Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories

Wow... Really great.

Can you add some historical archive to listen n hours ago (or morning briefing like) summary as a feature?

Thanks! An archive shouldn't be too hard to implement.

Would a morning briefing include more of a curated selection of news, like the most interesting/most discussed news of the day? Currently I just take the top 5 posts from the main page.

Yeah. You're right.

My morning routine is Checking HN with Coffee. So with your service I can minimize some time to click around and figure out what the root cause is.

I was actually listening to it while making breakfast as well, so the idea of an extended morning briefing resonates with me. I'll look into it, thanks for the follow-up!

Nice. Would it be possible to add a link to the actual submission as it is being discussed?

Definitely! I was thinking to just show a list of all the links under the player, would that work for you?

Really neat! How was the waveform visualization achieved?

This is really great stuff, love the added "news-station" type music! If something like this we're to be monetized would there be any issues regarding copyright?

I could easily see listening to such a summary once or twice a day. Considering the pace at which HN is updated, how about two to four somewhat longer episodes per day, with an archive of the past week so that people can catch up? You might also want to focus on certain types of stories, such as those with more upvotes or comments.

In any case, it's a great idea, and I enjoyed listening to the current episode.

Looks like https://wavesurfer.xyz/

Was thinking the same thing. Very fun idea, nice work!

Thank you! And that's a really good question. Since it's summarizing the articles, I would assume that there shouldn't be any issues regarding copyright. Regarding the comments that it's using, I think HN generally has some rights to them, although again it's more of a summarization. Generally HN seems cool about these things.

Now, if you were to scan the homepage of the BBC and create a news broadcast from it, they probably wouldn't be too happy about that, understandably. I have no idea how this would fare in court though.

Yep! First time using it, seems really solid and does the job.

Brilliant idea. I think this has real value as well: as I get older, I find that I have less energy for reading, but I also notice I often miss really cool stuff that was briefly on the front of HN.

I like that it summarizes the comments too. There are often real gems buried in there. (I assume you're only taking a few top ones?)

I think a great improvement could be made with personalization. Most of what's on the front page isn't personally relevant to me, and there's a lot of cool stuff on the new submissions page that never catches on. So it would be nice if a system could learn what kind of stories I personally respond to, and show me (a summary of?) those -- even if they aren't currently trending.

Last.fm came out 20 years ago (proving you don't even need AI for amazing recommender systems), but it seems personalizing your experience never really caught on. (Yeah, the YouTube algorithm kind of does this, but you unfortunately have no real control over it.)

Love it. Reminds me of the also useful Hacker News Recap from wondercraft but it looks like that stopped updating as of October 1st (https://www.wondercraft.ai/our-podcasts/hacker-news).

Would be great to have a playback speed button as well. (I can't sit through any audio at 1x.)

I like this idea a lot. Archived entries would be nice as others have suggested. It would also be nice to be able to control playback speed.

Not just the top five, more like http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ which also ensures newness.

Because of that, catching up on several days will also be unique stories.

Neat! Personally hourly feels a bit much but a daily briefing that can fit inside a commute or on a short walk would be perfect. Might be the first ai podcast I'd subscribe to.

Did you add the “hi mom” bit at the end, or was that organic?

That's a real useful resource. Thanks!

I was looking into using the algolia API to get the top 10 posts of the last day, but those won't be unique over the span of several days.

agreed on energy for reading. do you think it’s that we’re getting older or that the friction associated with consuming information is just getting lower and lower over time?

Same boat re: audio speed. I actually speed up the voice in the backend by 1.16x . Above that I was getting too many artifacts in the audio. The nice thing about doing it at that point is that I can handle the music and the voice separately, i.e. the speed of the music stays unchanged.

Speeding it up in the player will also speed up the music, which is not very zen. But I guess I'll just add it to the player and let people decide how fast they want to go.

I did https://radio-hn.pages.dev/ last year in the same idea, just once per day. Posted it somewhere here at the time.

So my energy levels have declined noticeably from age 20 to 30. I thought it was mostly my own chronic health issues causing accelerated aging, but many of my friends are making similar complaints.

I did notice far before this point (e.g. age 10 to 20) that my patience for reading had gone down significantly. If I had to guess I'd say that in my case it's due to an underlying anxiety that started in early teens and never left me. Drowning it out seems to require something more stimulating than reading (on paper).

(Perhaps meditation or therapy (shadow integration?) would help here. I've certainly had glimpses of inner peace during times when I was meditating regularly. One insight from this time: "holy crap, I always thought I needed to struggle harder, but it turns out I just needed to learn how to relax...")

I can get through audiobooks but I can only consume them while traveling or doing chores. If I'm sitting down, the restlessness is too high and I can't concentrate on the book.

I also have ADHD and heard similar things from others with ADHD, so I'm not sure to what degree this translates to others.

If you do this, it might be interesting to publish this as a podcast. Hourly is too frequent for a podcast, but daily would be pretty good.

(Podcasts are just RSS feeds.)

