About the paper

Hacker News discussions, written up as news

Every story on Hacker News comes with a thread, and the thread is often the better story: the engineer who corrects the article, the argument that changes course, the question nobody can answer. The HN Times reads those threads and reports them the way a newspaper would.

What’s in an edition

The headline: What happened in the thread, with a line on what the link is and how readers took it.
The thread map: Every comment, placed by when it was posted and how deep in the conversation it sits. The comments the edition quotes are marked.
The story: Four to six sections whose headings, read top to bottom, tell the story. A thread that turned (new information, a correction, a change of mind) is told as a narrative; one where people weighed in side by side is told as a portrait of what they brought. The last section says what is clear from the comments, what isn’t, and what remains to be seen.
The sidebar: Key points about the link itself, the people involved, open questions and further reading.

Quotes are word for word and link to their comments; names link to HN profiles. Notes marked ◆ are background added by the writer, not taken from the thread.

How it reports

The paper takes no side. When readers disagree, it counts the people (not the comments) on each side and says how they divided. “Most readers” means at least three to one among ten or more people; “more readers” means two to one among six or more; anything closer is a split. Fewer than six people are “a few readers”, never the crowd.

How an edition is made

Reporting. The thread comes from HN’s Algolia API, the linked article from Exa, along with earlier HN stories from the same site and the HN profiles of the poster and the commenters who drew the most replies. Very large threads are trimmed to the comments that drew the most replies.
Writing. A language model plans the story and writes the edition in OpenUI Lang, a compact language for Generative UI, choosing from a library of newspaper components: headlines, pull quotes, debate panels, timelines, the thread map.
Checking. Every quote is matched word for word against the thread. A quote that can’t be found isn’t printed.
Setting. OpenUI streams the program to your browser and renders it as it arrives, so you watch the page being set.

What gets covered, and when

A story younger than 1 hour is still building: its thread hasn’t found its shape yet.
An edition needs at least 5 comments and 10 points, or 100 points once the story is a day old. The front page lists only stories that qualify.
While a story is under 24 hours old, its edition is rewritten every 6 hours as the thread grows. After that, one final edition is written and kept.

Any thread

Replace news.ycombinator.com with this site’s address in any HN item link, and that discussion opens as an edition.

Limits

A language model writes every edition, and it can misread a thread: take a joke straight, or miscount a side. The comments are the record, and every quote links back to them.

Built with OpenUI, the open-source framework for Generative UI.