An honest TL;DR for anything

Every ask, newest first

Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.

Reader’s note. Book summaries are a recurring sub-ask.

1. Nov 2025Wants an archive.is-style site that runs saved pages through an LLM for summaries and key quotes. Read it: a comment in “FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is”
2. Oct 2024Wants a browser plugin that summarizes a site's privacy and data use policy in real time. Read it: a comment in “PayPal (USA) will automatically share data about you to participating stores”
3. Jan 2024Wants a lean Chrome extension for AI page summarization, without extra bloat. Read it: a comment in “Brave Leo now uses Mixtral 8x7B as default”
4. Mar 2023Wishes for software that reads an article and returns a short TL;DR. Read it: a comment in “An experimental beach barrier could be key to rebuilding eroding coastlines”
5. Jan 2023Wants an AI that condenses non-fiction books into a few pages. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Is there an AI that summarizes non-fiction books?”
6. Dec 2022Would happily pay for article summarizers, but finds catalogs too small or summaries too short. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: Chrome extension to summarize blogs and articles using ChatGPT”
7. Nov 2022Wants a GPT-style Chrome extension that automatically summarizes pages. Read it: a comment in “The truffle industry is a scam”
8. Jan 2022Wants a high-quality book summary service to help decide whether to buy a book, unlike Blinkist. Read it: a comment in “Summary of Atomic Habits”
9. Dec 2020Wants a way to spot padded articles beforehand and get a short summary instead. Read it: a comment in “Alien Hunters Discover Mysterious Signal from Proxima Centauri”
10. Jun 2020Would pay for a service that turns news articles into short summaries. Read it: a comment in “'Black neutron star' discovery changes astronomy”
11. Oct 2019Wants a TL;DR service for the Hacker News front page submissions. Read it: a comment in “Why New York City Stopped Building Subways (2018)”
12. Sep 2019Wants a service summarizing long-form articles to state the key insight without narrative decoration. Read it: a comment in “A Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code (2018)”
13. Jul 2019Wants a site with plain summaries of academic papers. Read it: a comment in “AI made from a sheet of glass can recognise numbers just by looking”
14. Apr 2019Wants a Wikipedia-like, community-built alternative to Blinkist. Read it: a comment in “500-year-old library catalogue reveals books lost to time”
15. Feb 2019Wants a service that condenses a batch of newsletters into one weekly digest with length and timing settings. Read it: a comment in “Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters”
16. Oct 2018Wants a service where they send an article URL and get just the relevant data back. Read it: a comment in “Meet the Endoterrestrials”
17. May 2018Wants a tool that produces a TL;DR for any article. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Are there any tools which can summarize an article?”
18. Dec 2017Would pay for a service that translates vague website marketing copy into plain explanations. Read it: a comment in “Fashion Freedom Initiative”
19. Nov 2016Wants a browser plugin giving vetted, plain synopses for articles they view. Read it: a comment in “Biggest Spike in Traffic Deaths in 50 Years? Blame Apps”
20. Mar 2016Would pay for a TL;DR as a service. Read it: a comment in “Facebook's new front-end server design”
21. Nov 2014Wants an auto summary or keyword list for every link, so long articles are not dismissed unread. Read it: a comment in “Orwell and China: Nineteen Eighty-four in Chinese”
22. Apr 2014Would pay for an app that summarizes a photographed book page for schoolwork. Read it: a post: “Tell HN: App idea that should become reality”
23. Feb 2014Wants a hype-free one-paragraph summary of tech magazine articles, perhaps through an app. Read it: a comment in “The Next Big Thing You Missed: A Would-Be Dropbox Meant to Thwart the NSA”
24. Aug 2012Wants a place offering objective summaries of HN articles. Read it: a comment in “Everything you know about China is wrong”