases for agentic browsing where the user doesn't have to be logged into sensitive websites. Summarizing Hacker News front page, for one.
by asoneth | 2025-08-25 16:01:54+00:00
It's better than it was 20+ years ago (jeez I'm old) when I first tried Linux. Back then you needed to be fairly technical to get it running and even to do basic day-to-day tasks, but now you can use a human-friendly GUI most of the time.

But not 100% the time. And that makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have a Linux expert in their life. Finding a file that got put in a weird place, plugging in USB devices, understanding what version of an application to install (apt? snap? flatpak?), permissions, weird issues after updates, etc. All solvable problems that seem simple to you or me but that would stymie a nontechnical person.

> a large proportion of folks would be switching because a family member was helping them make the move.

Exactly. Linux is fantastic if you have a technical person on speed dial or are interested in investing time and energy becoming a technical person. For the other 90% of the planet it's just not there yet.
by scythe | 2025-08-25 16:02:07+00:00
>the pump broke

Saved you a click.

Fort Garland sits just below Blanca Peak, the highest in the Sangre de Cristo, which receives a ton of precipitation. So what's the problem?

The pump broke.

There are water issues in the San Luis Valley. It's a cold desert which happens to be the best place in the United States to grow a recently popular cash crop: quinoa. About 77% of water use in the region is for agriculture, not weird prepper cisterns. This supply is strained, but the current drought status is only D1.

TFA is really more of a closing-frontier issue than a drought issue. The states northeast of Pennsylvania manage all of their land via townships. Everywhere else you can get these weird municipal-unincorporated disputes. See also: Walmart locating outside city limits to avoid taxes.
by potatolicious | 2025-08-25 16:02:49+00:00
> "I suspect part of this is rich people coming up with use cases."

Yes. Having been in the room for some of these demos and pitches, this is absolutely where it's coming from. More accurately though, it's wealthy people (i.e., tech workers) coming up with use cases that get mega-wealthy people (i.e., tech execs) excited about it.

So you have the myopia that's already present in being a wealthy person in the SFBA (which is an even narrower myopia than being a wealthy American generally), and matmul that with the myopia of being a mega-wealthy individual living in the SFBA.

It reminds me of the classic Twitter post: https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888?lan...

I honestly see this as a major problem with our industry. Sure, this has always been true to some extent - but the level of wealth in the Bay Area has gotten so out-of-hand that on a basic level the mission of "can we produce products that the world at large needs and wants" is compromised, and increasingly severely so.
by lukan | 2025-08-25 16:02:56+00:00
I mean, my fridge keeping an eye on the food and order fresh milk and butter in a timely (preprogrammed) manner would be quite nice.

Or if I have a long term project I am building, but waiting for some material needed to drop in price again.

All scenarios where I would like agents, if I could trust them. I think we are getting there.
by The_Fox | 2025-08-25 16:03:02+00:00
With regards to wrapping your head around heat loss- this winter some work was done on our property while there was snow on the ground. A bunch of snow got covered in dirt. In the spring, maybe three weeks after all the snow on the ground had melted, I moved the pile and was surprised to find all the snow still frozen. It had been under maybe 18 inches of dirt. I was pretty surprised to see it.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-08-25 16:03:03+00:00
How am I sidestepping the point? The point is that, upon reviewing the evidence, NPR is not as biased as you personally described, and that your claims here[0] are thus unfounded.

The problem here isn't with any bias on NPR's part, but with your personal claim of NPR bias, given that it is contradicted by the evidence we see here. Indeed, a position of 'evidence against my claim only proves my point harder' is nonsensical, and may itself be underlied by bias.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010316
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-25 16:03:07+00:00
> Anyway, i'm on a whole lot of fbi lists now

The Radioactive Boy-scouts real problems started with a unlucky find of an antique Radium paint vile inside one of the clocks he salvaged.

Everyone is already on a list now regardless of conduct, as privacy became redundant in 2017. The funnier phenomena is people still acting like they are Batman. It is absurd naive behavior... =3
by jkaplowitz | 2025-08-25 16:03:19+00:00
I’m sorry to hear your grandma got targeted by con artists, but it’s a rare scam where imprisoning the few individuals who are actually within reach of arrest and who generate enough usable evidence to convict them will meaningfully protect the scam’s potential future victims. In those rare cases, imprisonment might well be appropriate.

I don’t see signs of that in the case we are discussing. This crime was a crime of opportunity against a large corporation causing only monetary harm to the corporation in the form of inconvenience and time wasted for its employees to clean up the mess, but not ruining anyone or anything beyond coworkers’ account profile settings, not even anyone’s paychecks.

Certainly this case was worthy of punishment, definitely worthy of the felony criminal conviction and potential damages if the employer wants to sue or if this criminal statute lets the court include that in the sentence, likely worthy of temporarily or permanently keeping him away from employer computer systems beyond something heavily locked down (e.g. point of sale screen), and maybe also temporarily or permanently away from computers or the internet in general if that won’t unreasonably prevent him from having some viable way of making a living, but not worthy of imprisonment without more reason for that.