I added a basic speed setting, hope 3x is enough ;)

When it comes to online reading, there are quite a few things that cause me fatigue that I don't feel I used to experience. Advertisements have been there for a long time, but often these are woven into the content, either as literal text placed in the article, or as visual ads that you need to scroll through to continue reading the article. Relying on different JavaScript and CSS techniques to "enhance" the user experience often cause me issues when I'm just trying to focus on reading. Those include overriding scrollbars, dynamic loading of content when the text is small enough to have been included in the page, and displaying some kind of alternative action when highlighting text. I'll often highlight text to keep track of where I'm reading, and some sites will pop up a dialog with share actions, or the ability to add annotations, etc. This is distracting and makes it more difficult to follow along with a longer article.

I'm 45, and got my start on BBS pre-internet, but I feel like if I find an article without the distractions I mentioned above, I actually have more energy to complete an article than I did in my 20's and 30's. Having access to the article without distractions helps me to focus, and when I focus, I tend to consume more content than I normally would. Most likely one of the reasons we're drawn to HN.

Interesting, I actually did a search before submitting mine, but I narrowed it down to the last year only. Yours being 2y/o didn't show up. You were ahead of your time!

You've just made me realize why I usually avoid clicking the actual article link on HN. It's usually a very unpleasant experience, unless it's clear that it's a smaller website.

I added a basic speed setting, have a look! Also looking into the archive idea, which will be a bit more involved, since my current infra is kind of minimalist.

Frankly this is super fantastic. Thank you. Any possibility to make this longer, and split it into sections with updates on previous stories at the end? I love this concept a lot.

Next step heygen avatar's doing desk presentations with small videos overlayed to show the websites etc.

"although details remain sparse due to issues extracting content from the linked resource"

Unfortunate that it adds stuff like this, which doesn't seem helpful to the listener.

Did anyone notice it reporting about itself now? This will definitely go into the archive :)

Yep, some pages can't be read for some reason or another. I already added support for PDFs, I guess I'll handle more error cases as they pop up.

I added it to the prompt for this exact situation. So it was "hard-coded". Tbh it would have been a bit scary if that happened organically. Kind of like animals recognizing themselves in the mirror levels of self-awareness.

Sounds good, I'll get back to you about that!

Excellent, thank you. This is something I can listen to!

"First up a webgpu wifi simulator has emerged, although details remain sparse due to trouble extracting data from the linked resource"

Sounds about right

Thanks for the comment, I'm really enjoying the discussion it has sparked.

Yes, I'm just taking the top comments, along with a few child comments, in order to not exceed the context window of the model.

Regarding personalization, there's definitely lots of potential. HN can be so random though, sometimes you find things that you didn't even know you needed (intellectually). I guess as with most recommender systems, it's about a balance between exploration and exploitation. Maybe an MVP could filter for specific keywords and add those posts to the model input.

The AI voice is good. What are you using to generate it?

Fun stuff. It does feel like NotebookLM (and others) are hurtling us toward a future that seems inevitable: all content is public domain, and people consume it in many transformed ways.

Those that get ahead of the curve and make their content publicly available and semantically well structured will see their ideas thrive.

Here's my user test: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.loom.com/embed/9e8b8d454ee...

Yeah, if you look at the page source, there's actually no text in the document body. At one point I will have to use a JS-capable browser, to capture pages like this one.

This is awesome, I wish it did a rolling 8 hour instead that is updated once a hour if that makes sense.

That seems to be the general consensus, I think it makes sense to move in that direction and beef it up a little.

Unrelated but reminds me of GTA V's radio channels in cars. The news talking about what you just did.

Thank you! Most of the people here seem to prefer a longer form, so I think I'll move in that direction.

> split it into sections with updates on previous stories at the end

So basically, if a story comes up that has been reported on before, it references the older story and gives some context and the update? Something like "just last week, the Internet Archive had been the victim of another cyber-attack, in which [...]"?

It's openAI's voice generator.

So the best of the last 8 hours, with a new episode every hour? I think that makes sense, you could check in every 8 hours or so and have a fresh set of stories.

> Yeah, the YouTube algorithm kind of does this, but you unfortunately have no real control over it.)

You do, indirectly. Just need to curate your last watched videos.

Sometimes I feel like I got put into a certain genre or bubble or if things autopplay a when I sleep I'll not ice my front page being taken over.

I just go delete some of those videos from my recent list I can see visible improvement.

Or just start a few video on the topic you want to see and then it's all you'll be recommended.

This is possibly an interesting extension [1]. I just generally don't follow recommendations. But my kids love it, and they use my account (Premium, else they get all kind of inappropriate ads (which is even illegal)), so I have to be careful. So the other day I wanted to look into what the other political side had to say about something. You know, as a matter of broadening my view to gain some understanding. Boy, did I regret, as I was getting sucked into some kind of conspiracy bubble. My wife asked me what on earth I watched. So I ended up trying to have YouTube profile me as little as possible (via settings). Didn't fully solve it, but it is much more clean now. And if I do watch something which I don't want to be remembered: private browsing mode. I do this for porn, but unfortunately they do profile my IP address (so I should use a VPN).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/regretsreport...

Great idea! I've always wanted to catch up with tech news while walking/driving, particularly from HN.

Fantastic idea! I really liked extracting meta information from Comments as well. Good luck!

Thanks for the video, it's really interesting to see a user test like this!

Wow—this is indistinguishable from an NPR piece.

This is so good! I could use that mixed in together with a spotify station for modern Radio experience. I miss the days where you could just do something else and listen to the radio host. Streaming partially supplanted it but not to the same extent, sadly.

