WhatHappened
HN summaries, heatmaps, and contrarian picks
Details
- External ID
- 46196796
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- WhatHappened
- Website domain
- whathappened.tech
- Launched
- Dec. 8, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 66
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8473282442748091
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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! :DThanks!
Enrichment
- Theme
- Hacker News clients, datasets, and tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Content generation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- hacker news summaries and analysis
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a wrapper application that ingests the public Hacker News Firebase/Algolia API, uses an LLM API to summarize threads and extract sentiment, and displays the results in a Next.js interface.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: trackernews (HN content tables), RSS feed summarizers, Palantir technologies
Concerns raised: Cannot reliably determine highly upvoted comments on HN (votes not shown in UI), Token usage/cost from running jobs, Unclear business model or monetization intent, Too many posts classified as Non-technical, Content table presentation confusing on some views
Feature requests: Filter/search by tags and categories, Reverse sort option for posts, Filter for technical posts specifically, Desktop table/card view improvements, Easier self-hosting code release
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 89 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #20 of 90 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 32 days after the earliest competitor.
- Was tired of drowning in HN comments, so I built an AI Chief of Staff · hn · 2026-01-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Turning 100-plus comments HN threads into readable discussions · hn · 2026-01-02 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Credible brings credibility scores directly on Hacker News · hn · 2025-12-19 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- I built an interactive HN Simulator · hn · 2025-11-24 · 538 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- HN Insights · hn · 2025-11-22 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- HN Companion · hn · 2026-02-10 · 31 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- I built a tool that helps predict HN front page success · hn · 2026-05-03 · 26 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Doomscrolling Research Papers · hn · 2025-12-02 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.