HN Explorer

Show HN: WhatHappened – HN summaries, heatmaps, and contrarian picks (whathappened.tech)

66 points by marsw42 ↗ HN
Hi HN,

I built WhatHappened (whathappened.tech) because I have a love/hate relationship with this site. I love the content, but the "wall of text" UI gives me FOMO. I was spending too much time clicking into vague titles ("Project X") or wading through flame wars just to find technical insights.

I built this tool to act as a filter. It generates a card for the top daily posts with a few specific features to cut the noise:

1. AI Summaries: It generates a technical TL;DR (3 bullet points) and an ELI5 version for every post.

2. The Heat Meter: I analyze the comment section to visualize the distribution: Constructive vs. Technical vs. Flame War. If a thread is 90% Flame War, I know to skip it (or grab popcorn).

3. Contrarian Detection: To break the echo chamber, the AI specifically hunts for the most upvoted disagreement or critique in the comments and pins it to the card.

4. Mobile-First PWA: I mostly read HN on my phone, so I designed this as a PWA. It supports swipe gestures and installs to the home screen without an app store.

Stack: Next.js, Gemini, Supabase.

It currently supports English and Chinese. Any feedback will be appreciated! My original X post: https://x.com/marsw42/status/1997087957556318663, please share if you like it or find it helpful! :D

Thanks!

27 comments

[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 55.3 ms ] thread
MrCoffee7
It seems like each article takes a lot of vertical space. What if you changed the UI so you just displayed a title for each article with a little icon next to it like a downward arrow that you could click on if you wanted to see more of that article? That way, you could display more titles on one screen so that the user could more quickly scroll to the articles they actually wanted to see?
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9vigugfgg
The arrows in the circles floating fixed at the bottom expand and collapse as you want.
marsw42
Yes there is a collapse all button on the bottom right. On desktop view you can also try the table/card view switch button next to the "sort by" button for denser information.
hyperjeff
Nice. It’d be cool if you could tap on the subject tags to filter for the latest posts with that tag.
marsw42
Just added the feature!
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mvkel
Really nice experience on mobile. I didn't think I'd like the "contrarian take" section, but it's actually useful to see what the main counterpoint is on a post, and how seriously others are taking it
jcoughenour
The timestamp under each title seems to be the timestamp of when it was summarized and not when it was actually posted on HN. As a reader, I would prefer to see when it was posted. You already have a "updated x hours ago" at the top of the page so there is no reason to just repeat that updated timestamp on all the cards.
marsw42
Oof that was a bug, just fixed! Clear your localstorage to refetch the data and the time shall be correct now.
prodigycorp
The number of new (less than one hour old) accounts with garbled names in this thread is odd, to say the least.
marsw42
I've been a long time HN reader but never created account since I never posted. I built the site to solve my own problems and just thought it was cool to share it with the community that I enjoyed :D
kenreidwilson
Any chance this can go open source? I'd love to contribute and self host.
marsw42
Working on it! Polishing the code and will fix some final bugs and I might make a different post to share the code so it's easier to host :D
winchester6788
Ooh, love the UX, the heat meter and contrarian detection are very nice ideas.

I recently released https://trackernews.app/browse which surfaces out and groups content from hn, reddit .. for user defined topics and extracts user defined structured data along with summaries.

a tangential take on similar problem with focus on grouping posts by topics.

would love to get any feedback on the UX/ understandability of the interface

marsw42
trackernews is awesome! To me the content of the tables are more or less confusing though. When I built my site I was just trying to focus on the mobile experience so it feels more like an app.
browningstreet
I have a Gemini gem for HN where I share a thread and it pulls out insightful comments, interesting links, and avoids that flame war stuff entirely. It's less compact than this format but has more actionable takeaways for me. Tips, tricks, insights, and links is what I want from a lot of these conversations. And there are some specific HN-isms that I've coded into the gem to restrict from the report.
marsw42
I agree! Gemini gem is great for deep dives. My site was just for me to have some feed to read whenever I'm on my phone, data is also cached so I can read on my commute where there's no consistent internet access.
renewiltord
Cool stuff. You have tags but no filtering on tags sadly. I think that would be the most valuable.
Tempest1981
Very nice. Most posts are classified as "Non-technical post" these days.

Was hoping for a way to filter on "technical", for when I need my dose of hacking and technology. (Filter on category could also help, but I assume there are many technical categories.)

And maybe reverse sort, for when I'm tired of controversy.

ugh123
I really like this. Although I see a lot of posts leading with "Non-technical post" which seems misapplied in a lot of cases and otherwise too much of a generalization for a technical audience to glean anything useful from.
nextstep
Israel used Palantir technologies in pager…

“ Contrarian View(highly upvoted) Many argued the attack was a highly targeted, lawful military operation against Hezbollah's command, achieving military goals with remarkably low civilian harm compared to conventional warfare.”

What a sad world we live in. This site really is a cesspool of American fascism, and the community is not doing enough to take a stance against that

rcarmo
Very nice indeed. I recently went through a similar process and built an RSS feed summarizer, but didn’t bother with comments because… well… it could go either way in terms of productivity and token usage (I prefer to grab the original article and summarize it when feasible).

But I really like the output.

marsw42
Thanks! Yeah I'm still trying to figure out ways to save tokens, but given the job only runs 3 times a day it's still kinda manageable :P
jimmySixDOF
How is this determining a comment is "Highly Upvoted" on HN where that is explicitly kept out of the ui/ux and new comments are a/b tested across users etc... it's not a thing you can know. I have had comments with a big number of descendents but very low upvotes so thats not a reliable indicator either. Genuinely curious.
marsw42
Here is the prompt I used!

* contrarian_view: * Look for the most upvoted comment that DISAGREES with the article's premise or the majority sentiment * This is the "steelman" of the opposing view - the most compelling counter-argument * If no significant contrarian view exists, set has_contrarian to false * Focus on constructive disagreement, not flame wars