Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

1. Hilarious and Often Eerily Accurate

Users overwhelmingly praised the tool's witty roasts and taglines as spot-on and laugh-out-loud funny.
"This is so well-done" - straydusk
"100% accurate lmao" - Imustaskforhelp
"My review was perfect, no notes" - jedberg
"Hilarious. It seemed to focus on something... but otherwise awesome" - tylerrobinson

2. Recency Bias and Superficial Analysis

Many criticized over-reliance on recent comments, keywords, or stereotypes, ignoring full-year activity.
"It fixates on the earliest and the most recent comments. Things in between don't appear to move the needle" - lelanthran
"the LLM is only really taking my most recent posts into account, not... far back ones" - satvikpendem
"it has picked up on certain keywords and then just rolled with its own stereotypes" - kqr
"feels like it only read the most recent few months of comments" - CGamesPlay

3. Praise for Creative Features Amid Minor Gripes

Appreciation for xkcd comics, predictions, and stats, with feedback on caching, case-insensitivity, and privacy.
"The xkcd comic generation was impressive" - stevage
"The salt race condition comic made me laugh :D" - hubraumhugo
"the fact that it is now so easy to process... social media data... scares me" - acheong08


🚀 Project Ideas

HN History Balancer

Summary

  • A CLI tool and web app that fetches a user's full HN comment/post history via API, shuffles and weights items evenly across the year to eliminate recency bias, then generates customizable "wrapped" summaries with stats, timelines, and optional LLM roasts using local models.
  • Core value: Provides accurate, comprehensive year-over-year HN activity insights without over-indexing on recent or high-karma items.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience HN power users wanting unbiased self-reflection on their full posting history
Core Feature Balanced sampling algorithm + timeline visualizations + prompt-engineered LLM integration
Tech Stack Node.js/Python CLI, HN API scraper, SQLite for storage, Ollama for local LLM, D3.js for charts
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Addresses complaints like "feels like it only read the most recent few months" (oersted, hobofan) and "hyper focused on some comments" (Imustaskforhelp); HN users would love the fairness and local privacy.
  • High potential for HN discussion as a "better Wrapped" fork with self-hosting.

Wrapped Cache & Sharer Extension

Summary

  • Browser extension that auto-caches HN-Wrapped outputs (including xkcd comics), fixes case-insensitivity, generates permanent shareable links/images with OpenGraph previews, and allows exporting to PDF/LinkedIn-ready formats.
  • Core value: Solves regeneration, saving, and sharing frustrations for viral moments without relying on the original site's uptime.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience HN commenters sharing their Wrapped on social media or portfolios
Core Feature Local storage of generated pages, screenshot/PDF export, custom OG images
Tech Stack Chrome/Firefox extension API, html2canvas, Puppeteer for exports, IndexedDB
Difficulty Low
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Fixes "it regenerates the xkcd every time" (AndrewDucker), "case-insensitive HN usernames" (ValentineC), and sharing desires ("turn it into a LinkedIn post" - jedberg; "social opengraph preview" - joshka).
  • Practical utility for traffic spikes; would spark "must-have companion tool" threads.

HN Vibe Matcher

Summary

  • Web service that analyzes HN profiles via embeddings (topic modeling on comments), clusters users by "vibe" (e.g., Rust evangelist, contrarian), and finds nearest matches with similarity scores, shared topics, and anonymized previews.
  • Core value: Turns passive profiling into a fun discovery tool for finding like-minded HNers, addressing desires for deeper insights beyond solo roasts.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Curious HN users seeking community matches or "who else yaps about chemistry?"
Core Feature TF-IDF/sentence-transformers embeddings, cosine similarity search, interactive cluster viz
Tech Stack FastAPI backend, PostgreSQL+pgvector, Streamlit/Next.js frontend, HN scraper
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: Freemium (basic free, pro for full history/private mode)

Notes

  • Directly from "find who is your 'nearest match' or similar" (HPsquared); users would love discovering peers amid roasts like "the only person on earth still trying to make 'decentralized link shorteners'" (Imustaskforhelp).
  • Sparks discussions on HN "personality types" with viral potential like personality quizzes.

Read Later