I've been working on this for a little bit and just got the site up off my own dev machine today. This is a site that uses the Gemini API to summarize HN posts and comments using Gemini 1.5 pro. It also tags stories using the Gemini API. Tags can be browsed for all stories that have that tag. All the tags annotated with the number of stories that have that tag are browsable. The web application portion is written in Django, backed by a Postgres database, served by gunicorn and ultimately pushed out through an nginx reverse proxy. I ended up making this because it was something that I wanted, I'm an old Slashdot nerd, always reading the stories and never the comments. I like HN, and the comment threads here, and wondered one day what it would be like to get Gemini to summarize posts in a way similar to Slashdot.

I don't have any plans to charge for the site. I will probably only have it pull stories once or twice a day to keep the API costs down. There are five API hits per story, verbose summaries (story and comments), tldr summaries (story and comments), and tags. Right now I've got a python script separate from the Django application that does all the interacting with the HN api (which is very nice by the way), the Gemini API, and the Postgres database. I ended up using the Gemini 1.5 pro model to do the summaries as it seems to have access to the Internet, while the other model I tried do not. Getting the model to consistently output JSON for the tags was a bit tricky, until I asked Gemini itself to fix up the prompt for consistently generating JSON. Now it seems to output valid JSON every time without a JSON prefix.

I have noticed that Gemini likes to hallucinate when it comes to the comments, I have it just about ironed out for the story URLs. Mostly when there are few or no comments it seems to summarize like the comments it expects to be there. I'll probably keep tweaking the prompts, and if there's interest demonstrated on Patreon I'll take some polls there of new features to add. I might add more summary types, Gemini seems to do an alright job when I tell it to critique an article but I haven't looked into that too deeply and I have a hunch it might start to hallucinate more. Setting up a personalized page with tag filtering might be an interesting thing to add.

Regardless, I hope you find it interesting. I'm personally curious which tags will end up with the most stories after I have it running for about a month or so. Questions and critiques welcome!