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Ask HN: News site that provides world updates only when relevant?

169 points by QuarterReptile 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
phgn 5y ago
What global news would you consider relevant? Why not look them up when you're wondering about that thing? IMHO we can do without almost all news coverage, except where it touches our work or social circle. Important bits like election dates, new regulations, significant opportunities etc seem to get to us in any case trough random conversations.
divbzero 5y ago
“The World This Week” by the Economist [1] provides a quick glance of prominent current events each week. [1]: https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/ https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/
QuarterReptile 5y ago
I didn't know about the massing of nearly 100K Russian troops on the Ukranian border until a week or so ago, and felt completely blindsided. I am desperately searching for a (preferably lightweight) site that would offer important world news, limited updates on that story, and be willing to be quiet when nothing is going on. The site I linked is way better than most, but still is full of low-value updates, and it tends to miss stories of real significance. In the past I have used text.npr.org, but it is worse yet about missing stories and giving low-value updates.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  The problem with this is question is that it all comes down to how you define "relevant". What is very relevant to one person is not the same as another, and news orgs are in the business of sending out as many updates as they can. I follow the AP directly, which IMO is pretty good about being concise, relatively impartial and generally does a good job of covering national news. You might try a few different aggregation newsletters to see what feels right for you. But you're always going to make tradeoffs between missing stories and receiving low-value updates, because your low-value updates may be someone else's hugely relevant story.
  - Uehreka 5y ago
    I think “news service that only alerts me about important stuff” is sufficiently specific in that you could probably come up with a service that generally satisfies most people. I think the reason it doesn’t exist isn’t that we don’t know what people think is important, it’s that important news is bursty. It would have to be fully subscription supported, since advertisers probably want to see an even amount of engagement each week (even if it’s small) so that they can set predictable budgets. But important news doesn’t work like that, sometimes there are 3 huge news events happening at the same time, sometimes there’s a slow month with no really big news happening.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nojito 5y ago
  >I didn't know about the massing of nearly 100K Russian troops on the Ukranian border until a week or so ago, and felt completely blindsided. That's pretty unbelievable. It was on the frontpage of all major western news sources.
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    Was it on the frontpage more than one day? One can often miss many whole days but check in from time to time.
    - nojito 5y ago
      If you don't check every day, it's inevitable you will miss something. I guess the real need is not a webpage but more of a notification service that tells you the major news stories of the day.
      - kzrdude 5y ago
        I think I'm good without being pushed news every day
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        Sounds like a niche for RSS to me. Push updates on a situation as it develops, know which part of the news stream you haven't caught up to yet.
  - tfehring 5y ago
    On the median day, major western news sources have zero articles I care about. Here are the current headlines from https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org: - The parents of the accused Michigan school shooter head to court again - Experts crack the secret to last letter of Mary, Queen of Scots before her execution - The Air Force discharges 27 service members for refusing to get a COVID vaccine - Their lives were changed by gun violence, and now they're running for office - The best and worst places to live if you care only about money - To save lives, the overdose antidote naxalone should be sold over-the-counter, advocates argue - Vaccine protection vs. omicron infection may drop to 30% but does cut severe disease - The federal agency that measures racial diversity is led mostly by white people - Rep. Liz Cheney read the text messages she says Mark Meadows got during the Jan. 6 siege - Kentucky crews search painstakingly for 109 people missing after deadly tornadoes - 'Return of the Jedi,' 'Selena' and 'Sounder' added to National Film Registry - Pfizer data shows that its COVID-19 pill is effective against severe disease - Saule Omarova gets candid: Banks sank her nomination to become a key regulator - The Supreme Court again leaves a state vaccine mandate in place for health care workers - Survivors of Nassar's abuse reach a $380 million deal with USA Gymnastics and the Olympic committee - This year's Golden Globes nominations avoid obvious pitfalls, but won't restore the awards' luster - More Black families are homeschooling their children, citing the pandemic and racism - No U.S. troops behind a drone strike that killed Afghan civilians will be punished - What dish is never missing from your holiday table? Tell us why you love it - Elon Musk is Time's 2021 Person of the Year I'd love an RSS feed that lets me know about Russian troops on the Ukranian border but not about any of those "stories." Actually reading the news is a frustrating experience because the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor.
- goblin89 5y ago
  As a counter-anecdote, I have been inundated with the Russia/Ukraine story every day for weeks since the US intelligence report. Every few hours there’s a new report on just this topic by DW or BBC on YouTube, and each time it’s 99% rehashing of the status quo plus 1% of maybe genuine new developments. Same goes for the new variant of COVID, multiple new sensational “breaking” reports per day all summed up as “yeah, stand by, we’ll know in a couple of weeks, or earlier”. I just stopped following the news recently, I may be projecting but it’s all a frenzy.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    On the 99% rehashing, that is another compromise that is forced by the format. The news org doesn't know how much context a reader has: they have to balance between a brief update to a known story (in which case a reader unfamiliar with the story will have no idea who's who, or what's going on) and a full rehashing every time there's an update (which is repetitive and harder to follow over time for someone familiar with the story).
    - goblin89 5y ago
