Show HN: Hackerbrief – Top posts on Hacker News summarized daily

(hackerbrief.vercel.app)

61 points | by p0u4a 9 hours ago ago

24 comments

  • karmakaze 3 hours ago ago

    I can't see the page at the moment (getting the No digest yet).

    I made a thing[0] that splits stories by day without mixing old popular with new stories. That helped cut down my HN visits to a few times per day. [I had originally made it to list all stories on one page and load story links at stops in a subway/metro commute.]

    What I'm finding now is that there's too much noise at the top and what I really want to see are the stories not upvoted by mainstream/populist interests--if anyone knows a solution to that, please share.

    [0] https://hackerer.news/

  • tom1337 6 hours ago ago

    > Hackerbrief

    > No digest yet. Trigger `GET /api/cron/digest`.

    > GET https://hackerbrief.vercel.app/api/cron/digest

    > 401 Unauthorized

    hmm

    • p0u4a 37 minutes ago ago

      I was on Vercel free tier and hit the quota for blob storage. Will probably make it open source so people can self host

    • Liftyee 4 hours ago ago

      Same on Firefox desktop.

    • wek 5 hours ago ago

      Same

    • Wistar 5 hours ago ago

      Same. At least at this moment. iPad.

  • qsort 8 hours ago ago

    I think the concept is great, I'd love something like this even more broadly, sort of a daily "customizable" newspaper. The issue I see is that it's a bit... bland? Obviously you're doing this with AI and there's no other way to do it, but one of the main reasons why something like HN has stayed relevant for this long is its variety: front page stories often have remarkable diversity, not only in topics and content, but also in tone and writing style. I feel a digest like this one flattens everything more than I'd like.

    • embedding-shape 8 hours ago ago

      > Obviously you're doing this with AI and there's no other way to do it

      What do you mean "no other way to do it"? Traditionally these sort of things been curated, by humans who read and make judgements, how is that not another way to do it? Probably would solve the whole "bit... bland?" problem to, given the right curator.

      • layer8 5 hours ago ago

        Probably no sustainable pays-the-bills way to do it, though I would love to be proven wrong by a curator who happens to match my preferences.

        On the other hand, the HN front page is already the result of collective curation.

    • deelayman 5 hours ago ago

      I agree that this is likely to flatten out the depth of comments I come here for. It's also hard to get a brief that is tailored to the subset of posts you might actually be interested in.

      The approach I tried was to rely mainly on what comments I've upvoted, have the AI look at those comments and gather context from the article/link and the parent comment chain, then give me a "here's what you learned yesterday" brief.

      I had plans to add some memory to mention related things from recent weeks. Relying mainly on being able to visually code all this with n8n, and never quite got it working.

    • andai 6 hours ago ago

      Not a perfect solution but I wonder if asking the LLM to preserve style when summarizing works well. I will have to try that. Because they do indeed otherwise default to bland slop style.

  • jacquesm 7 hours ago ago
  • yuppiepuppie 7 hours ago ago

    We dont do "top-posts" but we do most Game posts in case you are insterested :)

    https://hnarcade.com

  • throwaway12pol 9 hours ago ago

    Nice! Would be great to also get a summary of the comments.

  • ramon156 5 hours ago ago

    ? This has been done before, plus apps like Harmonic support Best by X hrs. Do people love re-inventing the wheel before googling "drive car from A to B"?

    • hidelooktropic 5 hours ago ago

      Oh relax. Let people make things. It's okay to have more than one take on an idea.

  • RobRivera 5 hours ago ago

    Am I being fair when I immediately categorize anything as a summary as a data dump from an AI?

  • unkeen 8 hours ago ago

    "Hackerbrief" means "hacker letter" in German.

    • vidarh 6 hours ago ago

      "brief" also has a similar meaning in English, in (several) alternative meanings of "brief" to mean a precis, summary, position paper of various kinds. Both are derived from latin breve/brevis - "short".

      You'll find variants with one or other of those meanings all derived from latin in a number of other languages too, e.g. "brev" in Norwegian (letter).

  • latchkey 5 hours ago ago

    HN already has these features...

    Active:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/active

    Highlights:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights

  • SilentEditor 7 hours ago ago

    Oh yeah! I was also really confused at first haha.

  • mplanchard 4 hours ago ago

    Man, I miss n-gate more than ever