Brilliant idea. I think this has real value as well: as I get older, I find that I have less energy for reading, but I also notice I often miss really cool stuff that was briefly on the front of HN.
I like that it summarizes the comments too. There are often real gems buried in there. (I assume you're only taking a few top ones?)
I think a great improvement could be made with personalization. Most of what's on the front page isn't personally relevant to me, and there's a lot of cool stuff on the new submissions page that never catches on. So it would be nice if a system could learn what kind of stories I personally respond to, and show me (a summary of?) those -- even if they aren't currently trending.
Last.fm came out 20 years ago (proving you don't even need AI for amazing recommender systems), but it seems personalizing your experience never really caught on. (Yeah, the YouTube algorithm kind of does this, but you unfortunately have no real control over it.)
Thanks for the comment, I'm really enjoying the discussion it has sparked.
Yes, I'm just taking the top comments, along with a few child comments, in order to not exceed the context window of the model.
Regarding personalization, there's definitely lots of potential. HN can be so random though, sometimes you find things that you didn't even know you needed (intellectually). I guess as with most recommender systems, it's about a balance between exploration and exploitation.
Maybe an MVP could filter for specific keywords and add those posts to the model input.
agreed on energy for reading. do you think it’s that we’re getting older or that the friction associated with consuming information is just getting lower and lower over time?
So my energy levels have declined noticeably from age 20 to 30. I thought it was mostly my own chronic health issues causing accelerated aging, but many of my friends are making similar complaints.
I did notice far before this point (e.g. age 10 to 20) that my patience for reading had gone down significantly. If I had to guess I'd say that in my case it's due to an underlying anxiety that started in early teens and never left me. Drowning it out seems to require something more stimulating than reading (on paper).
(Perhaps meditation or therapy (shadow integration?) would help here. I've certainly had glimpses of inner peace during times when I was meditating regularly. One insight from this time: "holy crap, I always thought I needed to struggle harder, but it turns out I just needed to learn how to relax...")
I can get through audiobooks but I can only consume them while traveling or doing chores. If I'm sitting down, the restlessness is too high and I can't concentrate on the book.
I also have ADHD and heard similar things from others with ADHD, so I'm not sure to what degree this translates to others.
When it comes to online reading, there are quite a few things that cause me fatigue that I don't feel I used to experience. Advertisements have been there for a long time, but often these are woven into the content, either as literal text placed in the article, or as visual ads that you need to scroll through to continue reading the article. Relying on different JavaScript and CSS techniques to "enhance" the user experience often cause me issues when I'm just trying to focus on reading. Those include overriding scrollbars, dynamic loading of content when the text is small enough to have been included in the page, and displaying some kind of alternative action when highlighting text. I'll often highlight text to keep track of where I'm reading, and some sites will pop up a dialog with share actions, or the ability to add annotations, etc. This is distracting and makes it more difficult to follow along with a longer article.
I'm 45, and got my start on BBS pre-internet, but I feel like if I find an article without the distractions I mentioned above, I actually have more energy to complete an article than I did in my 20's and 30's. Having access to the article without distractions helps me to focus, and when I focus, I tend to consume more content than I normally would. Most likely one of the reasons we're drawn to HN.
You've just made me realize why I usually avoid clicking the actual article link on HN. It's usually a very unpleasant experience, unless it's clear that it's a smaller website.
Same boat re: audio speed. I actually speed up the voice in the backend by 1.16x . Above that I was getting too many artifacts in the audio. The nice thing about doing it at that point is that I can handle the music and the voice separately, i.e. the speed of the music stays unchanged.
Speeding it up in the player will also speed up the music, which is not very zen. But I guess I'll just add it to the player and let people decide how fast they want to go.
So the best of the last 8 hours, with a new episode every hour? I think that makes sense, you could check in every 8 hours or so and have a fresh set of stories.
Thanks! An archive shouldn't be too hard to implement.
Would a morning briefing include more of a curated selection of news, like the most interesting/most discussed news of the day? Currently I just take the top 5 posts from the main page.
I could easily see listening to such a summary once or twice a day. Considering the pace at which HN is updated, how about two to four somewhat longer episodes per day, with an archive of the past week so that people can catch up? You might also want to focus on certain types of stories, such as those with more upvotes or comments.
In any case, it's a great idea, and I enjoyed listening to the current episode.
I was actually listening to it while making breakfast as well, so the idea of an extended morning briefing resonates with me.
I'll look into it, thanks for the follow-up!
Yeah, if you look at the page source, there's actually no text in the document body. At one point I will have to use a JS-capable browser, to capture pages like this one.
Interesting, I actually did a search before submitting mine, but I narrowed it down to the last year only. Yours being 2y/o didn't show up. You were ahead of your time!
Neat! Personally hourly feels a bit much but a daily briefing that can fit inside a commute or on a short walk would be perfect. Might be the first ai podcast I'd subscribe to.
This is really great stuff, love the added "news-station" type music! If something like this we're to be monetized would there be any issues regarding copyright?
Thank you! And that's a really good question. Since it's summarizing the articles, I would assume that there shouldn't be any issues regarding copyright. Regarding the comments that it's using, I think HN generally has some rights to them, although again it's more of a summarization. Generally HN seems cool about these things.
