Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by jbverschoor on Monday April 28, 2025 @08:18AM
(#43820611)
I’d prefer summaries of my YouTube subscriptions, where I can also add my own “summary template”
In currently have a prompt for it that works for me, based on the transcripts.
Problem: too much duplicate information in any type of publication and too much fluff
Problem2: YouTube/transcriptions
Probably wouldn’t pay for such a service, but would be very happy using it. Perhaps some channel promo / email based ads for discovery or recommendations.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by siruva07 on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @02:37AM
(#43829294)
perhaps gemini will native work with YouTube much better than we could.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by qwertox on Monday April 28, 2025 @08:24AM
(#43820677)
Interesting. Once signed in, how do I search for podcasts? Discover is not showing a search field, unlike https://www.podsnacks.org/newsletter/podcasts
Edit: Ok, I found the search function in the hamburger menu. A bit unintuitive.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by siruva07 on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @01:07AM
(#43828835)
will add search to discover. thanks for the comment.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by akudha on Monday April 28, 2025 @09:14AM
(#43821201)
What are the costs like, for such a service? You have to spend for transcribing (even if you ran something like Whisper) and pay for APIs to summarize, correct?
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by hsuduebc2 on Monday April 28, 2025 @09:35AM
(#43821402)
I'm also interested in this. :)
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by siruva07 on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @01:06AM
(#43828833)
yep. won't go into each cost, but it's primarily:
1) transcription (Assembly) 2) summarization (Claude) 3) podcast database (listennotes) 4) emails (postmark) 5) application hosting (render)
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by atlgator on Monday April 28, 2025 @09:15AM
(#43821216)
Just signed up! Do you use different AI prompts for each podcast based on the specialty or a single prompt?
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by siruva07 on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @01:07AM
(#43828836)
currently a single prompt.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by bcye on Monday April 28, 2025 @10:09AM
(#43821698)
That's awesome! I'm really not a podcast person, but a lot of good content is available primarily through podcasts. Hope that can help with it.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by siruva07 on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @02:38AM
(#43829300)
thanks and agreed! we see a massive distrust in traditional legacy media, and hopefully PodSnacks can give readers more control about how they access those voices.
I've been building PodSnacks because I found it overwhelming to keep up with podcasts across tech, business, and science. PodSnacks uses LLMs to summarize the most popular episodes from shows like Lex Fridman, Acquired, All-In, Invest Like the Best, and more.
You choose your favorite shows, and we email you short, high-signal summaries — no audio to skim through, no endless backlog guilt.
So far:
126K+ episode summaries generated 92K+ hours of podcasts processed 48–50% open rates 2,900+ early users
Still iterating and adding features like bundling by theme, language translations, and audio feeds.
If you're the kind of person who wants more inputs without more noise — would love for you to check it out.
Always open to feedback from HN!