      It’t not just that—they also overstate the severity of the event covered, in each report, even as they inevitably follow that by “well, no cause to really worry yet, we’ll have to see in coming weeks”. I wish for a solid news source that did unbiased reporting in a way that doesn’t offend knowledgeable viewer/reader’s intelligence. Just assume I already know what happened up to this point; then add links/annotations as appropriate. Don’t drum up sensational headlines and speculations. Save your effort, save my time. This isn’t something that can be found on YouTube, as it wouldn’t generate grand amounts of ad revenue.
      - HPsquared 5y ago
        When something "big and scary" turns out to be nothing, they don't usually post an "all clear" on the front page to tie up the loose ends for the reader. The resulting accumulation of worrying information probably contributes to a chronic stress in regular readers.
- anyfactor 5y ago
  I am very specific about the news I read. So, I aggregate news (particularly opinion features) from an easy to scrape news portal. Than I latex-format that to a pdf document using Pandoc and read it offline. I thought about making a news YouTube channel that described essential news stories under 30 or 60 seconds with only the essential highlights. But the incentive was simply not there. I run a VA firm where we aggregate industry news for social media posts. So, my business proposition is that like minded people could pool money to hire a VA and setup strict policies about the scope, news sources (also pay for those news sources) then aggregate and summarize essential news articles catered just for them. I feel like community based services should be a thing and people should pay and own the services they want.
- biztos 5y ago
  I didn't know about the crisis on the Poland-Belarus border[0] until half way through because I wasn't paying attention to the news in Hungary (a very pro-Poland and anti-"migrant" country) and then was surprised by it when I went to Germany and randomly picked up a newspaper. Which is only to say: in addition to the "what is relevant to whom" problem, a lot of times we are just focused on other things, and news sites are not going to find us. Not even hypothetically perfect ones that send us emails about the things we really care about, because sometimes we are going to be busy with work or family or whatever and tune out the constant stream of news alerts. Instead we will rely, as people have for a long long time, on other folks telling us if something really important is afoot. In a way -- counterintuitively? -- this is an argument for watching the Evening News as a sort of information-gathering ritual, just because it's harder to tune out. When I was a kid we always caught the news and the weather. One doesn't need to do that anymore, but maybe it's the better paradigm? You sit there, you chat about something else, you half-listen, but when Dennis Richmond[1] says the alien invasion is on, you're going to hear it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Belarus–European_Union_border_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Belarus–European_Union_bo... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv-Kt-F5CFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv-Kt-F5CFQ [Edit: it's debatable whether this was a "refugee" crisis so I removed that word.]
- idiocrat 5y ago
  You could give ZeroHedge an honest try. There is a certain stigma associated with ZH, but I find the articles well researched, containing in-depth analysis, many times with references to the original sources. What helps to overcome the stigma, is that I see the articles as essays with opinions, rather than single source of truth. Mostly important for me is that ZH is relevant and ahead of time of other MSM, in terms of global events.
avandermeulen 5y ago
Have you checked out the Wikipedia current events page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- judofyr 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure since the linked page here (https://legiblenews.com/ https://legiblenews.com/) is a just more readable version (typography) of Wikipedia's current events.
  - mstngl 5y ago
    Yes, there is correct attribution on the bottom reflecting this: "Original text authored by Wikipedia contributors" & linked to Revision history of the corresponding Wikipedia Portal:Current events/2021 December 13
- QuarterReptile 5y ago
  Now I have; Thank you! This is probably the 80/20 solution that doesn't abuse my attention too much.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  It's a nice summary if you read the whole thing, but the alphabetical ordering (both by category and by title) is not great for a quick skim. If there is no 'priority ordering', the most important article is on average going to be buried somewhere in the middle. It makes it easier for the Wikipedia editors (avoids endless arguments about priority), but not great for the average reader.
- kiwicopple 5y ago
  If you like this in email format: https://currentevents.email https://currentevents.email (looks like my GitHub action has stopped working - will fix it tmr)
  - desku 5y ago
    This looks great. Is it possible to get this as an RSS feed instead of an e-mail newsletter?
tjansen 5y ago
I love the idea. It would be nice if events (Miss Universe, Tornado outbreak) would be put on a timeline, and there would be a separate section for ongoing things (Covid, russian troops).
barkerja 5y ago
It's not a "site" per se, but I have been thoroughly enjoying winno https://winno.app https://winno.app. It's news that you subscribe to based on very specific topics and/or categories.
- sharikous 5y ago
  Winno is fine but it has few feeds. The few feeds are almost all US-centric and most of them have a small left-of-center bias. Since I live in the Middle East the only one relevent to me is the iran-us feed, but even if I was interested in European news there are almost none there
gpm 5y ago
I'm working on something that you might like - though it's not released yet. It's a news site that doesn't write articles. It just organizes links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas that unfolded over time. For stories of sufficient note I'd like to offer the ability to subscribe to them and get email notifications when something major changes. Unfortunately I suspect that for the long tail of other stories I will need to rely on a wiki-style model for gathering links, and probably can't send notifications without it becoming a source of spam. The brief version of the motivation for this is basically three fold: - Most stories of any interest really unfold over a period of weeks to years, but the current news cycle really only favors reporting on them as a single one time event. I'd like that to change. - Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value. - I'd often like to be able to compare new articles to what I've already read on the topic. Edit: Send me an email (my email is on my profile), and I'll send you one back once I have a MVP released. That's just my personal email, and I promise not to add you to a mailing list or anything.
