Daily Hacker News Digest — 10 Stories That Matter, Zero Noise

The Problem

Hacker News is the best tech signal source on the internet. It's also an enormous time sink.

On any given day, there are 300+ stories on the front page and /new. Maybe 5-10 are relevant to what we do. The rest is someone's weekend Rust project, another "Is AI a bubble?" thinkpiece, and a heated debate about text editors.

I was spending 30-60 minutes a day scrolling HN. Some days I'd find gold — a competitor launch, a funding announcement, an FHE breakthrough. Most days I'd find nothing and want my hour back.

The problem is filtering. HN's ranking algorithm optimizes for general developer interest, not for "what matters to a venture studio building AI agents and FHE technology."

The Solution

We set up the Hacker News Scraper skill on Mr.Chief, running as a daily cron job. Every morning at 7:00 AM Paris time, an agent scrapes HN, filters stories by relevance to PyratzLabs' interests, and delivers a curated digest of the top 10 stories.

The Process

The daily cron configuration:

# Cron: Daily HN Digest
schedule: "0 6 * * *"  # 6 AM UTC = 7 AM Paris
agent: pauly
skill: hacker-news-scraper
task: |
  Scrape Hacker News front page and top /new stories from the last 24h.
  Filter for relevance to: AI agents, FHE, homomorphic encryption,
  crypto regulation, venture studios, developer tools, Mr.Chief, Zama,
  multi-agent systems, privacy-preserving computation.

  Return top 10 stories ranked by relevance, each with:
  - Title and HN link
  - Points and comment count
  - 2-sentence summary
  - "Why it matters" annotation for PyratzLabs

  If Mr.Chief or Zama is mentioned in any story or comment thread,
  flag it as ALERT — deliver immediately, don't wait for digest.

output:
  format: markdown
  deliver_to: telegram
  save_to: /workspace/digests/hn/

The skill uses the Hacker News Algolia API — free, no authentication, rate-limit-friendly:

# The skill handles this under the hood
# Search HN for relevant stories from last 24h
curl "http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=AI+agents&tags=story&numericFilters=created_at_i>$(date -d '24 hours ago' +%s)"

The agent doesn't just keyword-match. It reads story titles and top comments, then scores relevance based on our interest profile. A story titled "Show HN: Open-source multi-agent framework" scores higher than "AI will replace all jobs" even though both contain "AI."

Sample output delivered to Telegram at 7:02 AM:

# HN Daily Digest — March 12, 2026

**1. "Zama releases TFHE-rs 0.8 with 10x performance gains" (342 pts, 127 comments)**
Summary: Major performance milestone for Zama's FHE library. Comments
highlight this closes the gap with traditional encryption for specific
use cases.
Why it matters: Direct Zama news. Share internally. Monitor comment
sentiment for community reception.

**2. "CrewAI raises $18M Series A" (289 pts, 93 comments)**
Summary: CrewAI announces Series A led by a16z. Focus on enterprise
multi-agent orchestration. Comments mixed — some praise, others question
differentiation from LangChain.
Why it matters: Direct competitor funding. Analyze their positioning
shift toward enterprise. Gap analysis needed.

[... 8 more stories ...]

Alert mode triggers separately:

HN ALERT: Mr.Chief mentioned!
"Show HN: Mr.Chief — 31 AI Agents Running a Venture Studio"
478 points, 201 comments. Sentiment: 72% positive.
Top criticism: "Cool but how does it handle X?"
Recommended action: Founder should engage in comments.

The Results

After 90 days of running the digest:

• Caught 4 competitor launches before they hit mainstream tech press
• Detected 2 mentions of Zama in comment threads we wouldn't have found
• Identified 3 potential partnership opportunities from Show HN posts
• Spotted a regulatory discussion that affected our MiCA timeline

Try It Yourself

mrchief skills install hacker-news-scraper

Set up the cron, define your keywords, and wake up to signal instead of noise. The Algolia API is free. The skill is free. Your mornings are no longer free — they're valuable again.

I used to scroll HN with my morning coffee. Now I read a digest and spend the extra 45 minutes on things that actually move the needle.