Pretty neat but it seems to make stuff up. It took a meta comment from this post[1] about the website formatting and suggested the community was worried the C++ memory safety proposal would make code hard to read on mobile. It is hard to trust the other summaries after hearing that.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41899828

Next step- create an HNN news network with chyrons and AI news anchors that you can have running on the TVs in your office 24/7 the way banks have CNBC and Bloomberg News running

I hate it but I also love it.

> as I get older, I find that I have less energy for

Side comment: When a person says something like that, they might be speaking of only themself, but there's a different parsing that many will hear.

Ageism is a real problem in our field, and one thing we can do is to not accidentally feed it.

Im reminded of the talking heads in Batman Beyond that were presumably AIs.

I started listening to it after this very submission became #1 on HN, so it was very meta to listen to it talk about how it might be making stuff up...

Great project!

I never had ADHD or related attention problems. However, I find the way interwebs has evolved over years and to basically trained our brains to be so focused on super short pieces of simply digestible content has basically turned me off of longer form content. I’ve noticed my preference for immediate gratification has increased significantly. It feels like I’m developing an attention disorder in my middle age years.

Hah! Here's what it had to say about itself this hour:

> In a more self-referential turn, we examine the launch of HN Update itself. This initiative aims to provide hourly news broadcasts, summarizing top stories from Hacker News. While listeners appreciate the concept of curated news, there are concerns about the accuracy of the summaries and the potential for bias in representation. Community discussion suggests that while the value of such a service is evident, trust in the accuracy of the content remains a critical issue.

Enjoyed this a lot! Particularly enjoyed the meta update about this thread. There are some neat suggestions here, but if this could come up on my podcast feed as-is I would listen to it.

Would be cool to create embeddings for historical HN posts, and then use a users favorite posts to personalize the post selection by averaging the embedding vectors for a users favorite posts then doing a cosine similarity search to select stories most likely to be of interest to a user.

Although it would be even better to use a users like history, but I’m not sure if/how those can be accessed.

Speaking of, I’m curious how other folks use embeddings. I know you can average multiple embeddings together, but is anyone else doing other translations and having success? Thinking of King - Man + Women = Queen, It seems a lot of the time I see questions being directly used as inputs for semantic search/RAG. I wonder if it might make sense to create a large set of question-answer pairs and embed them and then determine the average translation to move from “question space” to “answer space”, then when you embed questions you apply the translation on the embedding to move it into “answer space” before performing RAG, or maybe this would just add too much noise?

Wanted to share that I also had intense anxiety/depression well into my thirties but was able to finally sort it out a few years ago.

I think your phrase "learn how to relax" is spot-on. I was chronically under-slept and chronically over-focused on school, university, career, side-hustle(s), etc.--without much great effect I might add. My brain was so wound up from a decade-plus of hyper-vigilance that I had actually forgotten how to relax.

Obviously, I am not you and n=1, but hopefully it is encouraging to know that you might not always need to drown it out.

Haha yes!!

Sounds good. Listened to some of it -- good.

Suggestion, have better audio:

(1) Enunciate the words more clearly.

(2) To help with (1), slow down and speak fewer words per minute.

(3) At the end of a sentence, don't drop voice volume and enunciation clarity.

I read a huge amount every day, lots of news articles, chapters of whatever book, random material of interest, people's comments and questions. I rarely read anything "long-form", however, because it has a strong tendency to be a giant self-indulgent bloviating pile of shit. There are exceptions: I've read every story on damninteresting, because it's true to its name. (Hi Alan. Post something new.)

I've nearly finished Moby Dick, but I don't know why, it's dreadful, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I guess it's historically interesting.

Possibly you guys are not losing the will or energy to read, you're merely discovering that the things you think you ought to read are terrible. Try only reading what you like. So what if it's short? Maybe your preference is right.

> in a more self-referential turn

:o wow, the AI is becoming self-aware!

hmmm, I can't speak to people using word2vec in conjunction with RAG, but the other use case is actually pretty common. (you don't need to generate answers though in my experience).

For each document intended for ingestion into a vector database:

- Use an LLM to generate a list of possible questions that the document is capable of answering (essentially equivalent to generating a quiz)

- Map these question embeddings back to the original documents

- Store document, document chunks, question 1, question 2, etc. into the vector database

So now when a person queries your RAG, you have the direct link from user query -> doc chunks, but additionally the transitionary link from user query -> similar query -> doc chunk.

I wonder what it will do when it encounters a (year) postfix.

This is so neat. I been wanting to build something for HN and can't believe I didn't think of this. It was also cool too hear the update with a mention of HN Update as well considering it's treanding! :)

> Yeah, the YouTube algorithm kind of does this, but you unfortunately have no real control over it.

Wouldn't that argument hold true even if it was implemented here?

Not affilliated, but if you want a large selection of _really_ good text to speech voices, check out eleven labs. Only problem is it's not cheap :/

cool. and, a neat side effect of catching this late is that the HN Update broadcast I heard (labeled "10/20/2024, 9:59:47 PM", assuming Pacific time) included & described itself in the audio. at the time of writing, it's a top story currently on the front page!

There was also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35831177 some times after mine. Indeed a bit before the one year period from now.

