alt Hacker NewsShow HN: WhatHappened – HN summaries, heatmaps, and contrarian picks
Hi HN,
I built WhatHappened (whathappened.tech) because I have a love/hate relationship with this site. I love the content, but the "wall of text" UI gives me FOMO. I was spending too much time clicking into vague titles ("Project X") or wading through flame wars just to find technical insights.
I built this tool to act as a filter. It generates a card for the top daily posts with a few specific features to cut the noise:
1. AI Summaries: It generates a technical TL;DR (3 bullet points) and an ELI5 version for every post.
2. The Heat Meter: I analyze the comment section to visualize the distribution: Constructive vs. Technical vs. Flame War. If a thread is 90% Flame War, I know to skip it (or grab popcorn).
3. Contrarian Detection: To break the echo chamber, the AI specifically hunts for the most upvoted disagreement or critique in the comments and pins it to the card.
4. Mobile-First PWA: I mostly read HN on my phone, so I designed this as a PWA. It supports swipe gestures and installs to the home screen without an app store.
Stack: Next.js, Gemini, Supabase.
It currently supports English and Chinese. Any feedback will be appreciated! My original X post: https://x.com/marsw42/status/1997087957556318663, please share if you like it or find it helpful! :D
Thanks!
Comments
The number of new (less than one hour old) accounts with garbled names in this thread is odd, to say the least.
How is this determining a comment is "Highly Upvoted" on HN where that is explicitly kept out of the ui/ux and new comments are a/b tested across users etc... it's not a thing you can know. I have had comments with a big number of descendents but very low upvotes so thats not a reliable indicator either. Genuinely curious.
I have a Gemini gem for HN where I share a thread and it pulls out insightful comments, interesting links, and avoids that flame war stuff entirely. It's less compact than this format but has more actionable takeaways for me. Tips, tricks, insights, and links is what I want from a lot of these conversations. And there are some specific HN-isms that I've coded into the gem to restrict from the report.
It seems like each article takes a lot of vertical space. What if you changed the UI so you just displayed a title for each article with a little icon next to it like a downward arrow that you could click on if you wanted to see more of that article? That way, you could display more titles on one screen so that the user could more quickly scroll to the articles they actually wanted to see?
Ooh, love the UX, the heat meter and contrarian detection are very nice ideas.
I recently released https://trackernews.app/browse which surfaces out and groups content from hn, reddit .. for user defined topics and extracts user defined structured data along with summaries.
a tangential take on similar problem with focus on grouping posts by topics.
would love to get any feedback on the UX/ understandability of the interface
Very nice indeed. I recently went through a similar process and built an RSS feed summarizer, but didn’t bother with comments because… well… it could go either way in terms of productivity and token usage (I prefer to grab the original article and summarize it when feasible).
But I really like the output.
Very nice. Most posts are classified as "Non-technical post" these days.
Was hoping for a way to filter on "technical", for when I need my dose of hacking and technology. (Filter on category could also help, but I assume there are many technical categories.)
And maybe reverse sort, for when I'm tired of controversy.
I really like this. Although I see a lot of posts leading with "Non-technical post" which seems misapplied in a lot of cases and otherwise too much of a generalization for a technical audience to glean anything useful from.
Nice. It’d be cool if you could tap on the subject tags to filter for the latest posts with that tag.
Any chance this can go open source? I'd love to contribute and self host.
Really nice experience on mobile. I didn't think I'd like the "contrarian take" section, but it's actually useful to see what the main counterpoint is on a post, and how seriously others are taking it
Cool stuff. You have tags but no filtering on tags sadly. I think that would be the most valuable.
Israel used Palantir technologies in pager…
“ Contrarian View(highly upvoted) Many argued the attack was a highly targeted, lawful military operation against Hezbollah's command, achieving military goals with remarkably low civilian harm compared to conventional warfare.”
What a sad world we live in. This site really is a cesspool of American fascism, and the community is not doing enough to take a stance against that
[under-the-rug stub]
[see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988611 for explanation]
The timestamp under each title seems to be the timestamp of when it was summarized and not when it was actually posted on HN. As a reader, I would prefer to see when it was posted. You already have a "updated x hours ago" at the top of the page so there is no reason to just repeat that updated timestamp on all the cards.