WhatHappened
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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!
HN · launched Dec 8, 2025 · 66 upvotes (top 15%) · 0 views
Niche: news aggregation platforms · 244 launches, 12 in the last 7 days ▼ -54% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Analytics & BI
- B2C
- AI feature
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 244 launches in news aggregation platforms →
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 : 136 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #29 of 137 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 39 days after the earliest competitor.
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- HN Companion · hn · 2026-02-10 · 31 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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