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Hacker News Digest is an OpenHome community ability that turns Y Combinator’s Hacker News into a hands-free voice briefing. Trigger it to hear a digest of the current front page, say a number to drill into any story, or search any tech topic — all without touching your screen. Titles, points, and comment counts come straight from the Algolia Hacker News API, so the digest reflects live data with no hallucinated stories.

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What It Does

  • Fetches live front-page stories from the Algolia Hacker News API and delivers them as a concise spoken digest
  • Drills into any story on request for a fuller breakdown
  • Searches Hacker News for any topic by name
  • Pages through the front page for more stories
  • Uses the LLM only for narration — titles, points, and comment counts come directly from the API

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Voice Commands

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Example Conversation

User: What’s on Hacker News? AI: A new memory allocator for Rust is getting attention — it cuts allocation overhead by forty percent in benchmarks, and the thread is full of performance engineers comparing notes. Up next, PostgreSQL 17 shipped… AI: Want me to explain one of those? Say a number, name a topic, or say stop. User: Two. AI: PostgreSQL 17’s headline feature is a revamped vacuum process… User: Search for WebAssembly. AI: Five stories on WebAssembly right now — the top one covers the new WASI 0.2 spec that just hit stable… User: Stop. AI: Later. Stay curious.

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How It Works

  • Low-latency startup — the API fetch and the spoken intro run concurrently, so the stories are ready by the time the intro finishes.
  • Background prefetch — once the digest is spoken, all five story expansions are pre-generated in the background, so asking for a story by number is usually instant.
  • Intent classification — each response is routed through an LLM classifier (EXPAND, SEARCH, MORE, EXIT, CONVERSE, UNKNOWN); bare numbers bypass the LLM via fast-path detection.
  • Pagination — “more” fetches the next Algolia page, so stories never repeat across batches.

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Trigger Phrases

  • Hacker News
  • HN digest
  • what's on Hacker News
  • tech digest
  • HN today

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Setup

No API key required — the ability uses the free, public Algolia Hacker News Search API, which needs no sign-up or token. It requires Python 3.10+, the httpx package, and an OpenHome Agent with an LLM configured (used for narration and intent classification).

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APIs Used

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Developer Credit

Developed by Kuber Mehta.

View on GitHub

Source code for the Hacker News Digest community ability.