The day this story was posted on Show HN, I didn’t want to be glued to the screen, waiting for new comments. So, I asked Gemini to write a script that listens for new comments on Firebase. I already had Pushover [1], so I connected the script to send notifications to my mobile device. I ran the script and forgot about it. Today, I woke up to multiple notifications. I believe this script could be useful for other HN users as well, so I converted it into a project and posted it to GitHub [2].
Wanted to call out that the demo of the Enron dataset [1] is based on a private fork of Memento. Since the archive contains multiple inboxes, we had to make Memento pick one of the users as the central user. These changes are not in the main repo as it is not a regular use case.
Great feedback. It would be great to connect Memento to Slack and possibly the user's photo archive as well. And if we can map the canonical user across all these stores, the Memento can show the unified view for all your memories.
Thanks for the feedback. The system prompt for the web app is optimized to balance between too short a summary vs not long enough. The browser extension, on the other hand, allows you to customize the system prompt to make the result exactly the way you want.
Another option is to look at the Bluesky feed [0]. This bot looks at top stories in HN and creates a very short summary. It only does around 20 posts a day. That could be limiting too.
Fair enough. I completely understand that the experience and hunting for gems in the comments is the core appeal of HN for many and AI summaries definitely aren't for everyone.
That said, we are seeing a consistent daily user base who do find value in the summarization, so it seems to be solving a pain point for a specific segment of readers, even if not for all.
Apart from the AI features, we actually built HN Companion as a general power-user client. It supports keyboard-first navigation (vim-style J/K bindings for comment navigation), seeing context for parent/child comments without losing your place, and tracking specific authors across a thread.
You might find those utility features useful even if you ignore the summary sidebar entirely. In the browser extension, the summary panel is something the user have to activate - it doesn't show-up by default.
Another interesting link relevant to AI summaries for HN discussion is the utility created by simonw [0]. Our tool is quite similar to what simonw did, except that we make the back-links more seamless. If you’re interested in a standalone tool similar to what simonw developed, you can find our script here [1]. If there’s community interest, we can improve the user experience of this tool.
Another interesting feature for HN users in the companion Bluesky bot we created [0]. It analyzes top stories from HN [1] and generates a new Bluesky thread every hour using the same cached summary. This bot is operational for the last 8 months.
When people hear about AI summaries, this is what comes to mind. And I understand their concern. Wouldn’t a summary strip away the essence of a conversation? Let me explain with an analogy. When we’re overwhelmed with information, we benefit from a system that organizes it. For instance, I might use a tool to declutter my desktop files and categorize them into logical groups. Once the categorization is complete, I can view these clusters and focus on the specific files within those clusters that pique my interest. However, if the summarization process also alters the files, I wouldn’t want to use that tool.
In the context of HN Companion, our objective is to examine lengthy threads and group them into 3 to 4 topics. Within each topic, we present the actual discussion that represents that cluster. We invested significant effort in developing a system that enables you to not only read the actual comments but also seamlessly jump to that discussion and continue the conversation there.
I encourage you to explore a few of the summaries in the app. I’d greatly appreciate your feedback on how we can enhance our service.
Your feedback through GitHub issues has been instrumental in helping us prioritize specific features. Additionally, the Chrome Web Store team has approved our extension for their ‘Featured’ badge, which could enhance the trust in installing the extension. I’m curious to know if you’ve had a chance to try the web app.
I’m also hoping similar media management options are available on iOS and desktop, since I use Signal across devices.
By the way, does Signal treat synced devices (like desktop or a second phone) as “replicas” vs a “primary”? If so, does this affect how storage or message history is handled between them?
Would appreciate any insight from folks familiar with the technical side of this!
It would be really useful to have more client-side control over media storage. That way, I could better manage storage growth without wiping entire threads.
For example, being able to see all media across chats, sort by file size, and optionally group by conversation would make it much easier to clean things up.
This is unrelated to Memento.
[1] https://pushover.net/
[2] https://github.com/latentsignal-org/hn-comment-watcher