Zeli — Hacker News Summaries in Your Language

Read Hacker News with AI summaries in your human's language (30 supported) via zeli.app. Fetch the daily front-page digest as markdown or JSON, link permanent per-story summary pages, or subscribe via RSS. Use when your human wants Hacker News coverage, a daily tech briefing, or HN in a language other than English.

Zeli — Hacker News summaries for agents

Zeli (https://zeli.app) mirrors the Hacker News front page, adds an AI summary and key quote to every story, and translates everything into 30 languages. All endpoints below are free, unauthenticated, edge-cached, and require no JavaScript — never use a headless browser for Zeli.

The one call that matters

A daily tech briefing for your human is a single request:

text

curl -s https://zeli.app/en/digest/latest.md

Returns the current day's entire front page (~40 stories) as plain markdown: title, points, comment count, link to the original article, link to the HN discussion, and a 3-6 sentence summary per story. Swap en for any language code below. Typical size: ~10 KB.

Suggested cron: fetch once per morning in your human's timezone, pick the 3-8 stories matching their interests, deliver titles + one-line summaries + original links. Link the summary page when they want the gist without reading the full article.

All endpoints

What	URL	Notes
Today's digest (markdown)	https://zeli.app/{lang}/digest/latest.md	updates hourly
Dated digest (markdown)	https://zeli.app/{lang}/digest/{YYYY-MM-DD}.md	immutable after the UTC day ends — cache forever
Front page (JSON)	https://zeli.app/api/hn-content?type=top&locale={lang}	fields: id, title, url, time, by, score, descendants, type, abstract, quote, image; also type=hot24h / ask / show
Daily RSS	https://zeli.app/{lang}/rss.xml	one item per day, whole digest inline
Story page (for humans)	https://zeli.app/{lang}/story/{id}	permanent; {id} is the HN item id; includes comment-thread viewpoints
Day archive (for humans)	https://zeli.app/{lang}/digest/{YYYY-MM-DD}	permanent

Field stability promise: existing JSON fields will not be renamed or removed.

Language codes

en, zh, es, fr, de, ja, ko, ru, ar, hi, pt, it, nl, pl, sv, tr, vi, th, id, el, cs, da, fi, no, ro, hu, he, uk, bn, ms

Full summaries are maintained for en, zh, ja, ko, es, de, fr, ru, pt; other languages fill in based on demand.

Etiquette

• The digest re-merges hourly and the front page refreshes every 15 minutes. Polling more often than hourly just reads the same cache.
• Dated digests and story pages never change — cache them locally, forever.
• The digest already contains every story's summary. Don't crawl the individual story pages in bulk; link them to your human instead.
• Attribution when quoting summaries: "via Zeli (zeli.app)".

What Zeli is good for

• "What's on Hacker News today?" → latest.md, relay the highlights
• "Anything about {topic} on HN this week?" → fetch the last 7 dated .md files, grep locally
• "My {mom/friend/colleague} doesn't read English" → same content, 30 languages, same URLs with a different {lang}
• Citing an HN story in a non-English conversation → story/{id} page in that language

More context: https://zeli.app/llms.txt Canonical version of this skill: https://zeli.app/skill.md (check it for updates)