This assumes that favorites have some kind of meaning. Favorites are public (IIRC) and I basically use them to track and share interesting/funny comments. Upvotes on the other hand, are private and are more inline with the things I care about.

Haha indeed, got it as a last story

I would actually use that, especially if it had hourly summaries of the days news like some real news networks do, so you don’t have to watch all day but could just chuck it on when convenient.

The best part about these AI-reads-content things is the potential to let users do things like choose the voice, the talking speed, etc. As a non-American I hate listening to those American talking-head news channels because it’s jarring for me when I’m used to my own accent, even if I do want to catch up on some current events or something.

That would be great. Highlighting each one as it's talked about would be even better.

On a related note, what are some cheaper alternative to Open AI's text to speech? Last I checked it came out to ~$9/day for their text-to-speech.

Why is it that some people can accept - even like - music behind a voice that tells something?

I strongly dislike it. It makes it harder to listen to the voice.

Am I the only one?

This is probably the coolest use case I have seen of HN API

True, that is not a good look.

> This formatting and font mixing is difficult to read on mobile.

I guess for us it's obvious that it's a meta comment, but I can understand the confusion. Still, it could have figured out that "readability on mobile" doesn't really apply to C++, a programming language.

I'll add a section to the prompt reminding it that comments can be meta or even non-factual (gasp), so that it doesn't try to shoehorn meaning into comments like this one.

should add option to turn off background music

Not at all, I feel the same. In fact, last time I had that reaction was yesterday, listening to an audiobook which was employing the same dubious technique.

No, it's pretty annoying really; I don't know why people do that. I don't like it on youtube/podcasts either. It adds nothing at all at best and distracts at worst.

This is awesome. I like it

> as I get older, I find that I have less energy for reading,

As I get older (50 now), I have 0 patience for anything else than reading; it's much faster than listening and rereading stuff I didn't get the first time is easier and faster. I listen to stuff (including zoom/calls) to stuff that doesn't hold much importance/value; maybe it triggers something, then I go read about it instead.

Totally agree.

There used to be a commercial that would play on Canadian TV stations. It showed the view of a river, once with calm and tranquil sounds and then played again with ominous sounds like from a horror movie. When you are presented the river with tranquil sounds, you are happy and calm. When you are presented the river with eerie sounds, you dislike it. The message at the end of the video was to inform Canadians to think more critically about the media they consume, and to question if they are being led down a forced narrative rather than being given facts to question for themselves.

When I see modern day Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc, almost all of the videos are backed by music which is trying to bias the user. It makes me uncomfortable.

+1

AI making stuff up? Unbelievable.

I can't read long form content from a phone screen or computer monitor. I really don't like it. It might be the scrolling, or maybe the type of screen, or conditioning to expect instant gratification. I do, however, read 20-30 books a year, both paper and on an ereader.

I think it's super important to make reading a habit so one must identify what doesn't work for them and try something else. You lose so much if you don't read.

Tbf, there's a section in the prompt for this exact situation. Worth it just for this little wow moment.

Lots of positive feedback here, but after a quick listen, I'm not a fan. To summarize my thoughts...

1. The experience just feels too sluggish. For example, I opened the HN homepage, skimmed all of the headlines, read the comments on the top post, and it probably took about 30 seconds. I was done, feeling like I got all the information from HN that I needed, with the intention of checking for new posts later in the day. This tool took an entire minute to brief me about a single post.

2. It's not very practical. Usually 1 or 2 posts catch my attention on the HN homepage each day. This tool is most likely going to give me information about the wrong posts. You could improve this with some type of algorithm that learns what information I listen to and what I skip, but it's not ideal. Or, perhaps I could click the headlines I'm interested in, and a custom audio summary is generated.

3. Lastly, I think it removes the human experience of HN. I like to read exactly what people are posting. Everyone is unique, and it's interesting to see how people interact, along with their choice of words and tone. Erasing all of that and listening to a robotic summary just sucks the soul straight out of the community. It reduces the connection to the people here, which I think is the best aspect of the site.

Thanks for sharing though, it's interesting to see this idea brought to fruition.

Actually, I used to love reading, but the last years I've felt exactly like I had no energy to read any more, and have switched to audiobooks and podcasts. I then checked my eyes, and it turns out I need glasses. So as you get older, check your eyes!

I have had glasses since I was 7... A year after my father brought home a 'portable computer' (luggable) [0] with a tiny monochrome screen. Not sure if that was related, but I guess it could be as the screen was very tiny (see pic below).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1

Thanks for the feedback, looks like you're not the only one. Personally I enjoy it, but I can understand that some might find it distracting.

I just need to figure out a way to implement a toggle for the music, while also playing nicely with the playback speed etc.

You're mostly hinting at a very obvious shortcoming of synthesized speech: Its sequential. The phenomenon is most obvious if you look at screen readers using speech synthesis. Its a fundamental problem of the medium, which some devs will discover independently, now that tts has a new surge.

No, you are not the only one, background music is pretty common though.

Often the background music is just too loud compared to the voice. Professional productions use a technique called ducking, where the music is dynamically made quiet in relation to the volume of the voice.

Personally, I prefer no background music at all, and I wonder if there is a case to made for the professionally balanced case?

I enjoy it as well. Makes it easier to listen for me, voice alone is droning.

