Gist of Hackathon 2

news-summarizer-project.md

📰 News Summarizer Project — Full Build & Chat Transcript

🚀 Project Overview Backend: Ruby on Rails API (news_summarizer) Summarization Engine: Python script (HuggingFace Transformers + newspaper3k) Frontend: React app (news_summarizer_frontend) Goal: Paste a news article URL, get an AI-generated summary, with robust error handling, tests, and a modern, animated UI. 👤 User Requests & Actions

1. 🛠️ Initial Setup Build a Rails API endpoint to call a Python script for summarizing news articles. Ensure robust error handling and clear JSON responses.
2. 🧪 Testing Add RSpec request specs for POST /summaries (both valid and invalid URLs).
3. 💻 Frontend Scaffold a React app with: A single input for the article URL A "Summarize" button Loading, error, and summary display
4. 🎨 UI/UX Enhancements Make the frontend attractive: centered, full-width input, modern spacing, and font sizes. Add a spinner animation while loading. Animate the summary box with a pop-in effect. Smoothly animate the white box size changes.
5. 🔗 Integration & Environment Enable CORS so React can POST to Rails. Fix NumPy 2.x incompatibility with PyTorch/transformers by downgrading to NumPy 1.x. Suppress all backend warnings and device prints (including “Device set to use mps:0”). Ensure only clean summary text is returned to the frontend.
6. 📄 Transcript Export Requested a full export/gist of the chat and all input provided, both with and without code snippets.

🛠️ Key Decisions & Solutions

Error Handling: Rails controller captures Python errors and returns appropriate JSON with status codes.
Testing: RSpec request specs ensure both success and failure cases are covered.
CORS: Configured rack-cors to allow local frontend-backend development.
NumPy Fix: Downgraded NumPy to 1.26.4 to resolve compatibility issues.
Output Suppression: Used robust file-descriptor-level redirection to silence all backend prints during model loading.
Frontend UX: Added CSS transitions and animations for a smooth, modern user experience.
Loading Animation: Implemented a custom spinner for feedback during summary generation.
Summary Animation: Used CSS keyframes for a scaling/fade-in effect and smooth container resizing.
Transcript Export: Provided a full Markdown summary of the session, both with and without code.

📝 Final Workflow

1. User pastes a news article URL in the React frontend and clicks "Summarize."
2. React sends a POST to the Rails backend.
3. Rails controller invokes the Python script, which fetches and summarizes the article.
4. All backend warnings and device prints are suppressed; only the summary is returned.
5. React displays a spinner while loading and animates the summary when it appears.
6. Errors are handled gracefully and shown to the user.