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I built a site that's similar in concept to Hacker News, but is entirely fed by RSS feed content, that is then bullet-pointed summarized on the article page: https://engineered.at/

But I also extract topics automatically from the content too with LLMs, to allow for dynamic topic pages that users can separately subscribe to to tune their feeds.

Haven't promoted it much, but it's pretty amazing what you can do for a couple bucks a month. And my main thesis with this site is that by locking the content to only rss feeds of known blogs, you dramatically reduce the spam submission risk (basically eliminate it). Doesn't handle the spam comment side of things, but that's a different problem.

EDIT: I also open sourced a Rails engine I made to power this site if anyone is interested: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor


This looks great, I've wanted something like this for a while. Finding how to click through to the actual item in the feed was a high point of friction for me.

I went to a topic and then clicked on the header of something I was interested in expecting to be brought to the blog post directly. Needing to click on that same title again to be brought to the post was unintuitive to me, I searched around the page, went back and forth a few times and eventually figured it out.

As a user I would love to be able to click directly through to the article FROM the topic feed. I would expect that the comments is a URL to the page that the header currently brings me to. This would match my expectations from using sites like reddit/HN.

A one or two liner summary directly on the topics feed would be really great I think.


Great feedback, should be straightforward to make happen. I’ll try to implement tonight.

As a sysadmin hosting a few blogs, do you mind sharing what IP ranges you crawl from? Or what agent your requests use? Thank you.

I presume you’re politely asking in order to block? Which is fine, I get it. On my phone right now but can update later.

I do want to ask though (and I should make this clear in a FAQ or something): the way I check RSS feeds uses adaptive scheduling, so I intentionally don’t check feeds of sites too rapidly. Then the summarization is based on the full article content but I never render that full content on the site (to avoid traffic hijacking concerns). Given that: what’s the concern?


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Can't even view your site with Firefox

That’s…bizarre. Let me take a look

EDIT: just checked in firefox, I don't see an issue. can you email me at me@dchuk.com and maybe I can debug with you?


I just noticed the same thing.

UA being blocked for example:

  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/140.0
Did mess with it some more:

Allowed:

    Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; zh-tw) Presto/2.7.62 Version/11.01
    Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; cs) Presto/2.7.62 Version/11.01
406:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0 Opera/12.0
    Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 14; rv:140.0) Gecko/20110101 Firefox/140.0
Maybe just remove it?

Figured it out, had a random block of Firefox versions less than 147 in my ApplicationController for some reason. Of course my home internet went down though so I’ll push in a few.

ok this should now be fixed!

Thanks for this info! Very helpful

Getting

    406 browser not supported
for ESR Firefox 140.

If I set my UA to "FUCKIT" I can use the site perfectly fine. Why is there a User Agent Filter that disables the whole website? This should be maybe a warning, not a complete block.


you know, I had setup some analytics filtering based on geoip because I was getting crazy spam traffic from Chine and Singapore, but that should only be affecting analytics not the whole site. Mind if I ask where you're located? (you can email me privately if preferred: me@dchuk.com)

Europe

IP address has no effect on the User Agent block though...


Yeah I know and agree, just wondering if something is haywire in that logic somehow. Otherwise it’s a bizarre issue but I’ll get it fixed

Glad to hear, and neat site. Cool to see new Ruby on Rails sites. Thought I was the only one still loving it. ;)

This is awesome thank you for building this! I’ve wanted to try building some sort of companion robot for my kids to play with, that leverages edge voice AI models and likely an api connection to one of the big SOTA providers for the brain, with a custom system prompt to have a very simple child-like personality. I feel like it would be neat to use an android phone as the “face” where you get a nice screen to render on, compute for the edge models, and the forward and rear facing cams for the vision all included. One of those daydream projects…


Thanks!

- Checkout Reachy Mini or Stack-chan on orobotio, those are the top 2 SOTA AI personality robots, what you're looking for! Not an exact match, but I see the vision, it's definitely buildable.

- What AI services are you most familiar with? Claude? GPT? OpenRouter? HuggingFace? Gemini? Something else? I'm planning to support all of them, but will be helpful to know which would help you most.

- What would you estimate your skill level with programming, 3d printing, and building robotics electronics? beginner - moderate - expert?

Join my discord, and I'd love to set up a call with you. https://discord.gg/DWfUsCNVs

Thanks for checking it out!


