5 ms·

Show HN: HN top 30 summarized by Gemini 2.5 Pro

6 points by mbm 1y ago

Fun little project, had Gemini 2.5 Pro summarize HN's top 30 each hour, both the stories and comment sections. Pretty impressed with Gemini 2.5. It's probably the first model other than Claude 3.7 Sonnet where I actually find the output readable. I normally use 3.7 Sonnet for coding, but used Gemini for the codegen on this one as well. Was pretty impressed! Using Cursor, it seemed to instruction-follow better than Claude generally does, and remain lucid during very long agent sessions. Thanks for your feedback!

mbm 1y ago
Tech stack: - Rails 8 - Embedded React frontend w/ Tailwind - Sidekiq for cron jobs - Perplexity API for story info extraction via URL - Gemini 2.5 Pro for classifying story extraction results as valid/invalid - Gemini 2.5 Pro for summarizing stories and HN comment threads (tried Claude but preferred the personality of Gemini surprisingly) - Cursor with Gemini 2.5 Pro + Claude 3.7 Sonnet for codegen
- mdp2021 1y ago
  Could you indulge a bit in describing the workflow? For example, the "story info extraction" and its "results evaluation" deserve some more in depth explanation. How do you have the LLM summarize the article and the HN submission page: do you put the whole text in the input (as in: "Summarize the following text: <page text here>")?
  - mbm 1y ago
    Sure thing. For the story summary: send a prompt to the Perplexity API (which can access URLs) requesting an extraction of the article's content (a sort of very detailed technical brief). Then, use Gemini to classify the results from the Perplexity API as valid or invalid (sometimes, Perplexity isn't able to access the URL but it doesn't reliably return the string I've requested it to return when it isn't). After that, send a more detailed prompt to Gemini requesting the story summary be generated with a specific style and format (Markdown). For the comments summary: use the HN API to pull all comments, then prepare a Markdown document with a selected subset of comments (based on user karma, replies, and thread depth) if exceeding a given number of comments, otherwise all comments. Annotate comments with an index (eg, 1.1) to indicate the nesting to the LLM. Along with some formatting and stylistic guidance, send that to the LLM requesting summarization. While the story summaries are generally static once generated, regenerate the comment summaries on an interval (this could be optimized). Hopefully that helps a little!
    - mdp2021 1y ago
      I hope the final summary is created by Gemini by having it process the original text, instead of an intermediate from Perplexity...
mdp2021 1y ago
Instead of the 'Show more' button, use a link so that one can open the full summary in a new page.
mdp2021 1y ago
Notable HN comments page summary excerpt: > [The] announcement ... stirred up the usual HN mix of excitement, skepticism, and security paranoia
- mbm 1y ago
  Paranoia does seem a tad strong, doesn't it?
  - mdp2021 1y ago
    Well we are used to the "best possible interpretation" rule: it will be taken as tongue-in-cheek, jocular rhetoric. "Ah, the concerns of the involved... Bakers and their care towards flour"
apineda 1y ago
Cool, but needs a TLDR a top each entry, tiny paragraph.
- mbm 1y ago
  Agreed. Great suggestion!
- mbm 1y ago
  Added!
mdp2021 1y ago
Request: you should also have a feature, "provide a Tinysums page for the input submission" (e.g. "news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43862810").
mdp2021 1y ago
There's probably a bit too much JS for such a site. Is the "challenge" necessary? It will limit the amount of browsers the site will work on. -- But I would implement a "if landscape, then present list of titles on a left pane, with <a href='#pos'> page positional links to the right pane article stubs" (no JS needed).
- mbm 1y ago
  Hey mdp, open-sourced it this morning: https://github.com/mzxrai/tinysums https://github.com/mzxrai/tinysums This was a fun little project, but unfortunately can't spend too much time on it. It's also quite expensive to run -- around $15 per day in Gemini summaries (I'm sure 2.5 Flash would be much cheaper, but unsure about the quality)!
  - mdp2021 1y ago
    Thank you! I had checked your GitHub pages... ;) I think it was a good idea and implementation; there will be ways to perfect it. And it will be useful as learning material for other applications.
    - mbm 1y ago
      Indeed, it’s been a fun little project! Just pushed out a new version with 2.5 Flash and tl;dr’s.