- nathias 5y ago
  This is very cool, especially the assembling news into units of longer duration, it would be great if you also expanded on that with design and make the overarching sagas visually distinct.
- smoe 5y ago
  I was thinking about building something that sounds very similar when I was working at a news site. For me the main benefits of organizing articles into sagas is, that you can easily start reading up on something only once there is actually sufficient information there and to follow stories over time. Think, for example if there is some collapse of a bridge somewhere. Immediately news sites will publish stories to generate clicks but will not have anything useful to say beyond pure speculation. Bride x collapsed and some immediate consequences like road closures is the only thing you'll get that actually contains information. It will take weeks at least before there is anything useful about the why. By the time it might be easy to miss the story. The other thing I think is nice about it, that you can decide your own pace of consuming news. Say you only read news Sunday morning with breakfast, give me the most "relevant" articles and sagas from the the last x days.
efields 5y ago
Relevant is relative.
- Ettaa 5y ago
  Somebody has learned a lesson +1
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Question: Why is this "Ask HN"? Shouldn't it be "Show HN"? Looks like a decent site.
- QuarterReptile 5y ago
  Answer: I misunderstood the submission prompt, thinking my comment would be attached to the post and not lost below. I linked that as a halfway-there example of what I want, and also because I'm a slave to SEO and HN ranks posts higher if they have a link.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    You can edit the title of your post, or if it's been too long for editing to be an option, email hn@ycombinator.com to ask dang to do it for you. I had a similar reaction to others. Ask HN posts are supposed to just be a question, not a link to a site.
    - berkut 5y ago
      It is a question though, the link isn't their site...
      - gnicholas 5y ago
        The instructions on /submit are clear: > Leave url blank to submit a question for discussion.
cabirum 5y ago
How much effort does it take to maintain? Are topic discovery and story updates automated? It looks it could take a whole team to manually update every notable development in a timely manner.
tootie 5y ago
https://theworld.org/ https://theworld.org/ This one is pretty on the nose. It's from PRX/PRI. They have web and audio. But "relevant" is not easily measured. It's obviously pretty personal.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Is it normal for an Ask HN to be a link? It’s got a weird ad smell.
- QuarterReptile 5y ago
  No, I don't think so. I've answered elsewhere in this thread: when making the submission, I thought my comment would stay with the initial post, and yes, I wanted the bump for including a link in the submission. The linked page is a decent page, and a halfway-there example of what I'm looking for.
  - ShamelessC 5y ago
    > and yes, I wanted the bump for including a link in the submission. Wait so are you the originator of the link you posted or not?
    - berkut 5y ago
      Obviously not OP, but I don't think so: they give examples where they'd like improvements. Seems to have just been an example of the best thing they've found so far...
    - QuarterReptile 5y ago
      No, it's a skin of Wikipedia news (TIL) that has no connection to me. When you make a HN submission, there's some placement penalty applied to your submission if it doesn't have a link, IIRC. That's what I was referring to.
EGreg 5y ago
Wikinews?
dougmwne 5y ago
Spicy take: none of it is relevant to you. All world news is outside your sphere of influce and sphere of concern. It’s a pure waste of your time and you don’t need to read anything about it. If a global event is about to affect you, I guarantee you will hear about it.
- moonchrome 5y ago
  Especially important to point out considering the amount of posturing and virtue signalling about "global problems" goes on in our society.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    How much time has collectively been wasted on “Free Tibet” for instance? A person’s interest or disinterest was irrelevant to China’s policies.
- xenocratus 5y ago
  > none of it is relevant to you. > I guarantee you will hear about it. Choose one. I had to book emergency flights back to the UK on a day's notice last year before Christmas because all the countries were closing borders. My partner would've missed it and been stuck abroad if I didn't tell her about it. In a world as connected as ours, finding out what's relevant and what's not is a continuous struggle.
  - slingnow 5y ago
    You didn't know there was a pandemic going on and that countries were reacting by restricting travel? I find that hard to believe.
    - proto-n 5y ago
      Last christmas was the delta scare I believe, with sudden unexpected closures.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
theelous3 5y ago
For "legible" news, I'd like to see the section headers more clearly defined. Also... what does relevant mean? This news about conflict in the congo is not really relevant.
- QuarterReptile 5y ago
  You're right, I didn't define 'relevant', though I appreciate the Congo story. Examples, since you asked: 1. I don't care about Miss Universe (one of the stories in the link). 2. Sports are low value except for championships. 3. I want Covid stories batched where I can look at them if I want to look at that, but where they otherwise don't clutter everything. 4. The Midwest tornadoes are relevant, but human interest stories about one of the deceased candle workers are not.
- berkut 5y ago
  I guess "relevant" depends on where you are in the world (and/or where you're from which might be different to where you are currently) :) It's also a tricky thing due to interconnectedness: I generally don't care that much what happens in the US, but clearly there are important things happening there, which can have knock-on effects the world over...
- masterof0 5y ago
  > This news about conflict in the congo is not really relevant. Why not? Or does it have to be a "technologically advanced" country to be relevant?
arksingrad 5y ago
The archive is a few years out of date: https://legiblenews.com/archive/ https://legiblenews.com/archive/
ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
I'd like to see a news site in the style of the kind of cable bulletin board you saw a lot of from the 70s-90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEP96kDKW44&list=PLu7_of-Pg8ASVPADWR9SKrOgw2RubySuz&index=5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEP96kDKW44&list=PLu7_of-Pg8...
