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Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories

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Re: Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories

#171

Post by aanet »

Fantastic idea, good implementation. Very valuable and useful!

Do not listen to the chattering nabobs of negativity in the comments!

Your impl is valuable; gives a quick summary of top-n stories. Useful for somebody who dips in/out of HN now and then. It may not be for everyone (indeed, as various commenters have suggested), but its useful for me. And it;s a great example of marrying AI-generated summary with podcast style quick 5-min summary. Just like listening to BBC news summary.

A few suggestions: - perhaps make it personalizable (based on HN user?) or atleast provide an option to summarize top 15 (or 10 or 20?) stories - offer a way to go beyond the first page of HN - offer a way to summarize the most-commented stories

Good job! Happy to contribute if its on Github

Re: Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories

#172

Post by cancelself »

yunusabd wrote: post #38
vulcan01 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Podcast/RSS seems like ideal distribution tool?

Re: Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories

#175

Post by olup »

andai wrote: post #139
olup wrote: post #24

I did https://radio-hn.pages.dev/ last year in the same idea, just once per day. Posted it somewhere here at the time.

Damn, looks like you beat NotebookLM by a year and a half! Is the code for this available? I'm particularly curious how you did the multiple speakers and voices. NotebookLM has the issue that they keep switching sides, like one will be the student and the other the teacher on a subject, but then they'll suddenly switch in a way that makes no sense.

I did not release the code but it's incredibly basic, and I believe OP's one is just the same.

You collect N links from HN api with any heuristic you want, then scrape those urls - preferably using pupeteer-based tooling or online equivalent (think Jina).

I then ran each url's content in an LLM to get a summary, then from all the results ask a LLM to create the conversation (and give it a tone). Then decide on the voices and characters and feed each turn into 11labs (or any tts). And finally, concatenate all audio parts, add music and effects.

If I remember correctly, mine could perform all that from a single Cloudflare worker. The catch is it can become a bit pricey because of the TTS. I remember toying with making it a product (podcast everything) and quickly discovered there's a couple of company already offering this.

NotebookLM is slightly different on the TTS front, I think they are using the amazing model google showed off a year or so ago (without giving it public access) that can generate actual multi speakers conversations with "hums" and cutting, and talking at the same time.

Added : someone just made a python lib for the usecase (also found on HN 5 days ago) https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy

Re: Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories

#177

Post by ugh123 »

n2d4 wrote: post #66

Hah! Here's what it had to say about itself this hour: > In a more self-referential turn, we examine the launch of HN Update itself. This initiative aims to provide hourly news broadcasts, summarizing top stories from Hacker News. While listeners appreciate the concept of curated news, there are concerns about the accuracy of the summaries and the potential for bias in representation. Community discussion suggests th…

Actually makes me think if its possible to embed prompts into story headlines and/or content to do nefarious things...

Re: Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories

#178

Post by andai »

olup wrote: post #175
andai wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, looks like you beat NotebookLM by a year and a half! Is the code for this available? I'm particularly curious how you did the multiple speakers and voices. NotebookLM has the issue that they keep switching sides, like one will be the student and the other the teacher on a subject, but then they'll suddenly switch in a way that makes no sense.

I did not release the code but it's incredibly basic, and I believe OP's one is just the same. You collect N links from HN api with any heuristic you want, then scrape those urls - preferably using pupeteer-based tooling or online equivalent (think Jina). I then ran each url's content in an LLM to get a summary, then from all the results ask a LLM to create the conversation (and give it a tone). Then decide on the vo…

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories

#179

Post by nxpnsv »

anonzzzies wrote: post #102
nxpnsv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I used to love reading, but the last years I've felt exactly like I had no energy to read any more, and have switched to audiobooks and podcasts. I then checked my eyes, and it turns out I need glasses. So as you get older, check your eyes!

I have had glasses since I was 7... A year after my father brought home a 'portable computer' (luggable) [0] with a tiny monochrome screen. Not sure if that was related, but I guess it could be as the screen was very tiny (see pic below). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1

Very retro cool though, destroying your eyes in style!

Re: Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories

#180

Post by wholinator2 »

bloomingkales wrote: post #154
afavour wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want to overindex this point because at the end of the day this is just a fun hack project… but I do think it’s worth considering the behaviors our work encourages. Much like I think the 24 hour news cycle is detrimental to just about everything, an hourly HN summary strikes me as excessive. No one needs that much HN in their lives. But as you say, a daily summary you listen to the place of a podcast? That fe…

Depends. There’s no such thing as too much news during ww2 or Industrial Revolution. This is news about how news as we know it is going away, and there’s more news on that coming 24/7. And that’s just the news on the news. Idea for OP: If you treat an HN post and it’s comments as a hivemind, you could do something like ‘Interview with the Hivemind: (insert post topic)”, have the AI ask interview questions where the h…

What do you mean there's no such thing as too much news about war or capitalism (my interpretation of ww2 and industrial revolution)? I can't imagine your saying that interspersing your entire life with hourly updates on the deaths of millions of people is a... good? healthy? survivable thing? What about every 15 minutes? What about every second of every day? "No such thing" is certainly a strong phrase.

I can certainly say that consumption of news above around 1-2 hours a day in myself and everyone I've had the pleasure to discuss this with is an increasingly bad thing. Especially war! If you spend all of your time just consuming news about things when do you have time to do things like live a fulfilling life or enjoy peaceful human existence. Continuous news is the opposite of peace.

Maybe you're saying in general rather than in one person's life but i'd counter that a mass amount of news in general _is directly_ a mass amount of news in a mass amount of people's lives. Why would there be tons and tons of news unless people were actively consuming more and more of it?

How many hours a day do you spend reading current events and news? Why don't you spend more? Your answer to that question is my rebuttal

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