Now, if you were to scan the homepage of the BBC and create a news broadcast from it, they probably wouldn't be too happy about that, understandably. I have no idea how this would fare in court though.
I added it to the prompt for this exact situation. So it was "hard-coded". Tbh it would have been a bit scary if that happened organically. Kind of like animals recognizing themselves in the mirror levels of self-awareness.
Frankly this is super fantastic. Thank you. Any possibility to make this longer, and split it into sections with updates on previous stories at the end? I love this concept a lot.
Thank you! Most of the people here seem to prefer a longer form, so I think I'll move in that direction.
> split it into sections with updates on previous stories at the end
So basically, if a story comes up that has been reported on before, it references the older story and gives some context and the update? Something like "just last week, the Internet Archive had been the victim of another cyber-attack, in which [...]"?
Fun stuff. It does feel like NotebookLM (and others) are hurtling us toward a future that seems inevitable: all content is public domain, and people consume it in many transformed ways.
Those that get ahead of the curve and make their content publicly available and semantically well structured will see their ideas thrive.
I added a basic speed setting, have a look! Also looking into the archive idea, which will be a bit more involved, since my current infra is kind of minimalist.
Brilliant idea. I think this has real value as well: as I get older, I find that I have less energy for reading, but I also notice I often miss really cool stuff that was briefly on the front of HN.
I like that it summarizes the comments too. There are often real gems buried in there. (I assume you're only taking a few top ones?)
I think a great improvement could be made with personalization. Most of what's on the front page isn't personally relevant to me, and there's a lot of cool stuff on the new submissions page that never catches on. So it would be nice if a system could learn what kind of stories I personally respond to, and show me (a summary of?) those -- even if they aren't currently trending.
Last.fm came out 20 years ago (proving you don't even need AI for amazing recommender systems), but it seems personalizing your experience never really caught on. (Yeah, the YouTube algorithm kind of does this, but you unfortunately have no real control over it.)
Thanks for the comment, I'm really enjoying the discussion it has sparked.
Yes, I'm just taking the top comments, along with a few child comments, in order to not exceed the context window of the model.
Regarding personalization, there's definitely lots of potential. HN can be so random though, sometimes you find things that you didn't even know you needed (intellectually). I guess as with most recommender systems, it's about a balance between exploration and exploitation. Maybe an MVP could filter for specific keywords and add those posts to the model input.
agreed on energy for reading. do you think it’s that we’re getting older or that the friction associated with consuming information is just getting lower and lower over time?
So my energy levels have declined noticeably from age 20 to 30. I thought it was mostly my own chronic health issues causing accelerated aging, but many of my friends are making similar complaints.
I did notice far before this point (e.g. age 10 to 20) that my patience for reading had gone down significantly. If I had to guess I'd say that in my case it's due to an underlying anxiety that started in early teens and never left me. Drowning it out seems to require something more stimulating than reading (on paper).
(Perhaps meditation or therapy (shadow integration?) would help here. I've certainly had glimpses of inner peace during times when I was meditating regularly. One insight from this time: "holy crap, I always thought I needed to struggle harder, but it turns out I just needed to learn how to relax...")
I can get through audiobooks but I can only consume them while traveling or doing chores. If I'm sitting down, the restlessness is too high and I can't concentrate on the book.
I also have ADHD and heard similar things from others with ADHD, so I'm not sure to what degree this translates to others.
When it comes to online reading, there are quite a few things that cause me fatigue that I don't feel I used to experience. Advertisements have been there for a long time, but often these are woven into the content, either as literal text placed in the article, or as visual ads that you need to scroll through to continue reading the article. Relying on different JavaScript and CSS techniques to "enhance" the user experience often cause me issues when I'm just trying to focus on reading. Those include overriding scrollbars, dynamic loading of content when the text is small enough to have been included in the page, and displaying some kind of alternative action when highlighting text. I'll often highlight text to keep track of where I'm reading, and some sites will pop up a dialog with share actions, or the ability to add annotations, etc. This is distracting and makes it more difficult to follow along with a longer article.
I'm 45, and got my start on BBS pre-internet, but I feel like if I find an article without the distractions I mentioned above, I actually have more energy to complete an article than I did in my 20's and 30's. Having access to the article without distractions helps me to focus, and when I focus, I tend to consume more content than I normally would. Most likely one of the reasons we're drawn to HN.
You've just made me realize why I usually avoid clicking the actual article link on HN. It's usually a very unpleasant experience, unless it's clear that it's a smaller website.
Unrelated but reminds me of GTA V's radio channels in cars. The news talking about what you just did.
Did anyone notice it reporting about itself now? This will definitely go into the archive :)
Love it. Reminds me of the also useful Hacker News Recap from wondercraft but it looks like that stopped updating as of October 1st (https://www.wondercraft.ai/our-podcasts/hacker-news).
Would be great to have a playback speed button as well. (I can't sit through any audio at 1x.)
Same boat re: audio speed. I actually speed up the voice in the backend by 1.16x . Above that I was getting too many artifacts in the audio. The nice thing about doing it at that point is that I can handle the music and the voice separately, i.e. the speed of the music stays unchanged.
