How I finally made HackerNews a habit

The problem- I heard about the quality of HackerNews community for years now. But I never became an active reader. I tried a few times over the years and failed miserably— almost always forgetting to open HackerNews the very next day after my resolution.

Two common problems are not the causes for my abstinence.

One. I am not bad at reading. I read 2-3 long form articles a week and 1-2 novels a month. So, clearly, I read if I want to.

And second. Friction of opening a community feed is not the issue. I do open Github trending page every other day and explore trending repos.

So what’s the issue? I boiled it down to two personal problems—

1. HackerNews feed page UX stops me from exploring more than a couple posts. I, even today, forget where to click to open the actual link, how to open the comments section and how to read what the author wrote.

2. The vocabulary of HN is technical. And that’s a good thing. But it gets too technical, too soon. This makes it hard to realize if a HN post is worth for me to dig into.

I sat down to solve this a month ago. Since I have been consuming HN for the past four weeks, I can share my working solution:

First step is to get the HackerNews feed right into my note-taking space. Solution—

• A program that runs twice a day

• It goes through HackerNews feed at that time

• Fetches all the posts

• Scrapes the post link for the page’s content

• Creates a quick summary from the content written by the author on HN and the page content

• Puts it all together into one long-form post

• Saves it in my note-taking app

• Sends me a link via my reminders bot with a link to read

Second step is to solve the “technical” language part. Given that I write a lot, it’s fair to say, I have free access to a few of my notes. If I summarize each link with the vocabulary and sentence structures from my notes, that solves the readability part.

I vibe coded this in few hours by using these—

• Program code stays in Google AppScript. I pay 0$ since Google AppsScript is free.

• The HN feed is pulled from the mirror here - https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json

• To scrape and convert a URL content into readable markdown, I created a helper API in my personal VM using https://github.com/mixmark-io/turndown

• To curate posts for my writing style, I picked a few posts from my personal blog - siddg.com

• To create a summary in my writing style, I used Gemini. 2.0 Flash worked well. It’s fairly cheap as well.

• And I had an API to create a blog post on my personal writing app. Which I used to publish the long-form personalized HN feed.

• Lastly, I have a reminders bot, that uses Gemini internally and helps me stay on top of reminders - https://www.btw.so/a1

• I added a new reminder to message me with the published link to nudge me twice a day

The result is this one link-- here.

Twice a day, a post gets curated with my vocabulary. I then shortlist a few posts that intrigue me and go to HN to engage further. It’s been working well. I read so far all the posts that were created over the past 4 weeks. I usually tend to open 3-4 links per feed to go down the rabbit hole. You can bookmark the link and read along, if you find it useful.

For the curious, here’s the full AppScript code (sans the API keys and API urls) — here.