Agree and I would add,

4. Skimming HN is useful in text-format because you can go deeper on something that catches your eye by following the link. The podcast format removes this because you can't click on something you hear and dive deeper into it. Skimming without the ability to dive into something is not useful, see next point.

5. High-level summaries are not my use case for HN, or any social media. They don't provide real value, just the illusion of value. What I want to dive deep into stories I am curious about. That can be done with TTS, but I would need to curate my feed first, and then use the podcast format to dive deeper into my curated stories.

I almost feel like this product would be more useful if you remove the LLM aspect and instead let me paste a list of HN threads into it and just TTS all of them, including the full comments. Then I could listen to this long-form content while driving or doing something else.

Excellent Idea

I think it’s a case of this not fitting your use case.

It wouldn’t replace reading the front page for me but I could really see it replacing a podcast on my morning walk. Especially given the absence of news spin or adverts. I’ll definitely be giving it a try tomorrow.

I see lots of generated content with AI, would be interested how much of this is actually listened by a real human after the first days of excitement.

Wow this is awesome. I've actually been working on something very similar. In my case though I focus on individual stories. Like the commenter above I feel audio doesn't work so well for general overview.

I haven't done a showHN yet because it's not quite ready but you can see where it's at here:

https://news.gipety.com/hn/10842381/k/218/s/three-years-as-a...

I think it would be quite a nice way to give a second life to classic episodes of past showHNs and askHNs.

But he… what? :)

Last week I had a similar idea as you. I created a webpage called https://zeli.app that automatically helps you parse the content of posts from the HN homepage, rewrite the titles, and generate abstracts.

So, I ended up with these post fragments, and I tried feeding these title + abstract lists to Claude 3.5 Sonnet to string them together into a 5-minute English podcast, emphasizing on making these fragments flow cohesively.

Honestly, I wasn't completely satisfied with the results because the topics switched too quickly, and each post only had 2-3 sentence introductions, making it sound less interesting.

Anyway, it was exciting to find someone with a similar idea as me, but I still think the lack of interesting content is the main issue.

Sample here:

"Tech enthusiasts, welcome to 'Claude's Crazy Tech Emporium'! I'm your old friend Claude. Today, we're taking you on a fantastic tech journey, from the maze of subscription services all the way to nuclear-powered data centers. Fasten your seatbelts, we're taking off!

First, let's talk about those love-hate subscription services. Ever tried to unsubscribe and couldn't find the exit? Like being stuck in a maze, looking everywhere but finding no way out. Don't worry, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has heard our cries! They've recently introduced the 'Click to Cancel' rule. Imagine canceling a subscription as easily as deleting an ex's contact. Ah, the sweet taste of freedom! But don't get too excited, because...

Amazon is tempting us again! They've just launched a series of new Kindles, including their first color Kindle and the all-new Kindle Scribe. Now you can not only read color e-books but also write and draw on them. It's the perfect gift for those who love doodling in paper books! But book lovers, beware, this isn't a license to scribble in library books. Speaking of which...

Have you heard about the 'Transition Year' in the Irish education system? It's like a 'dream school year' for students! During this year, students can try various courses, from aeronautics to art, from programming to car maintenance. Isn't this like a real-life 'Hogwarts'? I even wonder if they have a course on 'How to Create Magic Books on Kindle'. But if you really want to experience magical technology, then...

You must check out the Apple Vision Pro! Someone recently used this device that looks like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie on a plane. Imagine wearing this high-tech headset, watching 3D movies at 30,000 feet - fellow passengers might think you're a time traveler from 2050. Just a reminder, don't scream out loud if you're watching a horror movie, or the flight attendant might think you've spotted a UFO! Speaking of unidentified objects...

Recently, someone benchmarked so-called 'AI PCs'. The results show that these computers might not be as intelligent as we imagined. It seems AI still prefers to roam in the cloud, reluctant to move into our computers permanently. Maybe AI thinks our computers are too cramped? But don't worry, because...

Amazon is finding a new home for AI! They've recently quietly invested in a nuclear power developer. Looks like they're planning a 'nuclear' upgrade for their data centers! Imagine, every tweet you send might have a hint of nuclear energy. Don't worry, this won't turn your phone into a mini nuclear reactor. Although, if it did, we'd never have to worry about low battery again, right?

Finally, let's look at the 'nuclear' war in the WordPress community. The dispute between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine is more dramatic than 'Game of Thrones'. It seems even in the open-source world, court intrigue is unavoidable. Developer friends, besides coding, learn some workplace politics too. But remember, in the programming world, the one with the most beautiful code usually wins, not the one best at playing politics.

Well, that's the end of our 'Crazy Tech Emporium' tour. From the maze of subscription services to nuclear-powered data centers, to power games in the open-source world, we've experienced quite a lot, haven't we? I hope you've had a good laugh and learned something on this crazy journey. I'm Claude, see you next time! Remember, in this crazy tech world, curiosity and a sense of humor are the best survival tools. Bye-bye!"

I think you're right here. I'm forgetting about "entertainment".

This will never replace my visits to HN because it's not efficient. Unless it uses neurolink to beam the information into my mind, that's always going to be the case. It fails in that way.

