nowfound

Life & fun · May 15, 2011

MF

my first app turns Twitter into a news aggregator

Hey everyone, Common advice for inexperienced hackers suggests "scratching an itch." Like many others here, I spent too much time on HN, Google Reader and Twitter searching for interesting stuff, so I decided to write an app that brings interesting links to you with no other distractions. HighFive uses Twitter and bit.ly's APIs to find interesting links in your timeline. When you log in, you'll see a group of five links with voting arrows. No HN comments or RSS feeds with hundreds of links--just a few interesting articles that you can read, then get back to work. HighFive was built using…

my first app turns Twitter into a news aggregator launched on May 15, 2011 with 14 votes, #46 of 217 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was not reachable when checked in September 2026.

Visit acompa.net ↗Alternativestop 21% of May 2011

In plain words

HighFive is a news aggregator that curates interesting links from a user's Twitter timeline using Twitter and bit.ly APIs. Designed for people overwhelmed by information overload, it presents just five articles at a time with voting arrows, eliminating distracting comments and feeds. Built with Python and Django, the app targets users who want quality content recommendations without the noise of traditional news aggregators or social media feeds.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hey everyone, Common advice for inexperienced hackers suggests "scratching an itch." Like many others here, I spent too much time on HN, Google Reader and Twitter searching for interesting stuff, so I decided to write an app that brings interesting links to you with no other distractions. HighFive uses Twitter and…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • Hypefury2021 · hypefury.com · ▲577

    Twitter tool for content creation & audience building

  • HA
    HackYourNews – AI summaries of the top HN stories2023 · hackyournews.com · ▲335

    Hey there HN! I wanted to share a pet project of mine. I built HackYourNews [1] to scratch a personal itch: Knowing which stories to focus on while browsing aimlessly (though there is a certain joy in that, as well!) HackYourNews uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to summarize the destination article as well as the comments section. Summarization of the article is always cached, while summaries of the comments are regenerated if the comments count is >10% (or >10 comments) different. While I styled the homepage to welcome HNers, my preferred view is the Mobile view, accessed from the navbar. This…

  • TL;DR2025 · tl-dr.tv · ▲199

    I love Hacker News but I rarely have time to read full articles / comments, so I built a simple site to summarize the top posts & comments to make it easier to get a big picture. A few implementation details: - It pulls the top stories from the HN Firebase API (`/v0/topstories`) - Filters stories with >200 points - Uses Claude Sonnet for post + comment summaries - Tries to capture the sentiment of the comments (still working on improving this) - Refreshes both posts + summaries hourly It has already helped me I hope it helps you! Please let me know if you have any feedback --…

  • TA
    Telescope, a news reader app2017 · ▲90

    I got fed up with the news reader apps out there so I decided to make my own. Its a simple concept where it tracks all your favorite news sources for new posts and the social shares it received. Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes. It's not meant to be alternative to HN, just a focused way to track your favorite sources. Please try it out and let me know what do you think, http://telescope.surf/ Note: you can do 'Add to Homescreen' on mobile to make it as an app. Please leave a feedback or any feature wishlist you may have. Thanks!

  • My recommendation engine for Hacker News2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · ▲314

    Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…

  • hcker.news – an ergonomic, timeline-based Hacker News front page2025 · hcker.news · ▲180

    Hi folks, I've built an alternative Hacker News front page. It is inspired by and meant to be a replacement for hckrnews.com. I built this because HN is woefully underfeatured, but most sites that try to improve it seem to assume that the visual design is the problem. hcker.news tries to maintain HN's familiarity while adding useful enhancements. There are three primary views: - Timeline View: Browse top stories by votes or comments grouped by day, week, or month (e.g., top 20 per day, top 100 per week). - Aggregate View: See top stories by votes or comments over custom time ranges. - Front…

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, May 2011

the whole month →