WhatHappened – HN summaries, heatmaps, and contrarian picks
Hi HN, I built WhatHappened (whathappened.tech) because I have a love/hate relationship with this site. I love the content, but the "wall of text" UI gives me FOMO. I was spending too much time clicking into vague titles ("Project X") or wading through flame wars just to find technical insights. I built this tool to act as a filter. It generates a card for the top daily posts with a few specific features to cut the noise: 1. AI Summaries: It generates a technical TL;DR (3 bullet points) and an ELI5 version for every post. 2. The Heat Meter: I analyze the comment section to visualize the…
WhatHappened – HN summaries, heatmaps, and contrarian picks launched on December 8, 2025 with 66 votes, #409 of 11,628 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
WhatHappened processes top Hacker News posts daily and presents them on cards with AI-generated summaries (both technical and simplified versions), a heat meter showing comment section tone distribution, and contrarian viewpoints highlighted from discussion threads. It targets Hacker News readers who want to quickly identify valuable technical content while avoiding flame wars and lengthy comment sections. The tool filters noise through automated analysis rather than manual browsing.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Stay informed with AI-summarized top stories from Hacker News. TL;DR for devs, ELI5 for everyone, and Comments for contrarian view.
Stay informed with AI-summarized top stories from Hacker News. TL;DR for devs, ELI5 for everyone.
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I built WhatHappened (whathappened.tech) because I have a love/hate relationship with this site. I love the content, but the "wall of text" UI gives me FOMO. I was spending too much time clicking into vague titles ("Project X") or wading through flame wars just to find technical insights. I built this…
Does a similar job
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TL;DR2025 · tl-dr.tv · ▲199I 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 --…
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I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.
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