However, let's consider a podcast. You get 5 people that are entertaining, knowledgeable about technology, well spoken, and have differing opinions, and get them to spend 30 minutes talking about the top HN posts. It's slow, they would most likely not even discuss my favourite posts, but yet, I would consider listening. Is it possible to replicate that with AI? Could AI digest the content and all of the comments, and turn it into an entertaining and educational discussion and debate between a few different AI voices?

I think it's possible, and it changes the idea from being an inefficient method of summarizing content, to a form of entertainment. That could be the right direction to go with this kind of project. However, even if AI perfectly replicates a great podcast, how would I feel listening to it? I think this question applies to most AI content. How important is the human process in the content we consume? Do people only care about the end result, or do they want read a book written by a person, view photos taken by a person, listen to songs performed by a person, and listen to a podcast by real people?

Re: 3. The problem with reading HN on your phone is that it's generally frowned upon to do it while driving a car.

Perhaps a small help for you might be "reader mode" or "focus mode" or whatever your browser of choice calls it.

It's usually embedded in the url bar (probably a hotkey for it), and gives you only the text. A major step forward in not having to subconsciously ingest and then choose to ignore all the ads, related links, etc.

Or lean into it and have it speech-to-text as well you can interrupt it when it's reading a post you don't like so it can move onto the next one.

Apparently, has no patience for writing too...;p

It causes sensory overload for me, I abhor it.

I have two super nitpicky things to say.

1) The website is slightly wide on my phone, so it wiggles left and right when I scroll. I usually fix this by pinch-zooming out the tiny amount necessary to align it to my viewport width, but your website apparently suppresses zooming.

2) The AI announces itself as having the name “Jane Doe”. What's the point in this? I know that American news with real anchors do this (having the anchor announce their own name), but this is not universal so it feels foreign to me. Since AIs don't have names, it feels like this was shoehorned in just to sound like American commercial news.

Interesting project, I think it would be nice to also have a volume slider as well as a speed slider. I manually set the volume via wavesurfer.media.volume = 0.10; to keep from hurting my ears.

I just had the biggest "duh" moment. Thanks for bringing it up.

Pretty interesting project. I have a special, yet weird, emotional attachment to these HN-based projects because they act like extensions or add-ons that could improve HN in one dimension.

While I don't feel like using this tool when I sit in front of my computer or when starting doom scrolling on my phone, I certainly would like to use it when I need to quickly check HN while being busy.

Some quick feedback:

1. First, regarding the UI/UX:

  - The title and subtitle don't tell much about the app.
  - In the audio track, while you can see the progress of the playing audio, it doesn't show the total time nor the current time.
  - It would be useful to highlight the audio track into segments, each one representing a story.
  - It would make sense to mention how many stories are being summarized (seems to be 5 right now).

2. For a better use case, I believe it would make more sense to have this tool as a mobile app or a PWA to easily access it even from your car's infotainment system while driving.

3. Tightly linked to (2), having this tool as a mobile app and making it available as a widget, with a Play button, would reduce the number taps needed to play the broadcast.

I hope this serves as a constructive critic.

This isn't what I had in mind, but now that you've suggested it I would absolutely listen to this. In fact, I'm convinced having read it that this is where we're going good or bad (I can see a lot of YouTube gurus suggesting this as the new get-rich-quick scheme for "creators"). A high quality version of this would absolutely work though if that can be achieved.

I was thinking more in terms of the way you can get morning news briefs on a nest hub. The AI summarising the top posts on HN would have value to me as something to listen to in the morning not because I expect a really interesting debate, but mostly just to get a quick update on what the buzz is on HN on a given day so I can decide if I want to pick up the thread from any of those topics when my day starts at the desk.

Thanks for the feedback!

1) That's strange, I don't do anything to prevent zooming. Although I could provoke a situation where I interacted with the player and it somehow captured all subsequent touch inputs, so zooming was blocked. Maybe that's what happened? Reloading the page should fix it.

2) I like it because it adds a bit of personality. And I felt like the generic name "Jane Doe" would be fitting for an AI. Kind of hinting at the fact that it seems like a human, but it's not. Also low-key telling you that the whole thing is AI generated, in case you don't pick up on it immediately.

Thanks a lot, all very good points!

I like your project a lot! Please release it.

I've been 'summarising' a lot of articles using NotebookLM's new feature and publishing them as podcasts episodes here: https://open.spotify.com/show/0C8DGPdYwZQ1cbvQsnvO6t

I've been using their service to easily draw out the key points and if the episode is a good one then I publish it on the feed.

I do think that for specific content, that a lot of gold is stored within the comments sections and reading those actually gives more insight than the article itself so I've been planning on doing a few which draw off comments from either a reddit or hacker posts which link out to some post. I'll probably do one from reddit first. Probably science focused.

the music is more distracting at higher speeds for me and i usually listen at 1.5x when walking or at the gym. you could have the music be a separate audio track where the playback speed doesnt impact it and the toggle plays it simultaneously with the vocal track or not.

Interesting, thanks for sharing! Looks like this one has stopped publishing since the end of September though.

Partly lower energy in general, though it would be interesting to try a "low information diet" and see what effect that has.

If you're eating snacks all day, you won't have a healthy appetite for proper meals.

I noticed on vacation I spend far less time online, and a lot more time reading books.

