[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a tech news aggregator that works t...
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Show HN: I built a tech news aggregator that works the way my brain
does
An honest to god, non-algorithmic reverse chrono list of tech news
that passes my signal-to-noise tests, updated hourly. A
lightweight a page design as I've been able to keep; simple, clean,
fast. No commercial features or aspirations - this is a passion
project, something I've been fooling around with on and off for
decades. There's a "Top" view too with an LLM edited front page &
summary, and categorized views for a large number of topics - see
the Directory. A few more buried features to explore, but the
fundamental use case is pop in, scan, exit - fast and concise.
Your feedback would be appreciated!
Author : dreadsword
Score : 124 points
Date : 2025-10-23 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (deadstack.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (deadstack.net)
| wmeredith wrote:
| I've built a couple different versions of this for myself over
| the years. I like yours! Thanks for sharing.
| dreadsword wrote:
| Cheers - thank you for the kind words!
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Really nice and clean, well done.
|
| What is the purpose of having summaries for "Recent", "Incoming",
| and "Outgoing" all at the top? Seems like all content from the
| later two are in the first, right?
| dreadsword wrote:
| You're right --- incoming & outgoing end up being redundant on
| the "Recent" view.
|
| Where they're (more) relevant is in the "Top" view where the
| LLM editor has picked a subset of stories to be categorized as
| top and incoming/outgoing are the ones that didn't make the
| cut, organized by timeliness.
|
| Definitely a gap in design!
| dreadsword wrote:
| Oh I should add: incoming will show stories ~20 minutes before
| they get picked up for "Top" inclusion, if they're going to
| make the cut, based on how jobs are scheduled.
| jarmitage wrote:
| RSS?
| dreadsword wrote:
| In the roadmap! RSS by tag - i.e.: for
| https://deadstack.net/tag/quantum And an RSS feed for /recent
| are both in progress
| chicagojoe wrote:
| This is great! Are you using a news API or pulling in RSS feeds
| yourself? Is there a list of what sources are included?
| dreadsword wrote:
| Reading RSS myself, OLD SCHOOL: Cron Jobs. PHP. Hahaha! List of
| sources: At present, no; but if its of interest, it would not
| be hard to add.
|
| I should also add - please post any recommendations re: sources
| to cover.
| dreadsword wrote:
| Hey - still thinking about sources here. With the data I have,
| I could actually do an interesting analysis of news sources -
| i.e.:
|
| - how often do their stories become members of clusters? - how
| "fast" are they to publish on a topic vs. other competitors -
| i.e.: who "breaks" the news? - what tags (people, companies,
| topics) does a given source stick close? Which do they shy away
| from?
|
| Thanks very much for a really interesting set of ideas to
| explore!
| fuddle wrote:
| Cool site, an About page would be useful. It's hard to tell how
| the site works.
| dreadsword wrote:
| Fair enough - its honestly not something I expected anyone to
| be interested in enough such that an about page would be
| required.
|
| At a high level, it reads RSS feeds from a number of sources,
| and uses LLMs to identify clusters of stories about the same
| thing, group them, tag them, and designate them a "top" story
| or not. That's it.
|
| The biggest thing I've learned in all of this is that o3-mini
| is far and away the best at following instructions (for this
| use case). Periodically I'll cycle through the models available
| on Groq, and always come back to o3-mini.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I love that your site comes with an overview instead of clicking
| away to another site immediately. Feels snappy and looks good. I
| can see this being my news roundup. Great work!
| dreadsword wrote:
| Cheers and thank-you!
| neilellis wrote:
| Really good, clean and to the point, love it.
| dreadsword wrote:
| Cheers - thank-you so much!
| productiveminds wrote:
| Simplistic site, looks clean and easy to navigate!
| dreadsword wrote:
| Many thanks for the kind words!
| botanrice wrote:
| This is neat! Thanks for sharing.
| dreadsword wrote:
| Cheers and thank you!
| tamimio wrote:
| If you can get rid of the cookies message that would be great, as
| I will place the site as an app in my phone and that message is
| annoying to have when I open it.
