I often browse forums like Hacker News, Tildes, Lobsters, Slashdot, Bear, and some science, tech & programming related subreddits. Having to constantly switch between various sites to stay up to date was frustrating. So, I built Lime Reader.

It has currently aggregated the best 20 thousand articles on STEAMD topics (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math, and Design) from various sites and displays them in chronological order. It shows the score on the side which can be clicked to read comments. I hope it saves you time from having to constantly switch between sites.

The percentages at the top lets you select how much top posts you want to see from each source. Top 100% will show all the top content. If you are short on time and just want to see the cream of the crop, try 5% to see the top 5%. You can change the link to a custom number too.

You can customize theme and other stuff in the settings page. Also, by default, headlines that are classified as political by an LLM are dimmed and show a "P" before them. You can disable dimming or entirely block political headlines in settings.

There are many useful settings you may want to tweak:

https://limereader.com/settings

Tech details:

I really hate huge bloated sites and also hate adding third-party frameworks unless absolutely needed.

Therefore, I have engineered Lime Reader to be as small in size as possible so that it loads instantly. It's server side rendered, so it works even with JavaScript disabled (though enabling it gives you a few extra features like quick access to archive.org for each link).

Both PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom rate my site's performance as Excellent.

This is the first time I decided to develop my entire backend in Swift. It uses only one third-party framework called Vapor for serving the HTML. I am using SQLite for database which comes already included on Apple platforms.

I am running a local LLM model (qwen3:8b) using Ollama for classifying headlines as political or not. It's doing the job decently well. I access it from my Swift backend app using its REST api.

I welcome any feedback.

Also, I am the developer of HACK, the top ranking app for Hacker News on iOS and Android. Is there any interest in turning Lime Reader into an app too?