For 10 years I've been running a personal reading system — saving articles,
filtering them with AI summaries, and posting the best ones to r/programming
and r/webdev and here. That pipeline is how I accumulated 350k Reddit karma. It was
never meant to be a product. It was just how I learned.
Then Pocket shut down. Then Omnivore. And the web kept filling with
content nobody asked for.
Hutch is that system rebuilt as an app. The idea is simple: you choose
what enters your reading list, not an algorithm. The TL;DR summary helps
you decide whether the article you saved deserves an hour or five minutes.
You're still the one deciding. That's the whole point.
v1 has Firefox and Chrome extensions (one click, Ctrl/Cmd+D, or
right-click), reader view via Readability.js, TL;DR summaries per article,
dark mode, and OAuth with PKCE. Hosted in Sydney. Australian Privacy Act
compliant. No tracking, no ads.
Free for the first 100 users, A$3.99/month after that.
Open source including the GitHub Actions + Claude CI pipeline I used to
build it: github.com/HutchApp/hutch-app
This is a genuine v1 — the advertised features work, everything else is
roadmap. What I want to build next: a preference learning layer
("more like this / less like this"), Gmail integration for newsletters,
and highlights. I don't know which matters most to the people who need
this.
Hey Fayner! Nice to meet ya, I have signed up to Hutch, I think I might be one of the first 100 users so are you suggesting that I might have the product free forever or till a certain time?
> Then Pocket shut down. Then Omnivore. And the web kept filling with content nobody asked for.
I used to use Shiori until I one day had accidentally removed that docker container, nowadays, I either star if its a github project or I even had a tampermonkey script which created a button in my screen which I can click to store links in json format in a private secret gist of mine. Personally I really like shiori and I have talked to their developers on matrix too and they seem nice, I would love to hear your thoughts on Shiori.
> This is a genuine v1 — the advertised features work, everything else is roadmap. What I want to build next: a preference learning layer ("more like this / less like this"), Gmail integration for newsletters, and highlights. I don't know which matters most to the people who need this.
Personally, I would love if there was a thing similar to linkhut (you can see my linkhut at https://ln.ht/~imafh), this is a place where I share all the really cool things that I found on the internet and the best part absolutely about linkhut is that I can write "notes"/"text" within Linkhut about a particular link)
So anyone, who is reading my profile can exactly know why I vouched for a project. Combining this with tags and videos and search and profiles with it being open source/with api, I Really Love linkhut but (its link aggregators features are a little not so good)
I am not sure of how similar linkhut and hutch can be, but I would really love to see a feature for example where I can get suggested an article by other people who have written some genuine things about it in notes and then I can comment about it within maybe hutch itself even, or if not.
I feel like having these human elements gives a sense of community. I would love to hear your thoughts on as well!
Notes and highlights are on the roadmap — you'll be able to annotate
as you read.
The social discovery angle is interesting. Hutch is deliberately private
for now but curated recommendations from real readers with genuine notes
is a different thing from algorithmic suggestions. Worth thinking about.
On the free tier: the first 100 users get free access, no time limit.
Thanks, I have been thinking about it from a more human perspective as in that I have some cool things to share to people and those don't fall exactly into Hackernews at times (suppose a struggling musician who has an interesting story to tell), Usually I then use linkhut with their channels with a note so that people can know why I have bookmarked them in linkhut if they go to my profile and see my linkhut there. Its definitely really interesting to think about.
I've been experimenting with using Claude via GitHub Actions for automated code review, CI fixes, and conflict resolution — not just as a coding assistant but as part of the actual pipeline. Hutch is the project I used to develop and refine this workflow.
The whole thing is open source. The AI workflow lives in .github/workflows/.
I also read a lot (350k karma on Reddit, 14.5k here) and plan to release the reading automation system as a proper app next week — but wanted to share the engineering approach first.
Happy to go deep on the GitHub Actions + Claude integration.
I have 3 agents working at all times but can be more, until I reach the Claude 5x limits that resets every 5 hours. I am seriously considering Claude 20x..
Slice | Principal Engineer (FullStack) | Hybrid/Remote | Full Time
We provide Lay-By for travel, recently got 7.5M funding with a total 17.5M incl. debt facility. Me and another employee (non-dev) recently started a new business and made 1M in 90 days. We value simple HTML apps over over-engineered cluttered SPAs.
At Slice, there's NO HackerRank, whiteboard algorithm, or unnecessary programming language questions. One form, one application, one interview. The other steps are just cultural fit and other due diligence checks.
Sad day for the Internet, Rest in Peace David L. Mills , and that time keeps going on forever to you and your energy to be felt across time and space.
I'm sure the artifacts of your work will never be forgotten.
----
On a sidenote
Last year I had a chat with one of the members of the early Web and we understood there's a serious issue of knowledge transfer to future web devs generations.
Few people reads books, and even if they do, the books written by technical people are not pedagogical enough as to allow the reader to capture the Tacit Knowledge and experience from the author as to be able to reproduce new ideas.
We are LOSING fundamental knowledge of the internet for every mind who dies. If you think that mailing lists, web archives, books and blog posts are enough then you're being naive.
