We all love the rich discussions in HN, but navigating long posts with multiple threads can sometimes be challenging. You get lost in the depth and breadth of the discussion. There are a few AI-based summarization tools, but they typically focus on summarizing the article rather than the comments, and thus miss the essence of threaded discussions.
So, we built Hacker News Companion, a browser extension that makes it easy to navigate discussions and understand diverse viewpoints using AI tools of your choice. The goal is simple - make the comments the true hero in HN.
AI summaries for discussions - Summarize any thread or full post - See the key points, takeaways and notable quotes in summary panel - Jump to specific threads from the summary with auto-generated backlinks - allowing you to re-engage in the discussion - Bring your own AI models - local or cloud-based: —- Local: Ollama with any local model (privacy-focused, runs locally) —- Cloud: OpenAI/Claude - use your API key —- Browser: Chrome's built-in AI powered by Gemini Nano
Vim-inspired keyboard navigation: - Home row keys to move through posts and comments (home pages and comments page) - j/k for next/previous, h/l for parent/child comments - o to open posts, c for comments - ? or / for all shortcuts, s to toggle the summary panel - Navigate author comments: use [ and ] keys or arrow buttons next to username - Hover usernames to see karma and profile info
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPRh7UKYd8E
You can try it immediately by installing from Chrome Web Store https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-compani...
No signup needed. The extension preserves privacy (no analytics/tracking) and the code is open source - https://github.com/levelup-apps/hn-enhancer
Technical details - our learnings about summarizing threaded discussions and comparing the performance of various models are detailed in the project wiki [0].
Related HN discussions on this topic - A recent Show HN post on 'Bring-your-own-key browser extension for summarizing HN posts with LLMs' [1].
Try it out and let us know how it works for you. Would love your feedback and contributions!
[0] https://github.com/levelup-apps/hn-enhancer/wiki/HN-Companio... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42401227
