[qsort]

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.

[embedding-shape]

> 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.

[quesera]

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! :-)

[layer8]

Probably no sustainable pays-the-bills way to do it, though I would love to be proven wrong by a curator who happens to match my preferences.

On the other hand, the HN front page is already the result of collective curation.

[deelayman]

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.

[p0u4a]

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.

[0907]

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].

1. https://absent.dev/ 2. https://absent.dev/episode/ABS-0014/clusters

[celltalk]

Basically, https://duobook.co :)

[andai]

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.