WRITING / NOTE
An Early Newshacker.me Experiment: Pushing Hacker News Digests to Telegram
An early experiment using the o3-mini API to summarize Hacker News discussions and push the results through a Telegram Channel.
I have always felt that Hacker News, launched by YC eighteen years ago, is still one of the few places on the internet that has not been completely washed over by traffic incentives.
Here, “hacker” does not mean the literal Chinese sense of a black-hat attacker. It is closer to a technical builder, a tinkerer, or someone who is drawn to systems and problems. Hacker News has sometimes described its scope as anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity.
At the simplest product level, Hacker News is just a place where people submit external links and discuss them. That is it. The site has also kept its decade-old look: plain, practical, and stubbornly utilitarian.
Its users tend to be naturally skeptical of closed source software, large technology companies, and crypto. Watching them complain can be entertaining in itself. These days, perhaps a third of the front-page conversation is related to AI, and following those discussions is useful.
To keep track of the latest Hacker News hotspots and quickly understand the main arguments in the comment threads, I built an automated workflow with the o3-mini API and pushed the output into a Telegram Channel:
This channel is not really a product yet. I also have not tested it over a long enough period, so there may still be bugs. I will try to maintain it and gradually add new features.
In early testing, the OpenAI API cost was roughly one to two dollars per day. For this month, OpenAI is offsetting part of the cost in exchange for contributed data, so for now it is effectively sponsored by OpenAI.
From the examples I have seen, o3-mini is clearly weaker than o1 in world knowledge, so some translations can be awkward. But it is cheap, and overall the quality is good enough for this use case.
If you do not mind a few bugs, you can subscribe to the Telegram Channel here:
This also became one of the natural starting points for what later continued as Newshacker.me: connecting high-signal information sources, AI summaries, and subscribable streams so I can understand more quickly what technical communities are talking about.
Originally published on X.