Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reception

  • Many commenters find the hourly HN audio recap clever, useful, and entertaining; some compare it to NPR/BBC-style news.
  • Others say they wouldn’t use it regularly, preferring to skim HN directly; several describe it as more “entertainment” than an efficient way to keep up.

Desired formats & cadence

  • Strong preference for less frequent, longer briefings: daily, 2–4 times per day, or morning/afternoon/evening.
  • Multiple requests for archives (days or a week back) so people can catch up.
  • Several suggest publishing as a podcast via RSS for easier subscription and use in podcast apps and car systems.

Personalization & content selection

  • Requests to:
    • Include more than the top 5 posts; maybe top 10–20, or top/best from last 24 hours.
    • Filter or focus on most-upvoted, most-commented, or user-interest-based stories.
  • Ideas for personalization using embeddings or user history (favorites/upvotes, topic keywords), with notes about exploration vs exploitation tradeoffs.

Audio experience: voice, speed, music

  • Voice quality is generally praised; it uses OpenAI’s TTS. Some propose ElevenLabs as an alternative, but cost is a concern.
  • Many want adjustable playback speed (fine-grained steps like 1.2–1.25x, up to 3x). Some already listen comfortably at high speeds.
  • Background music is divisive:
    • Some like the “news-station” feel.
    • Many find it distracting or manipulative and want an option to disable it.
    • Suggestions include separate music track, ducking, or muting music when speed changes.

UX, features & distribution

  • Requests for:
    • Links to the covered stories under the player and highlighting current segment.
    • Story index and waveform segmentation per story.
    • Display of total and current time, number of stories, volume slider.
    • Transcript of each broadcast.
    • Mobile‑friendly design, PWA/app, and widgets for one-tap play.
    • Ability to filter out certain kinds of stories.

Accuracy, trust & AI behavior

  • At least one concrete hallucination is reported (misinterpreting a meta formatting comment as concern about C++), raising trust issues.
  • Suggestions to tighten prompts (e.g., emphasize using only provided text; treat comments as possibly meta or non-factual).
  • Some see this as part of a broader shift toward AI-transformed consumption of public content, with open questions about bias and reliability.

Implementation & cost notes

  • Uses HN API plus scraping; Wavesurfer for the waveform; OpenAI TTS for voice.
  • Some discuss handling JS-heavy pages and PDFs, and note that TTS can get expensive at scale.