I think the concept is great, I'd love something like this even more broadly, sort of a daily "customizable" newspaper. The issue I see is that it's a bit... bland? Obviously you're doing this with AI and there's no other way to do it, but one of the main reasons why something like HN has stayed relevant for this long is its variety: front page stories often have remarkable diversity, not only in topics and content, but also in tone and writing style. I feel a digest like this one flattens everything more than I'd like.
> Obviously you're doing this with AI and there's no other way to do it
What do you mean "no other way to do it"? Traditionally these sort of things been curated, by humans who read and make judgements, how is that not another way to do it? Probably would solve the whole "bit... bland?" problem to, given the right curator.
I agree that this is likely to flatten out the depth of comments I come here for. It's also hard to get a brief that is tailored to the subset of posts you might actually be interested in.
The approach I tried was to rely mainly on what comments I've upvoted, have the AI look at those comments and gather context from the article/link and the parent comment chain, then give me a "here's what you learned yesterday" brief.
I had plans to add some memory to mention related things from recent weeks. Relying mainly on being able to visually code all this with n8n, and never quite got it working.
Not a perfect solution but I wonder if asking the LLM to preserve style when summarizing works well. I will have to try that. Because they do indeed otherwise default to bland slop style.
Nice concept. Daily summaries are useful for anyone who can't check HN multiple times a day. Do you weight by comment velocity or just points? Some of the best discussions happen on posts with moderate points but high comment counts. We built something tangentially related - a startup idea validator that scores across multiple dimensions (market, timing, competition). Different use case but similar "give me the signal, skip the noise" philosophy. Free at crewhaus.ai/score if curious.
I can't see the page at the moment (getting the No digest yet).
I made a thing[0] that splits stories by day without mixing old popular with new stories. That helped cut down my HN visits to a few times per day. [I had originally made it to list all stories on one page and load story links at stops in a subway/metro commute.]
What I'm finding now is that there's too much noise at the top and what I really want to see are the stories not upvoted by mainstream/populist interests--if anyone knows a solution to that, please share.
Edit: I was hosting this on Vercel free tier, and since this post made it to the front page, I've hit Vercel's quota limit. I will work on getting around this.
? This has been done before, plus apps like Harmonic support Best by X hrs. Do people love re-inventing the wheel before googling "drive car from A to B"?
"brief" also has a similar meaning in English, in (several) alternative meanings of "brief" to mean a precis, summary, position paper of various kinds. Both are derived from latin breve/brevis - "short".
You'll find variants with one or other of those meanings all derived from latin in a number of other languages too, e.g. "brev" in Norwegian (letter).
I think the concept is great, I'd love something like this even more broadly, sort of a daily "customizable" newspaper. The issue I see is that it's a bit... bland? Obviously you're doing this with AI and there's no other way to do it, but one of the main reasons why something like HN has stayed relevant for this long is its variety: front page stories often have remarkable diversity, not only in topics and content, but also in tone and writing style. I feel a digest like this one flattens everything more than I'd like.
> Obviously you're doing this with AI and there's no other way to do it
What do you mean "no other way to do it"? Traditionally these sort of things been curated, by humans who read and make judgements, how is that not another way to do it? Probably would solve the whole "bit... bland?" problem to, given the right curator.
Probably no sustainable pays-the-bills way to do it, though I would love to be proven wrong by a curator who happens to match my preferences.
On the other hand, the HN front page is already the result of collective curation.
I agree that this is likely to flatten out the depth of comments I come here for. It's also hard to get a brief that is tailored to the subset of posts you might actually be interested in.
The approach I tried was to rely mainly on what comments I've upvoted, have the AI look at those comments and gather context from the article/link and the parent comment chain, then give me a "here's what you learned yesterday" brief.
I had plans to add some memory to mention related things from recent weeks. Relying mainly on being able to visually code all this with n8n, and never quite got it working.
Not a perfect solution but I wonder if asking the LLM to preserve style when summarizing works well. I will have to try that. Because they do indeed otherwise default to bland slop style.
> Hackerbrief
> No digest yet. Trigger `GET /api/cron/digest`.
> GET https://hackerbrief.vercel.app/api/cron/digest
> 401 Unauthorized
hmm
I was on Vercel free tier and hit the quota for blob storage. Will probably make it open source so people can self host
Same on Firefox desktop.
Same
Same. At least at this moment. iPad.
Nice concept. Daily summaries are useful for anyone who can't check HN multiple times a day. Do you weight by comment velocity or just points? Some of the best discussions happen on posts with moderate points but high comment counts. We built something tangentially related - a startup idea validator that scores across multiple dimensions (market, timing, competition). Different use case but similar "give me the signal, skip the noise" philosophy. Free at crewhaus.ai/score if curious.
I can't see the page at the moment (getting the No digest yet).
I made a thing[0] that splits stories by day without mixing old popular with new stories. That helped cut down my HN visits to a few times per day. [I had originally made it to list all stories on one page and load story links at stops in a subway/metro commute.]
What I'm finding now is that there's too much noise at the top and what I really want to see are the stories not upvoted by mainstream/populist interests--if anyone knows a solution to that, please share.
[0] https://hackerer.news/
https://www.hndigest.com/
http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/
I would have appreciated a sarcastic summary like http://n-gate.com/hackernews/
They've been dead for ages haven't they?
HN already has these features...
Active:
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Highlights:
https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
We dont do "top-posts" but we do most Game posts in case you are insterested :)
https://hnarcade.com
Nice! Would be great to also get a summary of the comments.
Edit: I was hosting this on Vercel free tier, and since this post made it to the front page, I've hit Vercel's quota limit. I will work on getting around this.
how about static hosting?
? This has been done before, plus apps like Harmonic support Best by X hrs. Do people love re-inventing the wheel before googling "drive car from A to B"?
Oh relax. Let people make things. It's okay to have more than one take on an idea.
Am I being fair when I immediately categorize anything as a summary as a data dump from an AI?
why not someone use an n8n automation where it automatically fetches its and get telegram message? just asking so I can help you develop the idea
"Hackerbrief" means "hacker letter" in German.
"brief" also has a similar meaning in English, in (several) alternative meanings of "brief" to mean a precis, summary, position paper of various kinds. Both are derived from latin breve/brevis - "short".
You'll find variants with one or other of those meanings all derived from latin in a number of other languages too, e.g. "brev" in Norwegian (letter).
Oh yeah! I was also really confused at first haha.
Man, I miss n-gate more than ever
Aaaand we’re back
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