Hacker News Daily Digest

Fetch top Hacker News stories and get AI-written summaries of each article and its comment thread. Outputs a clean daily briefing as markdown or HTML. Schedule it to email you every morning.

What it does

Pulls the top N stories from Hacker News via the public Firebase API, fetches the linked article text, reads the top comments, and sends everything to Claude AI for a concise 2-3 sentence summary. The result is a clean daily briefing - one summary per story - saved as markdown or HTML.

You can schedule it with cron or Windows Task Scheduler to run every morning and email you the digest automatically.

Features

• Fetches top N stories from HN (default: 10)
• Summarizes article text + top comment threads
• Generates an overall TL;DR of the day's themes
• Outputs markdown or styled HTML
• Optional email delivery via Gmail SMTP
• No HN API key required

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/Get-Ai-Tools/hacker-news-digest
cd hacker-news-digest
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Basic markdown digest (top 10 stories)
python digest.py --api-key sk-ant-...

# HTML output, 20 stories
python digest.py --api-key sk-ant-... --stories 20 --output html

# Email the digest to yourself
python digest.py --api-key sk-ant-... --output html \
  --email you@gmail.com --smtp-user you@gmail.com --smtp-pass app-password

Schedule it (daily email)

On Linux/Mac, add to crontab (crontab -e):

0 7 * * * cd /path/to/hacker-news-digest && python digest.py --api-key sk-ant-... --email you@gmail.com --smtp-user you@gmail.com --smtp-pass app-password

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• requests, anthropic (auto-installed)
• Claude API key - get one free at console.anthropic.com