Posted by sebastiennight 4/17/2025
It takes any HN thread and turns it into an audio conversation so you can listen to the thread while doing other things.
I've seen many previous attempts to turn HN threads into podcasts, but they all shared a common issue IMO: trying to reduce the very rich back-and-forth into a single-thread single-reader boring podcast. Instead, I wanted to hear the actual debate from the actual thread!
So I asked Claude 3.7 to build this for me as a browser-only app. It just needs a thread URL and an Elevenlabs API key (this all remains in your browser, you can check the source code, it's only 3 files, there is no server storage of anything).
To make the resulting audio experience as natural as possible, each commenter has a different voice.
Commenters who appear multiple times in the thread have the same voice, and introduce themselves. A bit of context is also introduced when coming back "up" from deeply nested comments.
You can play the resulting audio or download it for later listening. I'm planning to later add the ability to load multiple threads so I can have a playlist generated for listening in the gym!
Any comments or improvement suggestions are appreciated!
- don't use Legacy voices as they seem to be of much lower quality (sounds like someone is calling in from an international landline)
- when the same poster appears many times, it gets tedious to hear them restate who they are. I think after the first 3, we should recognize the voice so that's not necessary anymore
Feature requests I'll add:
- emphasize quotes better
- add audio chapter marks if possible, so it's possible to skip ahead
- attach a speaker's voice to the relevant voice in the 11Labs account if there's a voice with the same name as the username
- add sound effects if people write down sound effects in their comments (this seems tough)
Anything I'm missing?
Cost Estimation
- Shows (very rough) character count estimate (rounded to nearest thousand)
- Displays approximate cost at $0.12 per thousand characters
- Updates dynamically as selections change
- Added toggle between single thread URL and top 100 stories selection
- Implemented multi-thread selection with checkboxes
- Saves input mode preference to localStorage
- Changed to "All" as default with option for custom limit
- Original post no longer counts against comment limit
- Text with > is now properly recognized as quotes
- Quotes are transformed with random introduction phrases
- Adds "End of quote" with variations at the end of quoted text
- Preserves shared links in expandable section at the bottom
- Different random phrases for first, second, and multiple links
- Links open in new tabs when clicked
- Matches commenter usernames to ElevenLabs voices if names match
- Falls back to deterministic assignment if no match found
- Saves progress and allows resuming after errors
- Shows "Retry" button with partial audio when errors occur
- Audio generated so far is available for download
- Added tooltip with API key information
- Persistent theme preferences via localStorage
- Improved responsive design for mobile
- the filename of the generated MP3 file matches the thread titleFirst 20 comments of "John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome"
Here is the rendered mp3 : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yG1mwD70ZteXtdh8Jk_sXUXS_sQ...
The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19126795
First 30 comments of a recent thread, "AGI is still 30 years away": https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YbgRXBv1LC3IdMl8Xb4i9y98S2T...
The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719280
Can I navigate by voice commands, for example if listening while driving?
2. No navigation by voice commands sadly - it generates a single audio track. I might be able to insert chapter marks for each comment though, so that it'd be possible to "skip" to the next comment!
That seems less natural. I think what I can do though, is turn quotes into actual quotes, eg. turning
> One big post can have a bigger reply counter-arguing every point 1b1
into:
"Look; you said 'One big post can have a bigger reply counter-arguing every point 1b1'"
yeah, I think what I'm getting at is when there is a big argumentative post crossing the line from chit-chat to speech, break out of the structure of the website, let the LLM get the arguments out and connect them to the counter-arguments and turn it into a back a forth with shorter dialog lines, without repeating too much or one person talking for very long.
Also I agree, the LLM should be free to transform or add dialog how it sees fit so it feels more natural but always keeping it true to what is written.
I also think it's incredibly difficult (even with an LLM) to render properly a multi-turn multi-user conversation without sticking to the actual hierarchy of the thread. We would probably run into the "summarize the thread and lose nuance" problem again.
I am not producing any derivative work of your comments, and this is not commercial use. Here is why:
a - this is a static HTML page so the only way to generate audio from it is for YOU to provide YOUR 11Labs key to get an audio on YOUR 11Labs account that YOU can then download to YOUR computer, so technically YOU would be creating the derivative work, not me
b - how is this promoting my business?? There is no link to it anywhere here
c - did you follow me from the TikTok thread to here? what's going on?
Also, are you also issuing cease and desist letters to every web app that is using the HN api? Because there's really nothing happening here warranting such a response.
To your second, see my first, above. Also, you opened your Show HN as:
> Hi HN, here's something fun to play with.
