---
schema: 4
type: case
id: 18
title: "A tech digest that ranks stories by real human effort"
description: "A daily newspaper-style digest that only published stories after they survived a settling delay, scored by a “Human Pain Index”."
created: 2026-10-20
updated: 2026-10-20
attributes:
  channels: [website]
  status: published
  motif: data
  kind: past
  client: "h1902y"
  year: 2026
  state: "Retired"
  stack: ["Next.js", "Cloudflare Workers", "Cloudflare D1", "Drizzle"]
  timeline: "Built in two days, retired in September 2026"
---

## Problem

Tech news is noisy. Hype spikes fast and fades faster, so first-day rankings reward the wrong things.

## What we built

- Fetchers for Hacker News, GitHub Trending, Lobsters, Product Hunt and arXiv
- A scorer for the Human Pain Index and a five-stage settling schedule (day 0, 2, 5, 13 and 34)
- Daily frozen editions and a newspaper-style reading interface
- Command-line tools to triage, settle and simulate a week of stories

## Outcome

- Retired on purpose; the fetchers are being reused in the research engine