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Posted by u/ukuina 2 years ago
Show HN: HackYourNews – AI summaries of the top HN storieshackyournews.com/...
Hey there HN!

I wanted to share a pet project of mine. I built HackYourNews [1] to scratch a personal itch: Knowing which stories to focus on while browsing aimlessly (though there is a certain joy in that, as well!)

HackYourNews uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to summarize the destination article as well as the comments section. Summarization of the article is always cached, while summaries of the comments are regenerated if the comments count is >10% (or >10 comments) different.

While I styled the homepage to welcome HNers, my preferred view is the Mobile view, accessed from the navbar. This no-frills view honors OS-level dark mode and is easy to skim on any device.

Tried to keep the site minimal. The only JS is Cloudflare's privacy-preserving analytics [2], just to gauge interest.

This is the first time I'm releasing something to the wild.

Hope you find this useful!

The frontend is pure HTML+CSS.

The backend is NodeJS (Puppeteer) + Python with the excellent Microsoft Guidance [3] library to interface to OpenAI's API.

[1] https://hackyournews.com/

[2] https://www.cloudflare.com/web-analytics/

[3] https://github.com/guidance-ai/guidance

jddj · 2 years ago
Summary: The website www.tandfonline.com is requesting to review the security of the user's connection before proceeding. This is likely due to concerns about the connection's safety. The website is utilizing Cloudflare for performance and security purposes. The Ray ID provided is 80346a40dbb01690, which may be used for tracking or troubleshooting purposes. It is important for users to ensure the security of their connection before accessing the website.
jtms · 2 years ago
The HN hug of death as reported by AI - This is fantastic.
Galanwe · 2 years ago
I didn't expect to actually like it, well done for making me change my mind :-)

Slight feedback:

- Many "comments" summary start with boilerplate such as "This content discusses" which a bit annoying.

- It would be good to have a sense of "controversy" in the comments summary. Like some kind of general "mood".

ukuina · 2 years ago
Awesome! Thank you for trying it out.

Will work on improving the conciseness of the summary and also surface the mood of the discussion.

fnordpiglet · 2 years ago
Yeah some instruction to be as concise as possible would help, and on the comments summary an instruction to not discuss hacker news or that it’s comments.
simonair · 2 years ago
Congrats on a great idea well executed!

In my mind, the gold standard for engaging summaries is Seeking Alpha. As a random example, see https://seekingalpha.com/article/4633758-sell-amazon-before-...

If you could train the model to come up with well structured bullet points, the summaries would be amenable to scanning before committing to fully engage. This is just an idea, I am not sure what fraction of your readers would prefer bullet points.

oezi · 2 years ago
I also think the article summary could be a bit more snappy and to the point.
nomilk · 2 years ago
I really like this. I just read about 2 stories (of significant interest) whose titles I'd glanced at but hadn't clicked on on HN. Also like that it summarises the comments, as some posts tend to be conversation starters and the really interesting stuff is in the discussion (as opposed to the link/artcile).
ukuina · 2 years ago
I agree, the comments section is usually more interesting than the article. The comments are especially useful for the opposing viewpoints (i.e., why the article is wrong or missing important caveats).
melvinmelih · 2 years ago
I’m the type of person who reads the comments first and if the comments are interesting enough, maybe I’ll check out the article.
zmmmmm · 2 years ago
it's interesting because it's sort of quintessential ChatGPT: the content and information is there, it's doing a good job - but it's lifeless and dull, all the sharp edges are rounded off. I realise I come to HN precisely to connect with "real" people and see the different extremes of opinion. I wonder how it would go if you explicitly prompted it to capture and reflect the extremes of opinion and passionate voices.
fnordpiglet · 2 years ago
I don’t think it’s a replacement for HN, but it definitely is useful in quickly determining which story is useful to dive into and read then join the comments on. Some of the comment summaries are exceptionally informative, like this one on the RAG story:

> The article discusses the limitations of using LLMs (Language Model Models) and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) in AI systems due to the missing storage layer. The author points out two unstated assumptions: that similar vectors are relevant documents and that the vector index can accurately identify the top K vectors by cosine similarity. However, these assumptions are not always true, leading to the need for re-ranking and measuring the index's precision and recall. The comment section further explores the relationship between cosine similarity and relevance, as well as the use of different embeddings like Word2Vec and DistilBERT. Some commenters also discuss the benefits of using vector DBs for specific cases like customer chatbots. Overall, the article highlights the challenges and considerations in implementing LLMs and RAG in AI systems.

This makes me want to read the comments more because there’s some useful stuff, but I often would have gotten tripped up on the scale of the comment section and missed some of the more useful comments.

uaeu321321 · 2 years ago
Funny that in today's Hacker Newsletter [0], they exclude this thread from their Show HN section. Even though it has way more points than other stories.

I think you're onto something. Congrats.

0 - https://hackernewsletter.com/

ukuina · 2 years ago
Cheers!
uaeu321321 · 2 years ago
BTW, this is worth money. Don't shy from asking for it.

Dead Comment

zeptonix · 2 years ago
The summaries and comments need spacing/line breaks. I think right now the original HN site is still way better. Maybe have it produce bullet points or explicitly ask for line breaks in the relevant places. It's just not pleasant to read unbroken walls of text once they're more than about 1-2 sentences (yours appear to be at least 3+).
snickerer · 2 years ago
Cool, but now I need an AI tool that knows my interests and preferences and monitors HackYourNews for me, to alert me when a personally interesting article or discussion pops up.
ukuina · 2 years ago
It's AIs all the way down!
smashed · 2 years ago
Funny to see the site itself sitting at the 3rd position right now and the AI summarizing its own page. It seems to be using content that is not shown on the page though, maybe an og:description meta tag. Otherwise it would be spiraling in an infinite loop of summarizing itself.

Small comment: the "dehyped" title does not seem very useful. For most articles it is almost the same as the original title, just rephrased. It should summarize the conclusion or whatever the meat of the article actually is. Repeating the same thing or similar is just a waste of time and space.

Also it seems broken on the site itself, but that could be the AI getting confused on what the actual page title should be. It picked the top story as the dehyped title, which I guess is understandable but when generating a title for a news feed, it's wrong.

ukuina · 2 years ago
Good catch! Yeah, summaries of summaries are quite problematic.

The prompt for dehyping was not specific enough, but that (and a related bug) has been fixed. The dehyped titles make (more) sense now and are not the same as the HN article title.