I rebuilt an app I found in rust and extended it in a bunch of ways that I use everyday for this use case and it works flawlessly if this is any help: https://github.com/dchuk/jarkdown-rs


You have to include screenshots on a landing page for a diagramming system


Interesting concept. Two sided marketplaces are hard to bootstrap but maybe just enough curiosity would get the flywheel going. Hell they should just try and convince people to enroll as providers but then also use the service even if it’s hitting their own machines until there’s some degree of supply and demand pressure then try and get only providers to sign up. Or set up some way to encourage providers to promote others to use the service (the 100% rev share kind of breaks that concept but anything can change).

I wish this was self hostable, even for a license fee. Many businesses have fleets of Macs, sometimes even in stock as returned equipment from employees. Would allow for a distributed internal inference network, which has appeal for many orgs who value or require privacy.


Ignore all the hate in the comments here, anyone denying the direction of software development and it aggressively becoming agentic have their own reckonings to deal with…

I love this concept. While I’m a Rails guy myself, I appreciate the value of Django too, and an agent-optimized version of it makes sense.

I feel like the next logical steps are this exact concept but in Go / Rust to get even more performance out of everything and to also get the single deployable binary too


I've actually been vibe coding a port of Django to Rust as a fun learning experience. I didn't expect it to be possible, but I've already got the core ORM working (including makemigrations, migrate, and inspectdb) with basic admin support running.

Single file deployment, and the process seems to only use 3-4 MB of memory.

I've been able to use inspectdb on existing Django databases, and then browse and change that data using the rust admin.

I am probably not the right person to build a production ready version of this - since I am not a Rust developer - but gee I am impressed by how good it is becoming.


You're absolutely right!


Looks interesting for small internal tools and apps, especially with go’s simple deployment model. Do you already have a Claude code plugin or skills files for it? That would likely help adoption


Actually I designed it with complex user flows and business logic in mind, but it's a good fit for small apps also.

I am new to this LLM stuff to be honest. But seems like it's a default way to write code currently in many domains. I would be grateful if you could share framework related plugins/skills that you found great.


I’ve used something similar a bit and it worked very well: https://github.com/pproenca/agent-tui


Very cool. I’ve used a paid service for years now that gets me all sorts of sports and channels very reliably, I would assume they’re doing something similar to make this work. Might try this though with my home server setup.

Think it could be ran from within a docker container so I could add it to an existing docker compose media server setup?


any chance you'd be willing to share what the service is? I use streameast all the time but it's not reliable enough


You will want to search for IPTV services. It's a bit of a wild west out there but I'd recommend finding one that has a Discord. Most will offer a free trial for 24 hours or a week for you to try them out.


It's one of those sites where they don't really like to be advertised, but if you really like *seasons* that are just *4* *u*, try adding a .com


Not OP, but I have used iptvore[dot]net previously


google 'free media heck yeah' and follow the rabbit hole.


This is the only evergreen bookmark that will always have the most up-to-date sources.

You can also find some interesting tools and scripts if you search some of the streaming domain names with GitHub code search.


seconded


Very clean site, well done. I’ve built something similar, but it also has an algorithmic front page option as well based on the “standard” algorithm from Reddit/HN: https://engineered.at

I also have it wired up to gpt nano for topic extraction and summary creation per post, if you register for an account (free) you can also follow sources and topics to fine tune things.

I have a big list of features to continue adding to it, like an ability to “claim” your site so you can get some analytics from the site, and potentially to boost your site in the algorithm. Might also add a jobs board.

If you’re interested, while this site is closed source, the feed monitoring rails engine is open source: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor


Not sure if you want feedback on this, but mine is free.

The lists are impenetrable for my eye, I think an key mistake is that you don't use an accent color for titles in lists (i.e. look at a google serp).

That you don't directly link the content, felt like an offense, followed by a slap in the face looking at an AI generated summary.

The layout feels too reddit and too industrialized and the way you plan to progress the project, rings my "pet project to slam ad's on" bells.

I think the pure intent of OPs site naturally makes it more approachable and likeable.


I’ll ignore the tone here and solely reply to the feedback (go take a nice walk or something, no need to be so fired up, it’s just the internet): - noted on the readability call out. Was trying to keep things minimal, similar to HN itself, I’ll see what I can do to make the contrast better - I added the summaries because it’s something I want on sites like this. Every individual article page contains a direct link to the original site. I’m intentionally not rendering the full article content like a feed reader so that a gist/teaser is available for users to hopefully send them to the original article. - you are free to not use the site if you think my intent is nefarious, again it’s just the internet after all


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