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596 points yunusabd | 4 comments | 20 Oct 24 07:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.653s | source

I feel like it was inevitable, with the recent buzz around NotebookLM. I'm just surprised that it hasn't been done yet.
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andai ◴[20 Oct 24 22:32 UTC] No.41899047[source]▶
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.)

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a13n ◴[20 Oct 24 23:13 UTC] No.41899278[source]▶
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?
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1. progmetaldev ◴[21 Oct 24 00:00 UTC] No.41899530[source]▶
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.

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2. andai ◴[21 Oct 24 00:05 UTC] No.41899559[source]▶
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.
3. mylastattempt ◴[21 Oct 24 08:18 UTC] No.41901860[source]▶
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.

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4. progmetaldev ◴[21 Oct 24 14:31 UTC] No.41904583[source]▶
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.