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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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.