HN Companion

HN Companion is a browser extension and web app designed to enhance the experience of reading discussions on Hacker News. It addresses the challenge of navigating lengthy comment threads by providing context-aware AI summaries that highlight key debates, contrasting viewpoints, and the overall flow of conversations. The tool preserves the hierarchical structure of Hacker News threads, surfacing side discussions and notable perspectives to help users quickly grasp the essence of complex discussions.

Key features include a summary panel integrated directly into Hacker News pages, allowing users to generate focused overviews of comment threads with a single click. HN Companion offers Vim-inspired keyboard shortcuts for efficient navigation, such as moving between sibling comments, traversing the comment tree, and collapsing threads. Users can jump to specific comments from summaries, view user profile information on hover, and navigate to other comments by the same author, streamlining the process of following conversations.

5), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), OpenRouter, and local models via Ollama. Users can bring their own API keys for personalized summarization or utilize free cached summaries for popular discussions, which are pre-generated and instantly available. HN Companion emphasizes privacy, with no tracking or analytics, and all user settings and API keys stored locally. Summaries can also be generated entirely on the user's device using Ollama.

HN Companion is available as a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, and is compatible with Chromium-based browsers like Brave, Arc, and Vivaldi. For those who prefer not to install an extension, a web app and bookmarklet are also offered. The tool is completely free and open source, released under the MIT license, and its source code is accessible for review and contribution. This makes HN Companion a specialized solution for users seeking to efficiently navigate and understand Hacker News discussions with the aid of customizable AI-powered summaries.