> It takes any HN thread and turns it into an audio conversation so you can listen to the thread while doing other things.
> I've seen many previous attempts to turn HN threads into podcasts, but they all shared a common issue IMO: trying to reduce the very rich back-and-forth into a single-thread single-reader boring podcast. Instead, I wanted to hear the actual debate from the actual thread!
I appreciate you believe yourself to have acted in good faith, and on further review I concede I made some hasty assumptions, based on the nature of your own representations, about the nature of this work, which led me to conclude more than appears to be warranted in fact.
I know of no Tiktok thread, but infer from your mention of same I am not the only one who has reacted in a fashion which some could see fit to consider precipitous. Please consider the possibility that this is what a launch looks like in the moment when it is only going sideways, after the rocket has ceased going up but before it begins to succumb again to gravity's inexorable pull.
It's not a "corporate GitHub account", it's a throwaway github account I created a while ago because some app required a GitHub login to give me access. I have zero other repos there, are my company uses GitLab.
> I appreciate you believe yourself to have acted in good faith, and on further review I concede I made some hasty assumptions, based on the nature of your own representations, about the nature of this work, which led me to conclude more than appears to be warranted in fact.
No worries, everyone can be mistaken from time to time, especially in a written medium.
> I know of no Tiktok thread, but infer from your mention of same I am not the only one who has reacted in a fashion which some could see fit to consider precipitous.
You replied to me just earlier today, on a thread called "TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale" where I made a cheeky comment about AI-generated YouTube content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43718657
As an aside, I believe that AI should be used to enhance creation not replace it, which is why I built a video-editing agent (to help my customers who are experts or teachers who record themselves in real videos) and why we don't do avatar-style generative video.
So I have some strong opinions about AI content (that are vastly different from other founders in the space) and enjoy debate about it. Threatening legal action might not be the most constructive tool for debate when you could find out that you're mostly in agreement with your counterpart's position... this is one of the things HN is good for.
I threatened legal action when I believed you to be creating an unlicensed derivative work of my carefully considered original words, for the commercial purpose of promoting your business which I see functions in a way technically somewhat similar. I now understand that not to be the case, and for the sake of absolute clarity, I acknowledge that the cause for action I initially suspected is not in fact present, nor any other of which I'm aware, and I intend no further action of the sort I earlier described.
Sorry to blow you up over it. The folks who understand me to be "unhinged" don't know what it actually looks like to see someone care about something in a way that requires courage, and I don't blame them for failing to recognize it, but I'm not so small a person I can't concede I overreacted somewhat here.
That said, my voice - the way I use words, in text and in speech - has been the work of a lifetime, and to see that processed into AI-generated garbage may possibly be nothing I can eventually prevent but certainly is nothing I would intend to take lying down.
I'm sure someone here will take these words as reason to use your tool to generate something they can try to bother me with, and I hereby disclaim any intent of pursuing action against you, Sébastien, or OneTake, on that basis, unless I come to believe at some future time that you were substantially involved. (I'm sure I won't!) I don't expect to be particularly bothered in such event, but do intend to see someone else be, and I would advise anyone against the attempt.
I'm glad we had the opportunity to clear that up, and I look forward to following your further doings with the same favorable interest that's attended on our other conversation, and I hope now to some extent for both of us even at the end of this one, today.
> I would take it as a sign of good faith to see that change soon
Who are you, the district attorney around these parts?
edit: Oh, sorry, never mind, I see the 'Extension' now.
You may have issued such a license...
Though without an explicit sublicense from Y Combinator, they may have issues with this application:
> Except as expressly authorized by Y Combinator, you agree not to modify, copy, frame, scrape, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on the Site or the Site Content, in whole or in part, except that the foregoing does not apply to your own User Content (as defined below) that you legally upload to the Site.
I don't know if you're legally in the right or not, but if you are, it's only in the sense that media companies are in the right when the DMCA a child's fan art drawing of one of their characters.
Please stop.
I understand, as I have clarified elsewhere and for which I owe you no accounting of any kind, that is not happening in this case. I do not apologize, to you, for any particular of my reaction.
Please stop.
Entering a max of "26" manually is what created the off-by-one error, I think, because of the original post being counted as a comment.
But yeah, I'll fix that.
If I leave the max at 100, then I get every comment (original post + al 26 comments), here's the output audio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fIis8yQn-YuOmJwq1J4cLtthQV0...
Maybe publish it as a podcast.
I have no plans to publish as a podcast (if I was going to go through all the trouble to put a podcast together, it would be an actual podcast for my startup, not for a hobby project!) but I'd love it if someone did it!