| dreadsword wrote:
| You should only see that message once when you first show up,
| and as annoying as it is, there's a compliance element to it.
| Let me know if its persisting for you after accepting!
| _menelaus wrote:
| This is pretty cool man. How do you cluster the articles into
| stories? It looks like you did a good job of it.
| dreadsword wrote:
| Thanks so much for the kind words - its 100% o3-mini for
| clustering. I have zero editorial input as to what constitutes
| a cluster, what's "top" news, etc.
|
| The one subtlety is setting up the LLM to understand whether a
| new story belongs in an existing cluster, or with > 1
| neighbors, constitutes a new cluster. The challenge there is
| scoping the clustering window (hours of stories for
| consideration) and topic breadth to avoid creating Katamari-
| super-clusters that just end up with every story associated to
| them.
|
| At this point I seem to have found a sweet spot re: the hours
| window, the frequency of processing, and the design of the
| prompt such that its working consistently.
|
| Very few false positives in terms of spurious clusters being
| created, or potential clusters being missed.
| embit wrote:
| I have done similar style for tech news. Aggravating based on
| Tags. That way I can read tech news on micro topics.
| https://embit.ca/ Your feedback is appreciated.
| dreadsword wrote:
| Looking good - keep at it! Use it yourself every day, and
| iterate it continuously.
| amatecha wrote:
| This is probably a dumb question, but.. what does "incoming" and
| "outgoing" mean?
| dreadsword wrote:
| Oh man, don't ask - not a dumb question at all. I'll reshare
| what I put in another comment that answers it, but bottom line
| is they're a design gap in the context of /recent.
|
| You're right --- incoming & outgoing end up being redundant on
| the "Recent" view. Where they're (more) relevant is in the
| "Top" view where the LLM editor has picked a subset of stories
| to be categorized as top and incoming/outgoing are the ones
| that didn't make the cut, organized by timeliness.
|
| Definitely a gap in design!
| thekevan wrote:
| I assumed it meant stories that trended highly and were now
| fading in popularity (outgoing) and stories that are trending
| but trending quickly and may be on a fast ascent.
|
| Sort of a combo of "in case you missed it" and "the next new
| big stories".
| amatecha wrote:
| Oh, sure, but I literally just don't understand what their
| meaning is >_>
| al_borland wrote:
| I like it. It kind of reminds me of the old Fever RSS reader,
| which would group together similar articles from different
| sources, and use that to rank how hot a story was.
| dreadsword wrote:
| Not familiar with fever, but there is something similar buried
| at the heart of mine - the LLM clusters stories, and they get
| promoted to public when they reach a threshold of unique
| sources.
|
| That threshold is a function of day of the week - on weekends
| when the news cycle is quiet, it lowers the bar --- tuesday to
| thursday its at its most restrictive.
| lateforwork wrote:
| Love it, but the body font (garamond) is not easy on the eyes.
| Garamond is one of my favorite fonts in print and at not-too-
| small sizes. On the screen it doesn't look good because where the
| characters get thin it gets too thin (or as font experts call it,
| too much contrast).
| dreadsword wrote:
| Noted, thank you! I haven't put a tonne into readability, other
| than some basics - I prefer a serif'd font, and I made sure the
| background was easier on the eyes than #FFFFFF haha
| jiwidi wrote:
| Pretty cool! How do you do to build these "stories" based on
| news?
| dreadsword wrote:
| Cheers and thank you! I'll reshare an earlier comment that I
| think answers your question - let me know:
|
| Thanks so much for the kind words - its 100% o3-mini for
| clustering. I have zero editorial input as to what constitutes
| a cluster, what's "top" news, etc.
|
| The one subtlety is setting up the LLM to understand whether a
| new story belongs in an existing cluster, or with > 1
| neighbors, constitutes a new cluster. The challenge there is
| scoping the clustering window (hours of stories for
| consideration) and topic breadth to avoid creating Katamari-
| super-clusters that just end up with every story associated to
| them.
