Another option is to look at the Bluesky feed [0]. This bot looks at top stories in HN and creates a very short summary. It only does around 20 posts a day. That could be limiting too.

[0] - https://bsky.app/profile/hncompanion.com

That said, we are seeing a consistent daily user base who do find value in the summarization, so it seems to be solving a pain point for a specific segment of readers, even if not for all.

Apart from the AI features, we actually built HN Companion as a general power-user client. It supports keyboard-first navigation (vim-style J/K bindings for comment navigation), seeing context for parent/child comments without losing your place, and tracking specific authors across a thread.

You might find those utility features useful even if you ignore the summary sidebar entirely. In the browser extension, the summary panel is something the user have to activate - it doesn't show-up by default.

[0] - https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/claude-hacker-news-themes

[1] - https://github.com/hncompanion/skills-scripts

[0] - https://bsky.app/profile/hncompanion.com

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/best

In the context of HN Companion, our objective is to examine lengthy threads and group them into 3 to 4 topics. Within each topic, we present the actual discussion that represents that cluster. We invested significant effort in developing a system that enables you to not only read the actual comments but also seamlessly jump to that discussion and continue the conversation there.

I encourage you to explore a few of the summaries in the app. I’d greatly appreciate your feedback on how we can enhance our service.

Your feedback through GitHub issues has been instrumental in helping us prioritize specific features. Additionally, the Chrome Web Store team has approved our extension for their ‘Featured’ badge, which could enhance the trust in installing the extension. I’m curious to know if you’ve had a chance to try the web app.

Try it: https://app.hncompanion.com or available as an extension for Firefox / Chrome: [0].

Most AI summarization strips the voices from conversations by flattening threads into a wall of text. This kills the joy of reading HN discussions. Instead, HN Companion works differently - it understands the thread hierarchy, the voting patterns and contrasting viewpoints - everything that makes HN interesting. Think of it like clustering related discussions across multiple hierarchies into a group and surfacing the comments that represent each cluster. It keeps the verbatim text with backlinks so that you never lose context and can continue the conversation from that point. Here is how the summarization works under the hood [1].

We first built this as an open source browser extension. But soon we learned that people hesitate to install it. So we built the same experience as a web app with all the features. This helped people see how it works, and use it on mobile too (in the browser or as PWA). This is now a playground to try new features before taking them to the browser extension.

We did a Show HN a year ago [2] and we have added these features based on user feedback:

* cached summaries - summaries are generated and cached on our servers. This improved the speed significantly. You still have the option to use your own API key or use local models through Ollama.

* our system prompt is available in the Settings page of the extension. You can customize it as you wish.

* sort the posts in the feed pages (/home, /show etc.) based on points, comments, time or the default sorting order.

* We tried fine tuning an open weights model to summarize, but learned that with a good system prompt and user prompt, the frontier models deliver results of similar quality. So we didn’t use the fine-tuned model, but you can run them locally.

The browser extension does not track any usage or analytics. The code is open source[3].

We want to continue to improve HN Companion, specifically add features like following an author, notes about an author, draft posts etc.

See it in action for a post here https://app.hncompanion.com/item?id=46937696

We would love to get your feedback on what would make this more useful for your HN reading.

[0] https://hncompanion.com/#download

[1] https://hncompanion.com/how-it-works

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42532374

[3] https://github.com/hncompanion/browser-extension

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46962942

Points: 31

# Comments: 15

I’m also hoping similar media management options are available on iOS and desktop, since I use Signal across devices.

By the way, does Signal treat synced devices (like desktop or a second phone) as “replicas” vs a “primary”? If so, does this affect how storage or message history is handled between them?

Would appreciate any insight from folks familiar with the technical side of this!

For example, being able to see all media across chats, sort by file size, and optionally group by conversation would make it much easier to clean things up.

The author's Go library, sqlitebp, automates these settings and others (NORMAL synchronous, private cache, tuned page cache, connection pool limits, automatic PRAGMA optimize, and in-memory temp storage) to make high-concurrency, reliable usage safer and easier right out of the box

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010354

Points: 30

# Comments: 10

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43651007

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Since HN Homepage stories change throughtout the day, I thought it is better to create the Newsletter based on https://news.ycombinator.com/front

So, you are getting the news a day late, but it will capture the top stories for that day. The newsletter will have high-level summary for each post and a link to get the details for that story from a static site.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43597782

This is the output that we got (based on the HN-Companion project) [2]:

LLama 4 Scout - https://gist.github.com/annjose/9303af60a38acd5454732e915e33...

Llama 4 Maverick - https://gist.github.com/annjose/4d8425ea3410adab2de4fe9a5785...

Claude 3.7 - https://gist.github.com/annjose/5f838f5c8d105fbbd815c5359f20...

The summary from Scout and Maverick both look good (comparable to Claude), and with this structure, Scout seems to follow the prompt slightly better.

In this case, we used the models 'meta-llama/llama-4-maverick' and 'meta-llama/llama-4-scout' from OpenRouter.

--

[0] - https://gist.github.com/annjose/5145ad3b7e2e400162f4fe784a14...

[1] - https://gist.github.com/annjose/d30386aa5ce81c628a88bd86111a...

[2] - https://github.com/levelup-apps/hn-enhancer

edited: To add OpenRouter model details.

[1] https://docs.openpipe.ai/features/dpo/overview

This is really nice. Once I am in this 'search' mode, I couldn't figure out how to get out of this mode.

- Edited to make question more descriptive.

We've actually been thinking along similar lines. Here are a couple of improvements we're considering:

1. Built-in prompt templates - Support multiple flavors (e.g. On similar to is there already, in addition to knowledge of up/down votes, another one similar to what Simon had - which is more detailed etc.)

2. User-editable prompts - Exactly like you said - make the prompts user editable.

One additional thought: Since summaries currently take ~20 seconds and incur API costs for each user, we're exploring the idea of an optional "shared summaries" feature. This would let users access cached summaries instantly (shared by someone else), while still having the option to generate fresh ones when needed. Would this be something you'd find useful?

We'd love to hear your thoughts on these ideas.