At some point nobody will understand how the Web works. The curve where the Web is going is not pretty.
This is extremely troubling to me and I'm trying on the sidelines to have some sort of way to run Tacit Knowledge extraction from those ppl. Known techniques are ACTA and CTA (Advanced Cognitive Task Analysis and Cognitive Task Analysis).
> At some point nobody will understand how the Web works
Sorry to be blunt; but that is absolute weapons grade nonsense on multiple levels.
First, we aren't losing any knowledge on how the internet works; at least, as far as I'm aware. Can you please explain what you mean? What knowledge have we lost? Are we unable to write networking stacks because some greybeards aged out?
Secondly, If you think the guys who wrote the first C compilers and implemented NTP have much of an idea how the 'modern internet' works even today (outside of what you can learn reading beej's guide), you're wrong. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, again, but I struggle to see how folks like these would be useful on the team who implements, for example, the distributed caching algorithms used by Akamai..
I get your sentiment, it's definitely sad and a 'passing of the guard' sort of feeling when the first engineers pass on, and for sure, they know a lot about their domains. But lamenting that 'nobody will understand how the web works' because no one cares about ISC bind's implementation anymore is kind of bonkers.
I don't think we're losing knowledge of how the Internet works, but we're almost certainly losing knowledge of why it was done that way. I remember Bob Braden saying (and I paraphrase):
"When we designed the early Internet, we had a huge blank space to work in, and we agonized over what the best way to do things would be. Ever since, people have been filling in all the other parts of that space."
This was 20 years ago, but he's probably even more correct today. Of course they didn't get everything right by a longshot, but we're definitely losing the rationale for why things were done the way they were. As a result, it's quite common to stumble into old problems that had been engineered around before.
I don't think we're losing the macro "why" at all. We may be losing the wisdom of the path they walked to get to their design, which is certainly very valuable from a pedagogical and historical perspective.
Yes, that's the whole point I was trying to make. Without history of the why we tend to make the same mistakes all over again. Extracting the why is much more difficult than simply writing a book, there are psychological prompts to do that
I read it more as "losing knowledge of why things are the way they are today" i.e. the earlier technical context & nuance that caused things to evolve in the way they have.
Nice example from a link in this thread is a Dr. Mill's talk at udel: https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?feature=shared It's packed with interesting context and history stretching back to 1968
You are correct, that's what I meant. Understanding the why allows us to evolve ina. direction ina. way that's educated instead of making bad decisions and committing mistakes that shouldn't have been made
I see you've never met my coworkers: Akamai does employ a number of people with very long experience in the IETF world.
There is quite a bit of bad ideas the people pop up to propose time and time again, because they don't get why the net looks the way it does or the constraints on evolution. The old timers also understand when things have changed enough to justify new things.
W3C and IETF both have a paucity of early or middle career participants. So where are all these people who understand how it works? Not making more standards to solve some real problems.
I didn't speak with them, so I can't verify if "There is quite a bit of bad ideas the people pop up to propose time and time again". I need to verify why they are bad and why they're proposing. Before concluding they're bad you need to understand why. Many ideas are bad, but what I'm saying is that there's a few people like Roy Fielding, Tim Berners Lee, Mike Amundsen, & other that I don't remember their names, that actually have GREAT ideas, only that newbiew engineers with title of "senior" don't understand. Not saying it's your case, just saying there's no way to verify so I can't "explain" to you the effect you're observing.
Reach out to folks who are in the last chapter of their life and collect the knowledge, Story Corps [1] meets ArchiveTeam. Interview them, create or add to their Wikipedia page and upload other artifacts to the Internet Archive.
That and CTA/ACTA. Extract Their Tacot Knowledge using those techniques and convert them into simulations that can be use to mentor/teach new engineers with the WHY they did what they did by putting them in their actual shows.
For 10 years I've been running a personal reading system — saving articles, filtering them with AI summaries, and posting the best ones to r/programming and r/webdev and here. That pipeline is how I accumulated 350k Reddit karma. It was never meant to be a product. It was just how I learned.
Then Pocket shut down. Then Omnivore. And the web kept filling with content nobody asked for.
Hutch is that system rebuilt as an app. The idea is simple: you choose what enters your reading list, not an algorithm. The TL;DR summary helps you decide whether the article you saved deserves an hour or five minutes. You're still the one deciding. That's the whole point.
v1 has Firefox and Chrome extensions (one click, Ctrl/Cmd+D, or right-click), reader view via Readability.js, TL;DR summaries per article, dark mode, and OAuth with PKCE. Hosted in Sydney. Australian Privacy Act compliant. No tracking, no ads.
Free for the first 100 users, A$3.99/month after that.
Open source including the GitHub Actions + Claude CI pipeline I used to build it: github.com/HutchApp/hutch-app
This is a genuine v1 — the advertised features work, everything else is roadmap. What I want to build next: a preference learning layer ("more like this / less like this"), Gmail integration for newsletters, and highlights. I don't know which matters most to the people who need this.
If you try it, tell me. Happy to get feedback.
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