|
| At this point I seem to have found a sweet spot re: the hours
| window, the frequency of processing, and the design of the
| prompt such that its working consistently.
|
| Very few false positives in terms of spurious clusters being
| created, or potential clusters being missed.
| jiwidi wrote:
| Very interesting, how do you do that? Do you limit yourself
| what you feed or via custom instructions? I had a similar
| case so would love how you are doing the prompting here.
|
| In my case we went with embeddings and clustering to find
| close papers to each other because llm were allucinating.
| p-s-v wrote:
| cool, how did you create it? whats the architecture like ?
| dreadsword wrote:
| Thanks very much! Architecture - is truly recidivistic - LAMP,
| cron jobs, o3-mini, bootstrap. It works, its fast because its
| not complicated, and b/c I'm doing things like updating hourly
| vs. real time.
| jhack wrote:
| I'm REALLY liking this, way more than I thought I would. Great
| job! What's your stack if you don't mind my asking?
| dreadsword wrote:
| Awesome - glad you're enjoying it and thank you for the kind
| words!
|
| My "Stack" ---- LAMP + o3-mini for editorial tasks + Bootstrap
| for responsive front end. That is to say: Its old school, and
| painfully functional. But, light & fast.
| taftster wrote:
| I'm not sure, something about the "Recent Stories Summary"
| section (first view) is hard to read. The spacing is wrong. And
| the blue font. Someone mentioned Garamond too.
|
| It's creating a "wall of text" effect to me and I'm not able to
| quickly skim and allow my eye to catch the bits that are
| interesting to me.
|
| As a comparison, the HN homepage is very accessible to me for
| skimming and finding things to click into (like this entry).
|
| UI is often quite subjective, understood. But I can't really
| "scan" the first view fast enough. It's all blending together and
| causes extra processing on my mind.
| dreadsword wrote:
| I hear you - there's something to be done there. My initial
| thought was to stay as close to convention as I could (links
| are blue!), but as the RECENT list gets long, its definitely
| gets less scannable.
|
| Thank you for the feedback!
| taftster wrote:
| I hear you about "links are blue" ... except when you are a
| link aggregator.
|
| The links are blue design from early HTML was meant to
| highlight links in the context of a paragraph of prose, not a
| list of link items. "Blue" means something special about the
| text in the context of the text around it.
|
| In this case, the blue font is distracting because the links
| _are_ the content. You don 't need the blue to help your
| links "stand out". Because the links are normal text, using a
| normal palette would be appropriate.
|
| I don't mind some subtle clues that these are links.
| Underlines, slight grey text. Or even a subtle hover effect.
| Two cents.
| dreadsword wrote:
| How about now? Story titles are still clickable links, but are
| black. Made the story count a link as well, and kept it blue as
| a visual cue.
| taftster wrote:
| Better, to be honest. Keep refining of course. But this is
| definitely more readable.
|
| I admit that straight black is not quite the right answer
| either. A slightly toned down dark grey would be nice. And
| again, subjectively, I like how HN has a row of non-link
| smaller (lighter shaded) text under each listing, which I
| think plays nice for the white space between each item.
| bcrl wrote:
| Personally, I far prefer black over grey. Grey is really
| hard to read across a variety of lighting conditions and
| devices. The older you get, the more important contrast
| becomes.
| taftster wrote:
| Fair and good point. Sharp black bothers me, so just
| adding in a little hue is nice for my eyes. But that's
| me, of course.
|
| Noting also that this text is #000000 black, per the CSS.
| Maybe the background color helps soften it a little? Like
| contrast white/black is hard on the eyes, but HN is not?
| felideon wrote:
| Some additional feedback:
|
| There's no reason for both the story count and the story
| summary to be clickable. It's confusing because:
|
| (a) It's not clear what the number in parentheses even means
| (until you click and infer)
|
| (b) Separate links makes you think they lead to different
| pages
|
| Also, echoing another comment, it's not really clear what
| "incoming" and "outgoing" stories mean. Maybe "new" vs.
| "stale"?
