TechNews Skill

Fetches top stories from TechMeme, summarizes linked articles, and highlights social media buzz.

Usage

Command: /technews

Fetches the top 10 stories from TechMeme, provides summaries from the linked articles, and highlights notable social media reactions.

Setup

This skill requires:

• Python 3.9+
• requests and beautifulsoup4 packages
• Optional: tiktoken for token-aware truncation

Install dependencies:

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

Architecture

The skill works in three stages:

1. Scrape TechMeme — scripts/techmeme_scraper.py fetches and parses top stories
2. Fetch Articles — scripts/article_fetcher.py retrieves article content in parallel
3. Summarize — scripts/summarizer.py generates summaries and finds social reactions

Commands

/technews

Fetches and presents top tech news stories.

Output includes:

• Story title and original link
• AI-generated summary
• Social media highlights (Twitter reactions)
• Relevance score based on topic preferences

How It Works

1. Scrapes TechMeme’s homepage for top stories (by default, top 10)
2. For each story, fetches the linked article
3. Generates a concise summary (2-3 sentences)
4. Checks for notable social media reactions
5. Presents results in a clean, readable format

State

• <workspace>/memory/technews_history.json — cache of recently fetched stories to avoid repeats

Examples

• /technews — Get the latest tech news summary

Future Expansion

This skill is designed to be extended to other sources:

• Hacker News (/hn)
• Reddit (/reddit)
• Other tech news aggregators

The modular architecture allows adding new source handlers without changing core functionality.