HN Lens
AI-Powered HN Perspectives
Only for iPhone
Free · Designed for iPhone. Not verified for macOS.
iPhone
Listen to AI chat responses hands-free, explore deep comment threads, navigate story details from the Overview feed, and enjoy enhanced response formatting!
HN Lens unlocks smarter, faster insights from Hacker News.
Experience comment sections summarized through unique AI personas: read summaries generated through the lens of a Software Engineer, a critical Journalist, a pragmatic Hacker, a philosopher or neutral
Then, go deeper—chat directly with the chosen persona. Ask questions, challenge takes, or explore context. It’s like having an expert beside you, reading between the lines.
Features:
- Persona-Based Summaries – Understand comments through the lens of a persona
- Chat with the Persona – Ask follow-ups & dig deeper into the discussion
- Browse All Sections of Hacker News– Seamlessly access Top, New, Ask, Show, and Jobs
- Smart Bookmarks – Save articles & their AI insights in one tap
- Clean, Native iOS Experience – Fast, focused, and built for readers who think
See Hacker News differently. Download HN Lens today.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Deep Dive Chat Speech Synthesis (Read Aloud)
Hands-Free Audio Reading: Added built-in Text-to-Speech controls directly beneath AI assistant responses in Deep Dive Chat.
Neural Voice & Audio Ducking: Uses enhanced neural voice selection with automatic audio session ducking (.spokenAudio).
Markdown-Safe Playback: Automatically strips Markdown formatting (like **, #, and URLs) before speaking so the audio playback sounds completely natural.
Interactive Playback Controls: Play, pause, or switch playback between messages seamlessly. Audio automatically stops when navigating away from the chat screen.
Thread-Aware Comment Analysis & Deep Discussions
Nested Reply Fetching: Captures multi-level comment replies to surface substantive debates, technical counter-arguments, and dividing opinions.
Hierarchical AI Prompts: Formats comment threads as structured parent-child debates for richer, more nuanced AI comment summaries.
Dynamic Context Budgeting: Uses native Swift NaturalLanguage word guardrails to dynamically pack maximum comment context without overflowing model limits.
Depth-First Hierarchy & Indentation: Displays comment replies directly under parent comments with visual indentation and thread markers.
Overview Article & Story Detail Navigation
Unified Navigation: Tapping any story card, digest summary, or category link in the Overview feed now seamlessly opens the full Story Detail view.
State & Filter Preservation: Preserves your scroll position, active filters, and persona states when navigating back to the Overview section.
Deep Dive Chat Formatting & Typography
Strict Table Guardrails: Instructs on-device AI models to present structured information in clean bullet points rather than raw Markdown tables.
Auto-Formatting & Spacing: Automatically inserts proper spacing before inline section headers and applies enhanced line spacing to AI response bubbles for better readability.
Markdown Table Sanitizer: A post-processing fallback automatically converts residual table syntax into clean bullet lists.
The developer, Douglas Molineux, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Douglas Molineux
- Size
- 6.6 MB
- Category
- News
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 26.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 26.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 26.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 26.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Contains
User-Generated Content
- Copyright
- © Doug Molineux 2026