iso1631 5y ago
I subscribe to a weekly news magazine, it comes through the door on a Friday, and I read it on Saturday morning. There's very little news that I need to change my approach to the day for.
narrator 5y ago
Someone will probably tell you if it's important enough to affect your life. Barring that, the best very low volume news Twitter, IMHO, is @disclosetv . They don't tweet more than about 20 or so times a day and anything really important always shows up there. They are definitely right wing, so if you can't stand that, you're out of luck.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Not for COVID. I had approximately 2 weeks lead time ahead of the general public, thanks to message boards of all things. I could've known it as early as January, AFAIK, if I'd had enough background knowledge to identify the information as significant.
omarhaneef 5y ago
Relevance is in the eye of the beholder. Or, to put it another way, relevance is a property of the relationship between the material and the consumer. You would have to know something about me in order to provide me with relevant (to me) news.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  Even if a media tries to make a guess as to what you view as relevant they might not get it right and the internet will go banans and claim that the site is suppressing relevant stories. Relevant can better judged in hindsight. I’d try to find an outlet which publish stories once a week, or less. That filters out the less important stories.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Or you could just have a tag-like approach to news. If something new interests you, subscribe to a tag. If it ceases to interest you, unsubscribe from that tag or snooze it for some months. You discover new tags by seeing them referenced in stories from tags you already follow. That's pretty similar to what Reddit does. And it doesn't even need much user data, other than the user expressing what they are interested in.
newacc9 5y ago
I think the product you are looking for is a weekly or monthly email/magazine analysis of the news. There must be a large number of companies in the space, fwiw I get my weekly update from worldaffairsbrief.com.
- vpribish 5y ago
  isn't that the Chemtrails guy? yep https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/Chemtrails.html https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/Chemtrails.html
  - newacc9 5y ago
    His major research focus is deep state and triggers for world war. https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/threats.html https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/threats.html
    - subandi 5y ago
      I don't know what he's peddling, the truth it is not. Headlines straight from his homepage: "Ben Swann Exposes Institutional Failure Surrounding The Legitimate PizzaGate Investigation" "Germany’s Deep State Murders Doctor for Spilling the Truth"
      - newacc9 5y ago
        I told you what he's "peddling", ie his research focus. You just read the headlines. That's not smart, you have to read the articles. https://www.bitchute.com/video/IEmsdn8tf7Rc/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/IEmsdn8tf7Rc/
webscout 5y ago
https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com and https://upstract.com https://upstract.com are the exact opposite but also feature Wikipedia Current events (among many others).
arasx 5y ago
I've briefly worked on an idea that was "pandora for news" when pandora was the hot music app. The app would learn from your votes and cater news/aggregations based on your preferences every day to your news dashboard. I was in love with the idea but never pursued it. Is there something like this now?
- BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
  That sounds like it would be a radicalization engine for at least some portion of the population. I strongly encourage you to not pursue this idea.
  - arasx 5y ago
    call this a romanticized view, but for every tool mankind has created - there are ways to utilize it in good VS bad outcomes. I didn't really think of it as; the learning would concentrate around opposing views. Instead of "liberal views on middle east" vs "conservative views on middle east" it would be about "middle east politics" whether you are interested in the topic or not in general - if that makes sense. I would use a tool like this. That being said, that is not always a good indicator for a broad adoption interest.
    - BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
      > for every tool mankind has created - there are ways to utilize it in good VS bad outcomes Counter point: Slot machines exist. (I suppose you might find some few instances of them being used to raise money for charity or something, but I don't think that redeems the technology.) Recommendation engines are generally benign when the input content is benign. Pandora itself doesn't seem to cause trouble. Though even with benign content, content recommendation can encourage unhealthy behavior, such the content recommendation engine of netflix/etc encouraging binge consumption and couch potatoism. But what does it mean for content to be benign and how is that determination made? When you have relatively little content that changes relatively infrequently, like netflix, you can have trusted humans perform the selection. That bakes the biases of those humans into the system, which is not inherently a problem (it's not as though any newspaper or book was ever any different in this regard.) But with things like youtube or the hypothetical Pandora for News, the the depth and breadth of content is too large for trusted human curation. I think we've actually already seen some examples of this manifest on Facebook, where the recommendation engine sends people down radicalizing holes of local news particularly. There has been a lot of talk recently about the identification and suppression of disinformation and misinformation. D&M is problematic and tasking independent fact checkers to fight it may have some merit, but I think there is much more to consider. For starters, the local fact-checkers, who understand the language and cultural context of the material they are evaluating, are imposing their own potentially harmful biases onto the system. Secondly, and more importantly, some propaganda is neither misinformation nor disinformation. An example: racists love to pass around links to factually correct local news articles about crime. They will inundate their targets with news stories that support their narrative. Each of those stories, evaluated independently, might be factual and come from a reputable news organization. But the sum of those stories may mislead people by not presenting mitigating considerations, social or historical context, etc. If you create a system that recommends people the intersection of 'local news' and 