Read only the Hacker News stories worth your time: the week's top posts, each with a short AI summary, so you know what a link is about before you open it.
Live: cleanhackernews.netlify.app
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- Know before you click. Every story has a 2–3 line summary of the article and one line on what the commenters think.
- Read stories stay gone. Opening or archiving a story removes it from your list, on every device. You only need a passphrase you choose; there's no account.
- The best of the week, not just today. A big story from four days ago still beats a small one from this morning (see ranking below).
- Extras: topic filters, an Archive tab with the last 3 days (restore anything), light and dark mode, and links to the comments and the poster's profile.
You need an AWS account and a Gemini API key (free from Google AI Studio).
Paste this repo's link into an AI coding agent such as Claude Code and ask: "Deploy this to my AWS account." It follows AGENTS.md and asks you only for what it needs.
How stories are ranked
- The pool is every Hacker News story from the past 7 days with at least 100 points.
- Each story is scored by its points, minus 5% for each day of age. Points still decide almost everything; the small penalty only settles close calls in favour of the newer story.
- 500 points today beats 550 points a week ago (550 counts as about 385).
- 1,000 points five days ago still beats 700 points today (1,000 counts as about 775).
- The top 150 are shown, highest first. The list refreshes every hour, so new stories climb as they collect votes.
How it works
| Part | Service | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly refresh | EventBridge Scheduler → Lambda | Fetches the week's top stories, reads each new article and its top comments, asks Gemini for the summary, tags and comment line, and writes stories.json |
| Summaries | Gemini API | Newest Flash model, falling back to Flash-Lite when Flash is busy or out of quota. Each story is summarised once. |
| Website | S3 + CloudFront | Serves the page and stories.json; the page builds itself in your browser |
| Read-list sync | API Gateway → Lambda → DynamoDB | Stores which stories each passphrase has read, plus 3 days of titles for the Archive tab |
| API key | SSM Parameter Store | Keeps the Gemini key encrypted |
Everything is defined in template.yaml and deployed with the plain AWS CLI. Nothing runs between refreshes, so AWS costs stay at or near the free tier. Gemini costs a few cents a day on a paid key; the free tier also works, with Flash-Lite doing most summaries.
Manual setup (Windows, PowerShell)
- Install Node.js (version 20 or newer) and the AWS CLI, then run
aws configureand sign in to your AWS account. - Download this repo and open a terminal in its folder.
- Run
npm install. - Store your Gemini key. Your typing is hidden and goes straight to AWS:
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts/set-secrets.ps1
- Deploy. The first run takes about 5 minutes and prints your site's address at the end:
npm run deploy
- Optional short address: put your site address into
forwarder/netlify.tomland drag theforwarderfolder onto app.netlify.com/drop.
To preview locally first: npm run refresh:mock (real stories, placeholder summaries), then npm run dev and open http://localhost:5173.
To remove everything: empty the site bucket, then run aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name hn-reader.