TimeCrunch.tech

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AI Summary and Locked Article

Inspiration: Millions of people are constantly fed fast-paced information every minute. These thoughts disappear as quickly as they reappear in our feeds, leaving us scrolling, forgetting, and losing a snapshot of what people truly felt in that moment. As communities, we lose track of how opinions form and evolve, and those shifts are lost over time. In today’s digital age, expression often feels heavily filtered, shaped by algorithms and echo chambers that reduce raw human perspective. One heavy inspiration for this project was BeReal, along with the energy of live events where people experience and react in real time. We were especially drawn to how concerts, sports games, or breaking news create a shared emotional space where everyone is reacting together in the same instant.

What it does: TimeCrunch.tech ties one live discussion thread to one current news story at a time. Users can read an AI summary of the article, see a rough political framing, and jump into a threaded comment section while the story is still hot. When the timer runs out, the thread locks and an AI recap captures what people actually said. Then it moves on to the next story.

How we built it: React 19 and Vite on the frontend, FastAPI on the backend, and Supabase for auth and the database. Azure OpenAI handles article summarization, political spectrum labeling, and generating the post-thread recaps. A background sync job polls a Google News RSS feed every few minutes to keep a live thread always available.

Challenges we ran into: Keeping exactly one active forum thread at a time without race conditions took more database wrangling than expected. We also had to be careful about how often we hit the Azure OpenAI API to avoid burning through quota during the background sync.

Accomplishments that we're proud of: The end-to-end flow actually works. A story comes in, gets summarized, people discuss it, it locks, and a recap gets generated. Seeing that whole cycle complete in real time was a great moment. Also, having a complete project that we were able to submit was really satisfying

What we learned: We learned that the technology utilized needs to be quick and easy for a hackathon. Using stuff like Supabase makes development very simple.

What's next for TimeCrunch.tech Build a better political spectrum to make it accurate as possible and add proper moderation to avoid polarization and hate speech.