'crime', you've automated the job of the racist propagandists. But if your content recommendation engine doesn't recommend such intersections, by lumping all local news into a single category, then it has little utility over simply visiting the websites of local news organizations. And if your system forbids local news entirely because the breadth of local news across the world is too much to moderate, then your system omits the news that directly impacts the lives of news readers the most. I don't see any way around the above, but what makes a recommendation engine any worse than the local newspaper itself? Simply this: a newspaper is the same for everybody who reads it, when somebody is being sent down some bizarre radical rabbit-hole, those around them can read the newspaper and see what sort of thing their friend is reading. But recommendation engines provide personalized experiences. People can be radicalized without others in their community seeing what is happening, denying that community the opportunity to effectively respond and intervene. People withdraw into their own personal realities, losing touch with those around them. The further apart people grow, the harder reconciliation becomes.
hankchinaski 5y ago
the only lightweight news site i like is lite.cnn.com although with US focus i would love to see a more EU/UK/Worldwide focused one
dfghdfhs 5y ago
Depends on what you mean by "relevant". Personally I don't think Miss Universe is super relevant for the world. It's just some show that someone owns and monetizes. Or that some kid detonated himself. Or something something about the NFL....
als0 5y ago
This is just a reskin of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
nickstinemates 5y ago
The most valuable/relevant news includes original sources. As an example,, If there's a summary about court proceedings, link to the transcript. Gone are the day we need someone to interpret the original event for us with their own bias.
Sommer 5y ago
In the spirit of several projects mentioned here, this is an NLP-based RSS feed generator I put up recently- it takes a news story as a search parameter and it creates a latest, related story feed from it. add any url or search term to https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=[url or search term] Here is a good example using a Harpers story on disinformation: https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/ https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=https://harpers.org/archi... It is a WiP (new filter parameters shortly), but you can also visit the root of that domain if you rather get email alerts or use a slack notification. The UI in particular is very alpha, so please feel free to send suggestions. [edit:learning about formatting]
ricardobayes 5y ago
Soo... essentially a clone of Reuters? Failing to see why this is new.
benbristow 5y ago
I've been quite enjoying these two Twitter accounts (primarily UK-centric) https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI https://twitter.com/NewsForAllUK https://twitter.com/NewsForAllUK Bite-sized news headlines with sources in the replies if you need them, and the standard Twitter discussion thread.
u2077 5y ago
Winno is an iOS app that I’ve been using and it’s amazing. They don’t have a web app, however that is in the pipeline. For now you can join their discord server and there is a bot that posts summaries. (Unfortunately the read-more urls are only available within the app) The only downsides I’ve found is that the only way they make money is buymeacoffee. I haven’t looked into their privacy policy as well. https://winno.app/ https://winno.app/
lorenzfx 5y ago
I like the economist, for keeping up with the latest news especially the brief updates on the first 2-4 pages.
evandwight 5y ago
How do you decide what qualifies? I'm trying to build something like that. Take hacker news and let the community curate it into a weekly newsletter of just the important posts. It's a work in progress and I'm a little starved for feedback. https://efficientdemocracy.com https://efficientdemocracy.com
wheels 5y ago
Here's one that I personally find really interesting: Spiegel is one of the major German news magazines, and it has a small international section, where it takes the most important important, almost always long-form articles per day and translates them into English. As a result, it's both better than the German language Spiegel (which contains the usual fluff), and better than most English language publications (in curation, not sum of good content). It's EU focused, but maybe worth a gander: https://www.spiegel.de/international/ https://www.spiegel.de/international/
ComputerGuru 5y ago
BBC news is the closest to “just the facts, ma’am” to the extent that the app shows me (untouched, unbumped) months old news stories for categories that have had no recent updates. Their articles have a “news only with a narrative” main section and then any opinion is separated by an hr with the name of the person and their take on the news.
dmingod666 5y ago
I am thinking of building a simple comments per hour and total comments driven alert from HN. I missed the whole log4j news few days back. It will just ping me when something interesting comes up.
jcgoette 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542718
galfarragem 5y ago
https://www.slowernews.com https://www.slowernews.com I cherry-pick articles that dissect trends, unveil lesser known trends or are interesting edge cases, and are relevant, at least, for some months. It's like a generalist and slow HN once most articles appeared here. I couldn't find something similar so I built it... RSS, quarterly newsletter[0] and open source[1]. It's my pet project: I feed him, he doesn't feed me but in the end he makes me a better person. [0] https://slowernews.substack.com/ https://slowernews.substack.com/ [1] https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
goblin89 5y ago
It’s not an Ask HN but a promotion for Legible News, which has a paid product and is apparently based off content written by Wikipedia’s contributors. It doesn’t seem like Legible News uses any part of its profits to donate to Wikimedia or its contributors, or at least this isn’t stated anywhere on the website.
- gpm 5y ago
  OP just messed up posting it, see explanation here [1] and his "original comment" which was meant to be the question here [2]. I also feel like me and my as-of-yet unnamed/unreleased product is probably the main benefactor, since my top level comment has gotten a lot of attention (>20 emails too). I promise that I don't know the OP. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552591 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551687
gladinovax 5y ago
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thoughtstheseus 5y ago
The congressional research service produces comprehensive reports on most topical issues. Filled with facts, sourcing, and data.

