Show HN: Hackerbrief – Top posts on Hacker News summarized daily
hackerbrief.vercel.appI didn't recognise the top story ( about cannaboids ) at all.
I then went to "past" and nothing from yesterday.
I then realised this site is based off the current front-page.
So I forced the "past" page to be today, and it's the third result: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-03-16
But it's not on my actual front-page.
So this must have been done at a very brief window when this story was top, which even hnrankings didn't capture: https://hnrankings.info/47393619/
I think this would be better if powered by https://news.ycombinator.com/front , which is relatively stable after a day.
Otherwise you've ended up with a brief snapshot, and not the top posts of the day.
It also seems odd to have a "summary of 16/03" produced while that day has barely begun in the US timezone, so looking retrospectively at the previous day would make this better.
Hmm, yeah I suppose you're right. I'm currently using the algolia api https://hn.algolia.com/
Will look into tightening this up
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.
> 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.
Good editing and curation take time. It has to be compensated, or a labor of love.
That would not be a mere project, but a huge commitment. Which would be devalued if the content was not published consistently, regularly, predictably with no vacations, etc.
It would be a truly honorable commitment (I greatly appreciate similar efforts by people elsewhere), but not one to be made lightly.
(Edit: despite the "not a...but a" construction above, this comment is HI only, and not even much of that! :-)
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.
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.
I've been thinking about this for a while too. Probably what I will do is create embeddings of the frontpage results and then let users pick 3-5 topics that they would like to see. Then summarize the top 10 for those topics.
Something I've been tinkering on for the last few weeks is absent.dev[1], was working towards getting the guts to share this on HN but there's a few things I want to polish first. This is the MVP, but it will essentially be moving towards what you're suggesting, much more customisable news aggregation and more importantly, where you consume it. Feed agnostic, channel agnostic, in the form(s) you want (longform, shortform, summary, tl;dr etc). You can check the clustering logic on the digest[2].
1. https://absent.dev/ 2. https://absent.dev/episode/ABS-0014/clusters
Basically, https://duobook.co :)
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.
> Hackerbrief
> No digest yet. Trigger `GET /api/cron/digest`.
> GET https://hackerbrief.vercel.app/api/cron/digest
> 401 Unauthorized
hmm
I was on Vercel free tier and hit the quota for blob storage. Will probably make it open source so people can self host
Same on Firefox desktop.
Same
Same. At least at this moment. iPad.
Nice - that looks useful.
Would it be possible to:
- do "horizontal" swiping gesture to go to next/previous summarized article? Kind of like instagram stories
- keep the link to original article as I scroll through the summary so I can quickly navigate to full article if the summary is interesting?
yeah that would be awesome, will land it tomorrow
It doesn’t seem to work anymore, it’s stuck in the same set of text
Looking forward to that, I have added it to my home screen :thumbsup:
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.
I would have appreciated a sarcastic summary like http://n-gate.com/hackernews/
They've been dead for ages haven't they?
We dont do "top-posts" but we do most Game posts in case you are insterested :)
Nice! Would be great to also get a summary of the comments.
I think it will be great if we have a mobile app with push notification about most important news ...
Edit: I was hosting this on Vercel free tier, and since this post made it to the front page, I've hit Vercel's quota limit. I will work on getting around this.
how about static hosting?
? 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"?
Oh relax. Let people make things. It's okay to have more than one take on an idea.
Concept looks good. Just needs some more polishing like Newspaper theme, Endless swiping, HN like dark/light theme etc on mobile app.
Looks interesting. At the end of the newest post there is a npm update alert. That should be an easy fix though :)
A brief (one short paragraph) summary in HN would be nice and it would prevent kneejerk reactions on the title.
Am I being fair when I immediately categorize anything as a summary as a data dump from an AI?
"Hackerbrief" means "hacker letter" in German.
"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).
why not someone use an n8n automation where it automatically fetches its and get telegram message? just asking so I can help you develop the idea
Oh yeah! I was also really confused at first haha.
looks great. please add email signup, I'd like to receive this as a daily newsletter.
"I am sorry, but I cannot provide a summary. The provided content is empty."
This was for the bigfoot story: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-new-bigfoot-documentary-...
I wonder why.
Man, I miss n-gate more than ever
Aaaand we’re back