| tiaremnt wrote:
| I just configured my own rss website to only find this awesome
| solution. I'm crying right now if only it found you earlier I
| would have saved me so much time. Also do you have the code
| publicly available so that I can customize for my own needs?
| MiiMe19 wrote:
| This is exactly the stuff that I think LLMs are best at. We have
| created the world's coolest string manipulator and this is
| exactly the kind of things I think LLMs are best suited for.
| Awesome job!
| dreadsword wrote:
| Cheers and thanks for the kind words! And yes - LLMs (at least
| o3-mini) do a great job as my editorial team - the site is 100%
| automated.
| sweenzor wrote:
| Very cool. Having an immutable record "time machine" you can use
| to re-find something you remember reading is very humane. I'd
| love to see this for world news, politics, etc.
| dreadsword wrote:
| Ah cool! it is built to be extensible, and I'll give you a
| preview of another vertical here: https://northfeed.ca/
|
| And - did you actually see the time machine at the bottom of
| the right hand column? Or - was that just a wish list item of
| yours?
| hackncheese wrote:
| Combines the strength of AI at summarizing text and easy access
| to the actual information sources for verification, well done
| well done!
| dreadsword wrote:
| Cheers and thank you very much --- yes, LLMs are very well
| suited to editorial tasks!
| clueless wrote:
| looks very similar to https://particle.news how would you
| distinguish your approach (other than the tech focus)?
| dreadsword wrote:
| Cool - particle looks great - I really like how visual it is.
|
| Distinguishing characteristics - personally I get value from
| the unambiguous timeline (no editorializing in /recent), and
| (as nice as the visual is) the non-visual, super simplistic
| presentation & the curated sources (...which I value b/c I
| curated them myself haha).
|
| So bottom line is that DS will appeal to a certain kind of
| obsessive compulsive news consumer and synthesizer that wants
| the right balance of signal to noise ands a streamlined
| presentation that doesn't slow them down. I count myself among
| that group!
| wccrawford wrote:
| Wow. That's amazing! I've bookmarked it because I think it's one
| of the best news sites I've seen now.
| dreadsword wrote:
| Well thank you so much for the very kind words, and don't
| hesitate to reach out with any feedback!
| Biologist123 wrote:
| Great idea! May I ask what the information source is?
| dreadsword wrote:
| Individual feeds from ~100 sites!
| nathanwallace wrote:
| A similar site I've enjoyed for >15 years (!!) is
| https://techmeme.com/
|
| I also use it's sister aggregator site for political news every
| day - https://www.memeorandum.com/
| dreadsword wrote:
| Yes - Techmeme is definitely the archetype and a great product,
| and I have spent lots of time there over the years as well!
| swader999 wrote:
| Maybe I'm the only one but I would love a feed that never showed
| me items again that I've already scrolled past without engaging
| in the first time.
| stevage wrote:
| Me too. That's the number one thing I always wish for with
| every feed. And if I reach the end of the feed, that's fine.
| taftster wrote:
| Right, I'm so tired of "infinite scroll". There's a
| mental/emotional reward for actually reaching The End of
| something.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I wonder how much this is a factor of the widespread mental
| health malaise that is often attributed to tech these days?
| Certainly plenty of factors to go around, but consider the
| connotation of "scrolling" and how common it is a default
| replacement to boredom in modern life and suddenly it seems
| quite insidious.
| facundo_olano wrote:
| I built that feature (auto mark as read by scrolling) into my
| feed reader if you're up to self host and curate your sources
|
| https://github.com/facundoolano/feedi
|
| I did try to build a public facing news aggregator with a
| similar ux but I couldn't pull it off purely based on client
| side state (and I didn't want to do user management)
| econ wrote:
| Clicking "more" for a few extra words feels wrong.
| dreadsword wrote:
| Where are you seeing that?
| stevage wrote:
| I would love this but with more blogs and less product
| announcements.
| dreadsword wrote:
| I hear you - today was heavier on product announcements than
| normal I feel. And re: blogs - for sure: send me suggestions
| and I'll add them...!
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