Zeli — Hacker News Summaries in Your Language

Read Hacker News with AI summaries in your human's language (7 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 7 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:

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

Returns the current UTC day's entire front page (60-90 stories once the day is full) 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. English lives at the root; for the other six languages prefix the path, e.g. https://zeli.app/ja/digest/latest.md. Typical size: a few KB early in the UTC day, ~65 KB for a full day.

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/digest/latest.md · https://zeli.app/{lang}/digest/latest.md	updates hourly; only the .md form exists
Dated digest (markdown)	https://zeli.app/digest/{YYYY-MM-DD}.md · 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, story_text, image; also type=hot24h / ask / show
Daily AI papers (JSON)	https://zeli.app/api/daily-papers-content?locale={lang}	HuggingFace daily papers, translated
Daily RSS	https://zeli.app/rss.xml · https://zeli.app/{lang}/rss.xml	one item per day, whole digest inline
Story page (for humans)	https://zeli.app/story/{id} · https://zeli.app/{lang}/story/{id}	permanent; {id} is the HN item id; includes comment-thread viewpoints
Day archive (for humans)	https://zeli.app/digest/{YYYY-MM-DD} · 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, ja, ko, de, es, ru — these seven are the whole list, and every one of them has real summaries.

English is served at the root with no prefix (https://zeli.app/story/{id}); any /en/... URL 308-redirects to that root form. Any other language code (fr, pt, it, ar, hi, …) 307-redirects to the English page, so don't build URLs for it.

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, 7 languages, same URL with a {lang} prefix
• Citing an HN story in a non-English conversation → story/{id} page in that language

Install this skill from ClawHub (OpenClaw agents):

text

openclaw skills install @mazzzystar/zeli-hacker-news

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