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.
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 [I had originally made it to list all stories on one page and load story links at stops in a subway/metro commute.]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 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! :-)
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].
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.
? 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"?
"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).
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.
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