6 points by mbm 1y ago

mbm 1y ago

Tech stack: - Rails 8 - Embedded React frontend w/ Tailwind - Sidekiq for cron jobs - Perplexity API for story info extraction via URL - Gemini 2.5 Pro for classifying story extraction results as valid/invalid - Gemini 2.5 Pro for summarizing stories and HN comment threads (tried Claude but preferred the personality of Gemini surprisingly) - Cursor with Gemini 2.5 Pro + Claude 3.7 Sonnet for codegen

mdp2021 1y ago
Could you indulge a bit in describing the workflow? For example, the "story info extraction" and its "results evaluation" deserve some more in depth explanation. How do you have the LLM summarize the article and the HN submission page: do you put the whole text in the input (as in: "Summarize the following text: <page text here>")?
- mbm 1y ago
  Sure thing. For the story summary: send a prompt to the Perplexity API (which can access URLs) requesting an extraction of the article's content (a sort of very detailed technical brief). Then, use Gemini to classify the results from the Perplexity API as valid or invalid (sometimes, Perplexity isn't able to access the URL but it doesn't reliably return the string I've requested it to return when it isn't). After that, send a more detailed prompt to Gemini requesting the story summary be generated with a specific style and format (Markdown). For the comments summary: use the HN API to pull all comments, then prepare a Markdown document with a selected subset of comments (based on user karma, replies, and thread depth) if exceeding a given number of comments, otherwise all comments. Annotate comments with an index (eg, 1.1) to indicate the nesting to the LLM. Along with some formatting and stylistic guidance, send that to the LLM requesting summarization. While the story summaries are generally static once generated, regenerate the comment summaries on an interval (this could be optimized). Hopefully that helps a little!
  - mdp2021 1y ago
    I hope the final summary is created by Gemini by having it process the original text, instead of an intermediate from Perplexity...

mdp2021 1y ago

Instead of the 'Show more' button, use a link so that one can open the full summary in a new page.

mdp2021 1y ago

Notable HN comments page summary excerpt: > [The] announcement ... stirred up the usual HN mix of excitement, skepticism, and security paranoia

mbm 1y ago
Paranoia does seem a tad strong, doesn't it?
- mdp2021 1y ago
  Well we are used to the "best possible interpretation" rule: it will be taken as tongue-in-cheek, jocular rhetoric. "Ah, the concerns of the involved... Bakers and their care towards flour"

apineda 1y ago

Cool, but needs a TLDR a top each entry, tiny paragraph.

mbm 1y ago
Agreed. Great suggestion!
mbm 1y ago
Added!

mdp2021 1y ago

Request: you should also have a feature, "provide a Tinysums page for the input submission" (e.g. "news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43862810").

mdp2021 1y ago

There's probably a bit too much JS for such a site. Is the "challenge" necessary? It will limit the amount of browsers the site will work on. -- But I would implement a "if landscape, then present list of titles on a left pane, with <a href='#pos'> page positional links to the right pane article stubs" (no JS needed).

mbm 1y ago
Hey mdp, open-sourced it this morning: https://github.com/mzxrai/tinysums https://github.com/mzxrai/tinysums This was a fun little project, but unfortunately can't spend too much time on it. It's also quite expensive to run -- around $15 per day in Gemini summaries (I'm sure 2.5 Flash would be much cheaper, but unsure about the quality)!
- mdp2021 1y ago
  Thank you! I had checked your GitHub pages... ;) I think it was a good idea and implementation; there will be ways to perfect it. And it will be useful as learning material for other applications.
  - mbm 1y ago
    Indeed, it’s been a fun little project! Just pushed out a new version with 2.5 Flash and tl;dr’s.