Show HN: I built a tech news aggregator that works the way my brain does
65 comments
·October 23, 2025nathanwallace
A similar site I've enjoyed for >15 years (!!) is https://techmeme.com/
I also use it's sister aggregator site for political news every day - https://www.memeorandum.com/
dreadsword
Yes - Techmeme is definitely the archetype and a great product, and I have spent lots of time there over the years as well!
taftster
I'm not sure, something about the "Recent Stories Summary" section (first view) is hard to read. The spacing is wrong. And the blue font. Someone mentioned Garamond too.
It's creating a "wall of text" effect to me and I'm not able to quickly skim and allow my eye to catch the bits that are interesting to me.
As a comparison, the HN homepage is very accessible to me for skimming and finding things to click into (like this entry).
UI is often quite subjective, understood. But I can't really "scan" the first view fast enough. It's all blending together and causes extra processing on my mind.
dreadsword
I hear you - there's something to be done there. My initial thought was to stay as close to convention as I could (links are blue!), but as the RECENT list gets long, its definitely gets less scannable.
Thank you for the feedback!
taftster
I hear you about "links are blue" ... except when you are a link aggregator.
The links are blue design from early HTML was meant to highlight links in the context of a paragraph of prose, not a list of link items. "Blue" means something special about the text in the context of the text around it.
In this case, the blue font is distracting because the links are the content. You don't need the blue to help your links "stand out". Because the links are normal text, using a normal palette would be appropriate.
I don't mind some subtle clues that these are links. Underlines, slight grey text. Or even a subtle hover effect. Two cents.
dreadsword
How about now? Story titles are still clickable links, but are black. Made the story count a link as well, and kept it blue as a visual cue.
felideon
Some additional feedback:
There's no reason for both the story count and the story summary to be clickable. It's confusing because:
(a) It's not clear what the number in parentheses even means (until you click and infer)
(b) Separate links makes you think they lead to different pages
Also, echoing another comment, it's not really clear what "incoming" and "outgoing" stories mean. Maybe "new" vs. "stale"?
taftster
Better, to be honest. Keep refining of course. But this is definitely more readable.
I admit that straight black is not quite the right answer either. A slightly toned down dark grey would be nice. And again, subjectively, I like how HN has a row of non-link smaller (lighter shaded) text under each listing, which I think plays nice for the white space between each item.
bcrl
Personally, I far prefer black over grey. Grey is really hard to read across a variety of lighting conditions and devices. The older you get, the more important contrast becomes.
MiiMe19
This is exactly the stuff that I think LLMs are best at. We have created the world's coolest string manipulator and this is exactly the kind of things I think LLMs are best suited for. Awesome job!
dreadsword
Cheers and thanks for the kind words! And yes - LLMs (at least o3-mini) do a great job as my editorial team - the site is 100% automated.
NetOpWibby
I love that your site comes with an overview instead of clicking away to another site immediately. Feels snappy and looks good. I can see this being my news roundup. Great work!
dreadsword
Cheers and thank-you!
lateforwork
Love it, but the body font (garamond) is not easy on the eyes. Garamond is one of my favorite fonts in print and at not-too-small sizes. On the screen it doesn't look good because where the characters get thin it gets too thin (or as font experts call it, too much contrast).
dreadsword
Noted, thank you! I haven't put a tonne into readability, other than some basics - I prefer a serif'd font, and I made sure the background was easier on the eyes than #FFFFFF haha
amatecha
This is probably a dumb question, but.. what does "incoming" and "outgoing" mean?
dreadsword
Oh man, don't ask - not a dumb question at all. I'll reshare what I put in another comment that answers it, but bottom line is they're a design gap in the context of /recent.
You're right --- incoming & outgoing end up being redundant on the "Recent" view. Where they're (more) relevant is in the "Top" view where the LLM editor has picked a subset of stories to be categorized as top and incoming/outgoing are the ones that didn't make the cut, organized by timeliness.
Definitely a gap in design!
amatecha
Oh, sure, but I literally just don't understand what their meaning is >_>
thekevan
I assumed it meant stories that trended highly and were now fading in popularity (outgoing) and stories that are trending but trending quickly and may be on a fast ascent.
Sort of a combo of "in case you missed it" and "the next new big stories".
null
al_borland
I like it. It kind of reminds me of the old Fever RSS reader, which would group together similar articles from different sources, and use that to rank how hot a story was.
dreadsword
Not familiar with fever, but there is something similar buried at the heart of mine - the LLM clusters stories, and they get promoted to public when they reach a threshold of unique sources.
That threshold is a function of day of the week - on weekends when the news cycle is quiet, it lowers the bar --- tuesday to thursday its at its most restrictive.
fuddle
Cool site, an About page would be useful. It's hard to tell how the site works.
dreadsword
Fair enough - its honestly not something I expected anyone to be interested in enough such that an about page would be required.
At a high level, it reads RSS feeds from a number of sources, and uses LLMs to identify clusters of stories about the same thing, group them, tag them, and designate them a "top" story or not. That's it.
The biggest thing I've learned in all of this is that o3-mini is far and away the best at following instructions (for this use case). Periodically I'll cycle through the models available on Groq, and always come back to o3-mini.
jhack
I'm REALLY liking this, way more than I thought I would. Great job! What's your stack if you don't mind my asking?
dreadsword
Awesome - glad you're enjoying it and thank you for the kind words!
My "Stack" ---- LAMP + o3-mini for editorial tasks + Bootstrap for responsive front end. That is to say: Its old school, and painfully functional. But, light & fast.
jflskajfsd
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sweenzor
Very cool. Having an immutable record "time machine" you can use to re-find something you remember reading is very humane. I'd love to see this for world news, politics, etc.
dreadsword
Ah cool! it is built to be extensible, and I'll give you a preview of another vertical here: https://northfeed.ca/
And - did you actually see the time machine at the bottom of the right hand column? Or - was that just a wish list item of yours?
_menelaus
This is pretty cool man. How do you cluster the articles into stories? It looks like you did a good job of it.
dreadsword
Thanks so much for the kind words - its 100% o3-mini for clustering. I have zero editorial input as to what constitutes a cluster, what's "top" news, etc.
The one subtlety is setting up the LLM to understand whether a new story belongs in an existing cluster, or with > 1 neighbors, constitutes a new cluster. The challenge there is scoping the clustering window (hours of stories for consideration) and topic breadth to avoid creating Katamari-super-clusters that just end up with every story associated to them.
At this point I seem to have found a sweet spot re: the hours window, the frequency of processing, and the design of the prompt such that its working consistently.
Very few false positives in terms of spurious clusters being created, or potential clusters being missed.
An honest to god, non-algorithmic reverse chrono list of tech news that passes my signal-to-noise tests, updated hourly.
A lightweight a page design as I've been able to keep; simple, clean, fast. No commercial features or aspirations - this is a passion project, something I've been fooling around with on and off for decades.
There's a "Top" view too with an LLM edited front page & summary, and categorized views for a large number of topics - see the Directory. A few more buried features to explore, but the fundamental use case is pop in, scan, exit - fast and concise.
Your feedback would be appreciated!