I found myself compulsively checking Hacker News and wanted a calmer way to keep up – just one daily email. So, I built HN Buddy. It's an open-source project you can self-host.

The core idea is: 1) Fetch yesterday's top HN posts. 2) Summarize the previous day's top posts and comments, like I'd tell a friend. 3) Send it as a daily email digest to my inbox. I chose Listmonk for this because it handles subscriber lists, archives the digests (acting as a simple DB), manages unsubscribes, and lets me easily switch SMTP providers.

Emailed myself for over 10 days now and helped me cut down on direct HN visits.

It's been a learning project, so the code and AI summaries are always evolving.

If you want to see the last digests: https://hn-buddy.com

The code: https://github.com/herget/hn-buddy