HN is all about the rich discussions. We wanted to take the HN experience one step further - to bring the familiar keyboard-first navigation, find interesting viewpoints in the threads and get a gist of long threads so that we can decide which rabbit holes to explore. So we built HN Companion a year ago, and have been refining it ever since.

Try it: https://app.hncompanion.com or available as an extension for Firefox / Chrome: [0].

Most AI summarization strips the voices from conversations by flattening threads into a wall of text. This kills the joy of reading HN discussions. Instead, HN Companion works differently - it understands the thread hierarchy, the voting patterns and contrasting viewpoints - everything that makes HN interesting. Think of it like clustering related discussions across multiple hierarchies into a group and surfacing the comments that represent each cluster. It keeps the verbatim text with backlinks so that you never lose context and can continue the conversation from that point. Here is how the summarization works under the hood [1].

We first built this as an open source browser extension. But soon we learned that people hesitate to install it. So we built the same experience as a web app with all the features. This helped people see how it works, and use it on mobile too (in the browser or as PWA). This is now a playground to try new features before taking them to the browser extension.

We did a Show HN a year ago [2] and we have added these features based on user feedback:

* cached summaries - summaries are generated and cached on our servers. This improved the speed significantly. You still have the option to use your own API key or use local models through Ollama.

* our system prompt is available in the Settings page of the extension. You can customize it as you wish.

* sort the posts in the feed pages (/home, /show etc.) based on points, comments, time or the default sorting order.

* We tried fine tuning an open weights model to summarize, but learned that with a good system prompt and user prompt, the frontier models deliver results of similar quality. So we didn’t use the fine-tuned model, but you can run them locally.

The browser extension does not track any usage or analytics. The code is open source[3].

We want to continue to improve HN Companion, specifically add features like following an author, notes about an author, draft posts etc.

See it in action for a post here https://app.hncompanion.com/item?id=46937696

We would love to get your feedback on what would make this more useful for your HN reading.

[0] https://hncompanion.com/#download

[1] https://hncompanion.com/how-it-works

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42532374

[3] https://github.com/hncompanion/browser-extension

Show HN: HN Companion – web app that enhances the experience of reading HN