deleted 5y ago

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phgn 5y ago

What global news would you consider relevant? Why not look them up when you're wondering about that thing? IMHO we can do without almost all news coverage, except where it touches our work or social circle. Important bits like election dates, new regulations, significant opportunities etc seem to get to us in any case trough random conversations.

divbzero 5y ago

“The World This Week” by the Economist [1] provides a quick glance of prominent current events each week. [1]: https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/ https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/

QuarterReptile 5y ago

I didn't know about the massing of nearly 100K Russian troops on the Ukranian border until a week or so ago, and felt completely blindsided. I am desperately searching for a (preferably lightweight) site that would offer important world news, limited updates on that story, and be willing to be quiet when nothing is going on. The site I linked is way better than most, but still is full of low-value updates, and it tends to miss stories of real significance. In the past I have used text.npr.org, but it is worse yet about missing stories and giving low-value updates.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
The problem with this is question is that it all comes down to how you define "relevant". What is very relevant to one person is not the same as another, and news orgs are in the business of sending out as many updates as they can. I follow the AP directly, which IMO is pretty good about being concise, relatively impartial and generally does a good job of covering national news. You might try a few different aggregation newsletters to see what feels right for you. But you're always going to make tradeoffs between missing stories and receiving low-value updates, because your low-value updates may be someone else's hugely relevant story.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  I think “news service that only alerts me about important stuff” is sufficiently specific in that you could probably come up with a service that generally satisfies most people. I think the reason it doesn’t exist isn’t that we don’t know what people think is important, it’s that important news is bursty. It would have to be fully subscription supported, since advertisers probably want to see an even amount of engagement each week (even if it’s small) so that they can set predictable budgets. But important news doesn’t work like that, sometimes there are 3 huge news events happening at the same time, sometimes there’s a slow month with no really big news happening.
deleted 5y ago
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nojito 5y ago
>I didn't know about the massing of nearly 100K Russian troops on the Ukranian border until a week or so ago, and felt completely blindsided. That's pretty unbelievable. It was on the frontpage of all major western news sources.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Was it on the frontpage more than one day? One can often miss many whole days but check in from time to time.
  - nojito 5y ago
    If you don't check every day, it's inevitable you will miss something. I guess the real need is not a webpage but more of a notification service that tells you the major news stories of the day.
    - kzrdude 5y ago
      I think I'm good without being pushed news every day
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      Sounds like a niche for RSS to me. Push updates on a situation as it develops, know which part of the news stream you haven't caught up to yet.
- tfehring 5y ago
  On the median day, major western news sources have zero articles I care about. Here are the current headlines from https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org: - The parents of the accused Michigan school shooter head to court again - Experts crack the secret to last letter of Mary, Queen of Scots before her execution - The Air Force discharges 27 service members for refusing to get a COVID vaccine - Their lives were changed by gun violence, and now they're running for office - The best and worst places to live if you care only about money - To save lives, the overdose antidote naxalone should be sold over-the-counter, advocates argue - Vaccine protection vs. omicron infection may drop to 30% but does cut severe disease - The federal agency that measures racial diversity is led mostly by white people - Rep. Liz Cheney read the text messages she says Mark Meadows got during the Jan. 6 siege - Kentucky crews search painstakingly for 109 people missing after deadly tornadoes - 'Return of the Jedi,' 'Selena' and 'Sounder' added to National Film Registry - Pfizer data shows that its COVID-19 pill is effective against severe disease - Saule Omarova gets candid: Banks sank her nomination to become a key regulator - The Supreme Court again leaves a state vaccine mandate in place for health care workers - Survivors of Nassar's abuse reach a $380 million deal with USA Gymnastics and the Olympic committee - This year's Golden Globes nominations avoid obvious pitfalls, but won't restore the awards' luster - More Black families are homeschooling their children, citing the pandemic and racism - No U.S. troops behind a drone strike that killed Afghan civilians will be punished - What dish is never missing from your holiday table? Tell us why you love it - Elon Musk is Time's 2021 Person of the Year I'd love an RSS feed that lets me know about Russian troops on the Ukranian border but not about any of those "stories." Actually reading the news is a frustrating experience because the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor.
goblin89 5y ago
As a counter-anecdote, I have been inundated with the Russia/Ukraine story every day for weeks since the US intelligence report. Every few hours there’s a new report on just this topic by DW or BBC on YouTube, and each time it’s 99% rehashing of the status quo plus 1% of maybe genuine new developments. Same goes for the new variant of COVID, multiple new sensational “breaking” reports per day all summed up as “yeah, stand by, we’ll know in a couple of weeks, or earlier”. I just stopped following the news recently, I may be projecting but it’s all a frenzy.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  On the 99% rehashing, that is another compromise that is forced by the format. The news org doesn't know how much context a reader has: they have to balance between a brief update to a known story (in which case a reader unfamiliar with the story will have no idea who's who, or what's going on) and a full rehashing every time there's an update (which is repetitive and harder to follow over time for someone familiar with the story).
  - goblin89 5y ago
    It’t not just that—they also overstate the severity of the event covered, in each report, even as they inevitably follow that by “well, no cause to really worry yet, we’ll have to see in coming weeks”. I wish for a solid news source that did unbiased reporting in a way that doesn’t offend knowledgeable viewer/reader’s intelligence. Just assume I already know what happened up to this point; then add links/annotations as appropriate. Don’t drum up sensational headlines and speculations. Save your effort, save my time. This isn’t something that can be found on YouTube, as it wouldn’t generate grand amounts of ad revenue.
    - HPsquared 5y ago
      When something "big and scary" turns out to be nothing, they don't usually post an "all clear" on the front page to tie up the loose ends for the reader. The resulting accumulation of worrying information probably contributes to a chronic stress in regular readers.
anyfactor 5y ago
I am very specific about the news I read. So, I aggregate news (particularly opinion features) from an easy to scrape news portal. Than I latex-format that to a pdf document using Pandoc and read it offline. I thought about making a news YouTube channel that described essential news stories under 30 or 60 seconds with only the essential highlights. But the incentive was simply not there. I run a VA firm where we aggregate industry news for social media posts. So, my business proposition is that like minded people could pool money to hire a VA and setup strict policies about the scope, news sources (also pay for those news sources) then aggregate and summarize essential news articles catered just for them. I feel like community based services should be a thing and people should pay and own the services they want.
biztos 5y ago
I didn't know about the crisis on the Poland-Belarus border[0] until half way through because I wasn't paying attention to the news in Hungary (a very pro-Poland and anti-"migrant" country) and then was surprised by it when I went to Germany and randomly picked up a newspaper. Which is only to say: in addition to the "what is relevant to whom" problem, a lot of times we are just focused on other things, and news sites are not going to find us. Not even hypothetically perfect ones that send us emails about the things we really care about, because sometimes we are going to be busy with work or family or whatever and tune out the constant stream of news alerts. Instead we will rely, as people have for a long long time, on other folks telling us if something really important is afoot. In a way -- counterintuitively? -- this is an argument for watching the Evening News as a sort of information-gathering ritual, just because it's harder to tune out. When I was a kid we always caught the news and the weather. One doesn't need to do that anymore, but maybe it's the better paradigm? You sit there, you chat about something else, you half-listen, but when Dennis Richmond[1] says the alien invasion is on, you're going to hear it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Belarus–European_Union_border_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Belarus–European_Union_bo... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv-Kt-F5CFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv-Kt-F5CFQ [Edit: it's debatable whether this was a "refugee" crisis so I removed that word.]
idiocrat 5y ago
You could give ZeroHedge an honest try. There is a certain stigma associated with ZH, but I find the articles well researched, containing in-depth analysis, many times with references to the original sources. What helps to overcome the stigma, is that I see the articles as essays with opinions, rather than single source of truth. Mostly important for me is that ZH is relevant and ahead of time of other MSM, in terms of global events.

