Hackercast

An AI-generated podcast summary of Hacker News

Latest Episodes

Episode 27

October 27, 2023

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Episode 26

October 20, 2023

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Episode 25

October 6, 2023

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Episode 24

September 29, 2023

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Episode 23

September 22, 2023

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Episode 22

September 15, 2023

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Episode 20

September 1, 2023

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Episode 18

August 19, 2023

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Episode 17

August 11, 2023

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Episode 15

August 4, 2023

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Episode 14

July 21, 2023

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Episode 13

July 14, 2023

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Episode 12

July 7, 2023

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Episode 11

June 30, 2023

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Episode 6

May 26, 2023

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Episode 5

May 19, 2023

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Episode 4

May 12, 2023

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Episode 3

May 5, 2023

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Episode 2

April 28, 2023

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Episode 1

April 21, 2023

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About

I made this as a fun side-project to try out summarization with langchain (and because I get the Hacker Newsletter every Friday and never get round to reading it).

It works by scraping the Hacker Newsletter, summarizing the individual articles using Langchain and GPT-4, and then converting the text to speech using AWS Polly.

I'm basically pretty impressed by the quality of the summaries, although there are definitiely still some issues. The summaries of github pages are often pretty weird, and sometimes the analyses are very repetitive. I'm planning to try to improve the prompt to deal with these issues. At the end of the day some of the articles just don't work well as audio summaries. It currently ignores forum posts and comments, which I might try to include, as well as video links, which I probably won't.

The project is not associated with Hacker News, Y Combinator, or the Hacker Newsletter.

Let me know what you think and if you have any comments, feedback, or suggestions!