Hacker News has always been my go-to for interesting tech finds and community discussions. I used to spend about half an hour scrolling through it every single day.
Over the Spring Festival break, DeepSeek was everywhere, so I tried wiring up a Cloudflare Workflow to generate daily recaps. But the outputs were too brief and the API kept timing out. Then I tested GPT-4-class models, and the results still didn’t feel right, so I put the project on ice for a bit.
When Gemini 2.0 dropped, I gave it another shot. The generated write-ups were noticeably better. So I threw together a web UI and hooked up an RSS feed. Now I can catch up on Hacker News on my commute using any generic podcast app.
- Live Demo: https://hacker-news.agi.li
- RSS Feed: https://hacker-news.agi.li/rss.xml
- GitHub: https://github.com/miantiao-me/hacker-news
Features
- Scrapes top Hacker News posts automatically each day
- Uses AI to summarize both the articles and top comment threads
- Generates speech audio with Edge TTS
- Works in the browser and in standard podcast players
- Runs on a daily cron with zero manual upkeep
- Includes both brief summaries and the full spoken script
Tech Stack
- Next.js: Web app framework
- Cloudflare Workers: Runtime and hosting
- Edge TTS: Voice synthesis
- OpenAI-compatible API: Text generation (Gemini 2.0)
- Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui: Frontend styling
How It Works
- Daily Fetch: Grabs the top-voted Hacker News posts each morning.
- AI Summarization: Gemini 2.0 translates and condenses key insights and discussion highlights into a spoken script.
- Audio Generation: Edge TTS converts the script into an audio file.
- Storage: Content and audio assets are saved to Cloudflare R2 and KV.
- Distribution: Serves the episodes over an RSS feed and a web player.
Future Plans
Right now it uses Edge TTS with a single female voice. Ideally, a two-host conversational format (alternating male and female voices) would sound much more engaging. Doubao’s TTS voices sound fantastic, but they require a paid subscription. When I get more free time, I will look into improving the audio side.
Recommendation: Cloudflare Workflows
Finally, a quick shout-out to Cloudflare Workflows. It is an awesome, cost-effective platform for running background workflows.