avandermeulen 5y ago

Have you checked out the Wikipedia current events page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

judofyr 5y ago
I'm pretty sure since the linked page here (https://legiblenews.com/ https://legiblenews.com/) is a just more readable version (typography) of Wikipedia's current events.
- mstngl 5y ago
  Yes, there is correct attribution on the bottom reflecting this: "Original text authored by Wikipedia contributors" & linked to Revision history of the corresponding Wikipedia Portal:Current events/2021 December 13
QuarterReptile 5y ago
Now I have; Thank you! This is probably the 80/20 solution that doesn't abuse my attention too much.
HPsquared 5y ago
It's a nice summary if you read the whole thing, but the alphabetical ordering (both by category and by title) is not great for a quick skim. If there is no 'priority ordering', the most important article is on average going to be buried somewhere in the middle. It makes it easier for the Wikipedia editors (avoids endless arguments about priority), but not great for the average reader.
kiwicopple 5y ago
If you like this in email format: https://currentevents.email https://currentevents.email (looks like my GitHub action has stopped working - will fix it tmr)
- desku 5y ago
  This looks great. Is it possible to get this as an RSS feed instead of an e-mail newsletter?

tjansen 5y ago

I love the idea. It would be nice if events (Miss Universe, Tornado outbreak) would be put on a timeline, and there would be a separate section for ongoing things (Covid, russian troops).

barkerja 5y ago

It's not a "site" per se, but I have been thoroughly enjoying winno https://winno.app https://winno.app. It's news that you subscribe to based on very specific topics and/or categories.

sharikous 5y ago
Winno is fine but it has few feeds. The few feeds are almost all US-centric and most of them have a small left-of-center bias. Since I live in the Middle East the only one relevent to me is the iran-us feed, but even if I was interested in European news there are almost none there

gpm 5y ago

I'm working on something that you might like - though it's not released yet. It's a news site that doesn't write articles. It just organizes links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas that unfolded over time. For stories of sufficient note I'd like to offer the ability to subscribe to them and get email notifications when something major changes. Unfortunately I suspect that for the long tail of other stories I will need to rely on a wiki-style model for gathering links, and probably can't send notifications without it becoming a source of spam. The brief version of the motivation for this is basically three fold: - Most stories of any interest really unfold over a period of weeks to years, but the current news cycle really only favors reporting on them as a single one time event. I'd like that to change. - Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value. - I'd often like to be able to compare new articles to what I've already read on the topic. Edit: Send me an email (my email is on my profile), and I'll send you one back once I have a MVP released. That's just my personal email, and I promise not to add you to a mailing list or anything.

nathias 5y ago
This is very cool, especially the assembling news into units of longer duration, it would be great if you also expanded on that with design and make the overarching sagas visually distinct.
smoe 5y ago
I was thinking about building something that sounds very similar when I was working at a news site. For me the main benefits of organizing articles into sagas is, that you can easily start reading up on something only once there is actually sufficient information there and to follow stories over time. Think, for example if there is some collapse of a bridge somewhere. Immediately news sites will publish stories to generate clicks but will not have anything useful to say beyond pure speculation. Bride x collapsed and some immediate consequences like road closures is the only thing you'll get that actually contains information. It will take weeks at least before there is anything useful about the why. By the time it might be easy to miss the story. The other thing I think is nice about it, that you can decide your own pace of consuming news. Say you only read news Sunday morning with breakfast, give me the most "relevant" articles and sagas from the the last x days.

efields 5y ago

Relevant is relative.

Ettaa 5y ago
Somebody has learned a lesson +1

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Question: Why is this "Ask HN"? Shouldn't it be "Show HN"? Looks like a decent site.

