Hacker News Reader

Comment by TySchultz | Hacker News Reader

Last year artifact inspired me to build out my own AI news app. Even though they decided to shut down I still think there is potential here for more niche products not looking to grow to massive scale.

My news app, Quill, focuses more on completion than endless scrolling. Similar to a traditional newspaper. ~10 stories a day and you can be done. Similar to yahoo news digest from years back.

https://apple.co/3O8BPxr

View on HN

Just installed and gave it a try. Good initial vibe. One of the first things I wanted to do was share a particular story/summary with someone else (ideally by text or email). Since you’re pushing the sharing idea at the bottom of the front page, maybe you want to consider that option as well? Not much beats getting a potential new user by feeding them the real meat of your product.

Thanks for checking it out! I think thats a great idea. Since they are already on iOS a custom share link could be a nice hook into the app.

Ill work on getting something added around a share link for each story.

I want to do something similar by analyzing my activitypub feed and RSS feeds with a local LLM. I think that would be a much healthier way for me to receive news from the internet.

Thats exactly what I am doing here just with a massive list of RSS feeds. Changing it to a list of personal RSS feeds would be a pretty cool idea. It would allow your own personal digest for the day.

Any chance I could get your feedback on my app that summarizes news and social media?

https://shortsnip.com

Sure. The site on arrival feels like an ugly PHP example app design from 2008. Use some AI-looking metallic gradients for logo, or anything less orangy-brown.

The use of AI-generated images for the news items is totally dystopian, freakish, and dysfunctional: hallucinated faces for obituaries, AI bias all over the place, surreal representations of things... But I like it! It's a strange feature on its own seeing how AI may (mis)represent a headline. Prompt it to use even more different visual styles, and apply filters (ie color filters) so that the UX doesn't become visually repetitive.

The news text underneath is just garbage, I don't get it. Work on putting out a good AI-generated summary instead, plus real links to real news sites that your LLM/ranker/classifier thinks are the best links to get that news, which will also give attribution for your sources. Bonus for summaries+links to social top ranked comments too. Get rid of snips within snips (which do not work).

Add a short sentence-summary under the headline, or make headlines longer when applicable so that they are more descriptive.

"This app is currently not available in your country or region."

Perhaps you can drop the geo-block?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com