Yeah, reading on a screen is ass. What eReader do you use?

I got a Kobo recently and I don't like it much. It's much duller than my last one, which is either due to the color screen having less contrast or me misremembering.

Kobo's main selling point was that it's not botnet, but I couldn't even turn the thing on without making an online account...

I just deleted my account and switched to an old account and the quality of my recommendations improved by an order of magnitude.

It's probably because I last used that one 10+ years ago when it seems things were a little more lighthearted (at least in my digital world). Going back to that recommendations page in current year was a truly magical experience.

Of course it didn't last though, within a few weeks algorithm was onto me, and went back to showing me the same stuff as on my old account.

I wonder if dang uses embeddings, or it just comes naturally.

Apparently you can add "don't make stuff up" to the prompt and it helps. I'm not sure the exact phrasing but probably something like only using what's in the text given.

Lack of interesting content?

My version added "and yes, to our listeners... hi mom!"

Very cute and kind of impressive.

Damn, looks like you beat NotebookLM by a year and a half!

Is the code for this available? I'm particularly curious how you did the multiple speakers and voices.

NotebookLM has the issue that they keep switching sides, like one will be the student and the other the teacher on a subject, but then they'll suddenly switch in a way that makes no sense.

I use a Kobo Clara HD. I think Claras are the second cheapest ones. No colour. I find the contrast about as good as a cheap paperback book. Not as good as good quality printing on acid-free paper, but that's OK.

I actually prefer lower contrast, it gives me less eye fatigue and I've specifically chosen low-contrast themes on my computer for as long as I can remember.

I think there is a way to not create the account if you really don't want to. I put KOReader on mine straight away and never use the built-in software. That also incidentally has an option to adjust the contrast.

Thanks - I hope to be able to release it in the next few days.

Finding the right content to use for the podcast is quite important and I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to involve the community. Currently I host the audio files and GitHub and anyone is invited to contribute to that.

I checked out your Spotify and there is some good content there but I imagine it will be hard to rank on there.

Would you be interested in collaborating? I am based in the UK and I have some ideas around location based podcasts as well.

I like what you've done with zeli!!

It is a shame it did not get so much traction when you did your showHn.

One thing that I think would be useful alongside your summaries would be tags for each item. Have you considered that?

The issue is that the voice track will be shorter than the music track if you speed it up. So you'll have the music playing until the end, but the voice track ending before that. It's definitely possible, just a bit more complex to implement. Maybe when I have the feature to mute the music, I can just mute the music when the speed is changed?

Now with state-of-the-art volume control for all your volume-control needs!

https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/e7c9ed3936ba69e522f8cb38... This userscript (can use as a bookmarklet) lets you catchup to all unseen stories quickly. Open HN, click bookmarklet, any new stories will be appended with a "(NEW)". Old stories, will show much their rank was changed. Can set a flag to hide seen stories, or set comment and points threshold to hide/show old stories.

To me it makes it very quick to catchup. I just go over a few pages and can quickly see every new story that I have not seen yet.

It was pretty cool to hear the broadcast reference this. 100% think it should be more concise and have a greater depth of personality.

I don’t want to overindex this point because at the end of the day this is just a fun hack project… but I do think it’s worth considering the behaviors our work encourages.

Much like I think the 24 hour news cycle is detrimental to just about everything, an hourly HN summary strikes me as excessive. No one needs that much HN in their lives. But as you say, a daily summary you listen to the place of a podcast? That feels like the right fit.

I like it too. I enjoyed listening to it for 15 min straight.

I would love to have a transcript of the generated podcast.

How much each hourly update costs? OpenAI pricing table says $15.000/M characters.

vaguely related someone also made a Hacker News bot on Bluesky

https://bsky.app/profile/newsycombinator.bsky.social

I think people have different definitions of "reading":

- Skimming: In my day job this is 95% of "reading". I think this is unavoidable, since (even if the material is well written) there's very little chance that two consumers need the same information. In papers I read the abstract, jump to the conclusions, maybe go back to the intro if I'm confused, or check out the methods if that's what matters to me. I get frustrated with any medium where skimming isn't possible, and similar when search isn't possible.

- Reading as in reading a book: this is more for fun or to cool down. Video / podcast seems like a drop-in replacement here. I don't read HN this way. Does anyone?

I think people who create content should be aware of this dichotomy. If you are communicating with experts, make sure your information is well structured. If you are writing literature focus more on the flow.

Depends. There’s no such thing as too much news during ww2 or Industrial Revolution.

This is news about how news as we know it is going away, and there’s more news on that coming 24/7. And that’s just the news on the news.

Idea for OP:

If you treat an HN post and it’s comments as a hivemind, you could do something like ‘Interview with the Hivemind: (insert post topic)”, have the AI ask interview questions where the hivemind can respond from the entire thread. This is to get any post into some kind of known podcast format.

If you intersperse talk about Big Foot throughout that interview for no good reason, you could become the #1 podcast in the world.

Is there a way to filter out certain type of stories/submissions?

Or is there any HN filter or web-reader (if any) that can help me do that? I know HN doesn't do submission tags but still if something allows some kind of "type/kind" hiding/removal.

> I don't read HN this way. Does anyone?

I skim HN, when I like something, I dive in & read it carefully and sometimes even implement it. The rest is just chewing gum; nice maybe but not serious.

is the prompt available somewhere?

