Ask HN: What would you want from a website dedicated to release notes?

4 points by bradgessler 3y ago ↗ HN

I'm thinking about building a website that scrapes release notes from sources like https://community.ui.com/releases, https://github.com/rack/rack/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md, https://developer.android.com/about/versions/13/release-notes etc, and cleans them up & formats into the same format so they can be searched a lot easier.

It seems like the best place to start would be for folks who read HN since we refer to these quite a bit day-to-day to figure out what changes in software, apps, etc. Let's open this up with a few questions:

1. Would you find a service like this useful? Why or why not?

2. What release notes would you want to have formatted into the same thing and why?

3. What features or capabilities would you like to see a service like this do? e.g. would you like to select multiple "products/apps/whatever" and see their release notes in one timeline? Side-by-side? etc. etc. etc.

3 comments

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CrypticShift 3y ago ↗

1. In theory Yes, cause too many updates, too little time. In practice, this will turn into Yet another source of information to visit, so it better be good.

3. Because LLMs/Vector-search are getting “good enough” with Text, I think there is a potential here to bypass all the traditional feed-like UI, and go straight for the "give me a summary of the top updates since last time for all js libs on my list" kind of simple NLP search UI

bradgessler 3y ago ↗

What specific sources of changes would want to see? I’m assuming JS packages… anything else?

I guess the more popular the soft, the more useful for most people it will be. But because you will never be able to cover everything (the long tail), you could do a system to add particuler release notes pages on the spot. The first obvious candidate in a user starred GitHub repositories.