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Show HN: HomeBrew HN – Generate personal context for content ranking

(www.hackernews.coffee)
122 points azath92 | 4 comments | 03 Jul 25 12:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.944s | source

TLDR: Build a quick HN profile to see how little context LLMs need to personalise your feed. Rate 30 posts once, get a permanent ranked homepage you can return to.

Our goal was to build a tool that allowed us to test a range of "personal contexts" on a very focused everyday use case for us, reading HN!

We are exploring use of personal context with LLMs, specifically what kind of data, how much, and with how much additional effort on the user’s part was needed to get decent results. The test tool was a bit of fun on its own so we re-skinned it and decided to post it here.

First time posting anything on HN but folks at work encouraged me to drop a link. Keen on feedback or other interesting projects thinking about bootstrapping personal context for LLM workflows!

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pvg ◴[03 Jul 25 13:54 UTC] No.44455127[source]▶
Somewhat tangential but a oddly under-explored side of the LLMs+HN data projects - HN search that does a good job finding HN submission/comment results for the type of things often asked in Ask HN that can be answered by HN searches. 'How do I learn about [some nice thing or another]', etc. People asking this sort of thing often don't know the right keywords so pure keyword search often doesn't work well but more latent-spacey things, in theory, could. Another related one is "can you LLMgenerate something akin to dang's 'Related' posts".
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1. azath92 ◴[03 Jul 25 14:07 UTC] No.44455239[source]▶
hackernews is such a rich source of "non trivial" content, and we are really seeing this when using it for a project compared with just consuming it as an individual.

We are focusing right now on how comments could be used to build up a better user context, and your comment has made me think about how we can feed comments in (instead of just titles and urls) for your selected preferences to make a better profile, without needing to scrape anything (expensive and slow).

But i think that would only work because of their quality and relevance generally, which would for sure make it an interesting knowledge source for pure LLM search. Feels like something someone should build or maybe already has! keen to see if anyone knows of projects like that.

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2. pvg ◴[03 Jul 25 14:24 UTC] No.44455385[source]▶
Feels like something someone should build or maybe already has!

Yep, it very much feels like that but it doesn't seems to have happened yet. Even a not-entirely-quite-working yet attempt there could be an interesting thing/discussion.

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3. azath92 ◴[03 Jul 25 14:35 UTC] No.44455501[source]▶
I was able to find this post, which is a little old in LLM land, but appears to be pretty functional! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40238509

The post and comments include a bunch of other tools that feel similar, and the tool itself works.

Ill have to take some time to use it, but also see what i can learn about how they've consumed and used HN comments more generally.

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4. pvg ◴[03 Jul 25 15:42 UTC] No.44456194{3}[source]▶
If only there was some way to find all the similar related previous submissions (there have been a few :)