Speeding it up in the player will also speed up the music, which is not very zen. But I guess I'll just add it to the player and let people decide how fast they want to go.
I added a basic speed setting, hope 3x is enough ;)
Excellent, thank you. This is something I can listen to!
This is awesome, I wish it did a rolling 8 hour instead that is updated once a hour if that makes sense.
So the best of the last 8 hours, with a new episode every hour? I think that makes sense, you could check in every 8 hours or so and have a fresh set of stories.
Wow... Really great.
Can you add some historical archive to listen n hours ago (or morning briefing like) summary as a feature?
Thanks! An archive shouldn't be too hard to implement.
Would a morning briefing include more of a curated selection of news, like the most interesting/most discussed news of the day? Currently I just take the top 5 posts from the main page.
Not just the top five, more like http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ which also ensures newness.
Because of that, catching up on several days will also be unique stories.
That's a real useful resource. Thanks!
I was looking into using the algolia API to get the top 10 posts of the last day, but those won't be unique over the span of several days.
I could easily see listening to such a summary once or twice a day. Considering the pace at which HN is updated, how about two to four somewhat longer episodes per day, with an archive of the past week so that people can catch up? You might also want to focus on certain types of stories, such as those with more upvotes or comments.
In any case, it's a great idea, and I enjoyed listening to the current episode.
Yeah. You're right.
My morning routine is Checking HN with Coffee. So with your service I can minimize some time to click around and figure out what the root cause is.
I was actually listening to it while making breakfast as well, so the idea of an extended morning briefing resonates with me. I'll look into it, thanks for the follow-up!
If you do this, it might be interesting to publish this as a podcast. Hourly is too frequent for a podcast, but daily would be pretty good.
(Podcasts are just RSS feeds.)
Sounds good, I'll get back to you about that!
The AI voice is good. What are you using to generate it?
It's openAI's voice generator.
"First up a webgpu wifi simulator has emerged, although details remain sparse due to trouble extracting data from the linked resource"
Sounds about right
Yeah, if you look at the page source, there's actually no text in the document body. At one point I will have to use a JS-capable browser, to capture pages like this one.
I did https://radio-hn.pages.dev/ last year in the same idea, just once per day. Posted it somewhere here at the time.
Interesting, I actually did a search before submitting mine, but I narrowed it down to the last year only. Yours being 2y/o didn't show up. You were ahead of your time!
"although details remain sparse due to issues extracting content from the linked resource"
Unfortunate that it adds stuff like this, which doesn't seem helpful to the listener.
Yep, some pages can't be read for some reason or another. I already added support for PDFs, I guess I'll handle more error cases as they pop up.
Neat! Personally hourly feels a bit much but a daily briefing that can fit inside a commute or on a short walk would be perfect. Might be the first ai podcast I'd subscribe to.
That seems to be the general consensus, I think it makes sense to move in that direction and beef it up a little.
Next step heygen avatar's doing desk presentations with small videos overlayed to show the websites etc.
This is really great stuff, love the added "news-station" type music! If something like this we're to be monetized would there be any issues regarding copyright?
Thank you! And that's a really good question. Since it's summarizing the articles, I would assume that there shouldn't be any issues regarding copyright. Regarding the comments that it's using, I think HN generally has some rights to them, although again it's more of a summarization. Generally HN seems cool about these things.
Now, if you were to scan the homepage of the BBC and create a news broadcast from it, they probably wouldn't be too happy about that, understandably. I have no idea how this would fare in court though.
Did you add the “hi mom” bit at the end, or was that organic?
I added it to the prompt for this exact situation. So it was "hard-coded". Tbh it would have been a bit scary if that happened organically. Kind of like animals recognizing themselves in the mirror levels of self-awareness.
Frankly this is super fantastic. Thank you. Any possibility to make this longer, and split it into sections with updates on previous stories at the end? I love this concept a lot.
Thank you! Most of the people here seem to prefer a longer form, so I think I'll move in that direction.
> split it into sections with updates on previous stories at the end So basically, if a story comes up that has been reported on before, it references the older story and gives some context and the update? Something like "just last week, the Internet Archive had been the victim of another cyber-attack, in which [...]"?
Fun stuff. It does feel like NotebookLM (and others) are hurtling us toward a future that seems inevitable: all content is public domain, and people consume it in many transformed ways.
Those that get ahead of the curve and make their content publicly available and semantically well structured will see their ideas thrive.
Here's my user test: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.loom.com/embed/9e8b8d454ee...
Nice. Would it be possible to add a link to the actual submission as it is being discussed?
Definitely! I was thinking to just show a list of all the links under the player, would that work for you?
Was thinking the same thing. Very fun idea, nice work!
Really neat! How was the waveform visualization achieved?
Looks like https://wavesurfer.xyz/
Yep! First time using it, seems really solid and does the job.
I like this idea a lot. Archived entries would be nice as others have suggested. It would also be nice to be able to control playback speed.
I added a basic speed setting, have a look! Also looking into the archive idea, which will be a bit more involved, since my current infra is kind of minimalist.