Over the Easter weekend, I hacked together a little side project to solve a personal pain point: reading through massive Hacker News threads. I love HN and read it daily, but sometimes the most interesting posts have hundreds of comments. While the discussions are often gold, it’s hard to find the time (or the eye-ache/stamina) to read them all. So I built HN Summary. I used Cursor (using Gemini 2.5/Sonnet 3.5) for most of the work, and was able to get things going quite quickly (ps. I'm not a professional software developer but learnt how to code to an okay level). The tool gives you readable, nuanced summaries of the top HN stories and their comment threads. The app refreshes twice a day with summaries of the top 10 stories, and you can also request custom summaries of any HN thread (you get 12 free credits to start). The app is very much experimental, and some things may break, but I'd love feedback from the HN community. Let me know what you think, what you'd change, or if you've come across anything like it. |