About tl;dr HN
tl;dr HN provides AI-powered summaries of top Hacker News stories (200+ points). For each story, we provide:
- tl;dr: A 2-3 sentence summary of the article
- HN Discussion: Key perspectives from the top comments
Comment Sentiment Legend
Each discussion point includes a sentiment indicator showing where the commenters stand relative to the article — that is, whether they agree with the author's argument. It is not a measure of how people feel about the underlying topic. So if an article argues that a tool is bad and the commenters agree it's bad, that's marked positive (they support the article), not negative.
| ↑ | Positive Agrees with or supports the article's argument (even if the article itself is critical of something) |
| ↓ | Negative Disagrees with, pushes back on, or criticizes the article's argument or the author |
| ~ | Mixed Partly agrees and partly disagrees with the article — a nuanced take |
| • | Neutral Adds information or asks questions without taking a side for or against the article |
How It Works
- We fetch the top stories from Hacker News with 200+ points
- For each story, we extract the article content from the source URL
- We fetch the top 10 comments from the HN discussion
- Claude AI generates a concise tl;dr of the article
- Claude AI analyzes the comments to identify 3-5 key perspectives, using the article's tl;dr as context so each perspective's sentiment reflects whether the commenters agree with the article
Archive & Permalinks
The front page only shows the latest day, but nothing is lost:
- Every story has a permanent page (the permalink link under each story) at
/day/YYYY-MM-DD/<id>-<title>, under the day it first reached the front page - Each day's front page is preserved at
/day/YYYY-MM-DD, exactly as it appeared - /archive lists every day since the archive began
Limitations
- PDFs and videos cannot be summarized
- Paywalled articles may not be accessible
- Summaries are AI-generated and may occasionally miss nuance
- Data refreshes once a day (around 10:00 UTC)
For AI Agents & Developers
The day's summaries are available in machine-readable form — no auth, CORS enabled:
- /api/summaries — JSON feed of all current stories and discussion perspectives
- /summaries.md — the same data as plain Markdown
- /sitemap.xml — every day page and story permalink in the archive
- /llms.txt — site overview for LLM agents
Credits
- Data from Hacker News via the official API
- Summaries powered by Anthropic Claude
- Built with Next.js