Pricing

Pay per usage

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Hacker News Thread Summarizer

Try for free

Fetches top comments from a Hacker News thread and summarizes them using Claude API.

Pricing

Pay per usage

Rating

0.0

(0)

Developer

HJ JOO

Actor stats

Bookmarked

Total users

Monthly active users

3 days ago

Last modified

What does it do?

Takes a Hacker News thread URL as input
Fetches top-level comments via the official HN API (no authentication needed)
Sends the thread title, body, and comments to Claude API
Returns a structured English summary covering key opinions, recommendations, and debates

Example output

{
  "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865810",
  "title": "Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise",
  "commentCount": 20,
  "summary": "## Key Points from the XZ/liblzma Backdoor Discussion\n\n### The Attack\nA sophisticated backdoor was discovered in the xz/liblzma compression library..."
}

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
`url`	string	Yes	-	HN thread URL (e.g. `https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865810`) or just the item ID
`commentLimit`	integer	No	30	Number of top-level comments to fetch (1-100)

Setup

This Actor requires one environment variable:

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY -- Your Anthropic API key. Get one at console.anthropic.com

Set it in the Actor's Settings > Environment Variables on Apify Console.

How much does it cost?

Apify platform: Minimal -- a single run takes a few seconds of compute
Claude API: Typically $0.01-0.05 per summary depending on thread length (uses Claude Sonnet)

Use cases

Quickly catch up on long HN discussions
Research trending tech topics
Monitor community reactions to product launches
Build a digest of HN threads via Apify scheduling

Local development

# Clone and install
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Set up environment
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env and add your ANTHROPIC_API_KEY

# Run locally
apify run

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