> the new get-rich-quick scheme for "creators"

I wonder if the person executing the scheme would still be referred to as a "creator" in this case: they're creating a creator, and it's not so useful to have the same label for multiple layers (factory factories all the way down?). I could see possibly "engineer" (taken from "prompt engineer") or other technical terms being used instead of art terms.

> Last.fm came out 20 years ago (proving you don't even need AI for amazing recommender systems)

What makes that recommender system not AI? Wikipedia say it uses "collaborative filtering" which Gemini says is a form of AI. AI started nearly 70 years ago.

its actually been done, but in slightly different manner

https://t.me/hninsights/836?comment=441

Thank you, I'm not sure why I always seem to forget that feature. Although I don't like the Google lock-in, on certain sites I can also visit the AMP version of the page, and have fewer ads while also getting the images.

Can you make one of the playback speeds 1.25x (it jumps from 1.0x to 1.5x)?

I would like this except for it to be a daily podcast of the unique set of links and things that made it to the front page with more than 5 comments ordered by points and then comments and then have that read out to me with a summary of the comments. Now that. That would be amazing.

i think this is cool, i'm happy you did it... i really listen to podcasts for the hosts, though. i think the banter and the personality and the perspective are things that i really enjoy. getting to know people through what they choose to talk about or how they frame things is part of the whole charm.

if i want a fast rundown of HN, i'll read HN. you did make me kind of crave a 15 minute weekdaily "morning news" style podcast with some tech journalists that runs down the most talked about HN posts, though.

Great to hear - thanks. I will add several more over the coming days.

A daily update on the best posts of the last 24 hours would be amazing: https://news.ycombinator.com/best

AI slop generator.

Fantastic idea, good implementation. Very valuable and useful!

Do not listen to the chattering nabobs of negativity in the comments!

Your impl is valuable; gives a quick summary of top-n stories. Useful for somebody who dips in/out of HN now and then. It may not be for everyone (indeed, as various commenters have suggested), but its useful for me. And it;s a great example of marrying AI-generated summary with podcast style quick 5-min summary. Just like listening to BBC news summary.

A few suggestions: - perhaps make it personalizable (based on HN user?) or atleast provide an option to summarize top 15 (or 10 or 20?) stories - offer a way to go beyond the first page of HN - offer a way to summarize the most-commented stories

Good job! Happy to contribute if its on Github

Podcast/RSS seems like ideal distribution tool?

Amazing, I would love to do a version of this for more niches. Any pointers on how you built this?

I'd love to see a list of the articles covered so as I'm listening I could jump to an article and get more data.

I did not release the code but it's incredibly basic, and I believe OP's one is just the same.

You collect N links from HN api with any heuristic you want, then scrape those urls - preferably using pupeteer-based tooling or online equivalent (think Jina).

I then ran each url's content in an LLM to get a summary, then from all the results ask a LLM to create the conversation (and give it a tone). Then decide on the voices and characters and feed each turn into 11labs (or any tts). And finally, concatenate all audio parts, add music and effects.

If I remember correctly, mine could perform all that from a single Cloudflare worker. The catch is it can become a bit pricey because of the TTS. I remember toying with making it a product (podcast everything) and quickly discovered there's a couple of company already offering this.

NotebookLM is slightly different on the TTS front, I think they are using the amazing model google showed off a year or so ago (without giving it public access) that can generate actual multi speakers conversations with "hums" and cutting, and talking at the same time.

Added : someone just made a python lib for the usecase (also found on HN 5 days ago) https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy

Can the speed slider support .1 increments? I'd prefer 1.2x :)

Also, it would be useful to have an index of Stories on the side for each segment and possibly locators within the horizontal audio segment where index/story items are located.

Actually makes me think if its possible to embed prompts into story headlines and/or content to do nefarious things...

Thanks!

Very retro cool though, destroying your eyes in style!

What do you mean there's no such thing as too much news about war or capitalism (my interpretation of ww2 and industrial revolution)? I can't imagine your saying that interspersing your entire life with hourly updates on the deaths of millions of people is a... good? healthy? survivable thing? What about every 15 minutes? What about every second of every day? "No such thing" is certainly a strong phrase.

I can certainly say that consumption of news above around 1-2 hours a day in myself and everyone I've had the pleasure to discuss this with is an increasingly bad thing. Especially war! If you spend all of your time just consuming news about things when do you have time to do things like live a fulfilling life or enjoy peaceful human existence. Continuous news is the opposite of peace.

Maybe you're saying in general rather than in one person's life but i'd counter that a mass amount of news in general _is directly_ a mass amount of news in a mass amount of people's lives. Why would there be tons and tons of news unless people were actively consuming more and more of it?

How many hours a day do you spend reading current events and news? Why don't you spend more? Your answer to that question is my rebuttal

Senior Bullshit Engineer

Not sure this is something I'd regularly use just because I prefer reading the news to listening to it, but I still found it pretty cool.

I say it because at any point either of those two things could have shown up at your front door (as it was happening).

In this case, yeah, CNN may give you AI synthetic news sooner rather than later to preempt the inevitable.

I’m not really commenting on whether it’s good or bad really. This may be the last hours of how we’ve all been getting news. Worth watching I think.