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66 points marsw42 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.627s | source

Hi HN,

I built WhatHappened (whathappened.tech) because I have a love/hate relationship with this site. I love the content, but the "wall of text" UI gives me FOMO. I was spending too much time clicking into vague titles ("Project X") or wading through flame wars just to find technical insights.

I built this tool to act as a filter. It generates a card for the top daily posts with a few specific features to cut the noise:

1. AI Summaries: It generates a technical TL;DR (3 bullet points) and an ELI5 version for every post.

2. The Heat Meter: I analyze the comment section to visualize the distribution: Constructive vs. Technical vs. Flame War. If a thread is 90% Flame War, I know to skip it (or grab popcorn).

3. Contrarian Detection: To break the echo chamber, the AI specifically hunts for the most upvoted disagreement or critique in the comments and pins it to the card.

4. Mobile-First PWA: I mostly read HN on my phone, so I designed this as a PWA. It supports swipe gestures and installs to the home screen without an app store.

Stack: Next.js, Gemini, Supabase.

It currently supports English and Chinese. Any feedback will be appreciated! My original X post: https://x.com/marsw42/status/1997087957556318663, please share if you like it or find it helpful! :D

Thanks!

1. rcarmo ◴[] No.46235417[source]
Very nice indeed. I recently went through a similar process and built an RSS feed summarizer, but didn’t bother with comments because… well… it could go either way in terms of productivity and token usage (I prefer to grab the original article and summarize it when feasible).

But I really like the output.

replies(1): >>46246007 #
2. marsw42 ◴[] No.46246007[source]
Thanks! Yeah I'm still trying to figure out ways to save tokens, but given the job only runs 3 times a day it's still kinda manageable :P