QuarterReptile 5y ago
Answer: I misunderstood the submission prompt, thinking my comment would be attached to the post and not lost below. I linked that as a halfway-there example of what I want, and also because I'm a slave to SEO and HN ranks posts higher if they have a link.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  You can edit the title of your post, or if it's been too long for editing to be an option, email hn@ycombinator.com to ask dang to do it for you. I had a similar reaction to others. Ask HN posts are supposed to just be a question, not a link to a site.
  - berkut 5y ago
    It is a question though, the link isn't their site...
    - gnicholas 5y ago
      The instructions on /submit are clear: > Leave url blank to submit a question for discussion.

cabirum 5y ago

How much effort does it take to maintain? Are topic discovery and story updates automated? It looks it could take a whole team to manually update every notable development in a timely manner.

tootie 5y ago

https://theworld.org/ https://theworld.org/ This one is pretty on the nose. It's from PRX/PRI. They have web and audio. But "relevant" is not easily measured. It's obviously pretty personal.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

Is it normal for an Ask HN to be a link? It’s got a weird ad smell.

QuarterReptile 5y ago
No, I don't think so. I've answered elsewhere in this thread: when making the submission, I thought my comment would stay with the initial post, and yes, I wanted the bump for including a link in the submission. The linked page is a decent page, and a halfway-there example of what I'm looking for.
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  > and yes, I wanted the bump for including a link in the submission. Wait so are you the originator of the link you posted or not?
  - berkut 5y ago
    Obviously not OP, but I don't think so: they give examples where they'd like improvements. Seems to have just been an example of the best thing they've found so far...
  - QuarterReptile 5y ago
    No, it's a skin of Wikipedia news (TIL) that has no connection to me. When you make a HN submission, there's some placement penalty applied to your submission if it doesn't have a link, IIRC. That's what I was referring to.

EGreg 5y ago

Wikinews?

dougmwne 5y ago

Spicy take: none of it is relevant to you. All world news is outside your sphere of influce and sphere of concern. It’s a pure waste of your time and you don’t need to read anything about it. If a global event is about to affect you, I guarantee you will hear about it.

moonchrome 5y ago
Especially important to point out considering the amount of posturing and virtue signalling about "global problems" goes on in our society.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  How much time has collectively been wasted on “Free Tibet” for instance? A person’s interest or disinterest was irrelevant to China’s policies.
xenocratus 5y ago
> none of it is relevant to you. > I guarantee you will hear about it. Choose one. I had to book emergency flights back to the UK on a day's notice last year before Christmas because all the countries were closing borders. My partner would've missed it and been stuck abroad if I didn't tell her about it. In a world as connected as ours, finding out what's relevant and what's not is a continuous struggle.
- slingnow 5y ago
  You didn't know there was a pandemic going on and that countries were reacting by restricting travel? I find that hard to believe.
  - proto-n 5y ago
    Last christmas was the delta scare I believe, with sudden unexpected closures.
selfhoster11 5y ago

theelous3 5y ago

For "legible" news, I'd like to see the section headers more clearly defined. Also... what does relevant mean? This news about conflict in the congo is not really relevant.

QuarterReptile 5y ago
You're right, I didn't define 'relevant', though I appreciate the Congo story. Examples, since you asked: 1. I don't care about Miss Universe (one of the stories in the link). 2. Sports are low value except for championships. 3. I want Covid stories batched where I can look at them if I want to look at that, but where they otherwise don't clutter everything. 4. The Midwest tornadoes are relevant, but human interest stories about one of the deceased candle workers are not.
berkut 5y ago
I guess "relevant" depends on where you are in the world (and/or where you're from which might be different to where you are currently) :) It's also a tricky thing due to interconnectedness: I generally don't care that much what happens in the US, but clearly there are important things happening there, which can have knock-on effects the world over...
masterof0 5y ago
> This news about conflict in the congo is not really relevant. Why not? Or does it have to be a "technologically advanced" country to be relevant?

arksingrad 5y ago

The archive is a few years out of date: https://legiblenews.com/archive/ https://legiblenews.com/archive/

ZanyProgrammer 5y ago

I'd like to see a news site in the style of the kind of cable bulletin board you saw a lot of from the 70s-90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEP96kDKW44&list=PLu7_of-Pg8ASVPADWR9SKrOgw2RubySuz&index=5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEP96kDKW44&list=PLu7_of-Pg8...

iso1631 5y ago

I subscribe to a weekly news magazine, it comes through the door on a Friday, and I read it on Saturday morning. There's very little news that I need to change my approach to the day for.

narrator 5y ago

Someone will probably tell you if it's important enough to affect your life. Barring that, the best very low volume news Twitter, IMHO, is @disclosetv . They don't tweet more than about 20 or so times a day and anything really important always shows up there. They are definitely right wing, so if you can't stand that, you're out of luck.

selfhoster11 5y ago
Not for COVID. I had approximately 2 weeks lead time ahead of the general public, thanks to message boards of all things. I could've known it as early as January, AFAIK, if I'd had enough background knowledge to identify the information as significant.

omarhaneef 5y ago

Relevance is in the eye of the beholder. Or, to put it another way, relevance is a property of the relationship between the material and the consumer. You would have to know something about me in order to provide me with relevant (to me) news.

mrweasel 5y ago
Even if a media tries to make a guess as to what you view as relevant they might not get it right and the internet will go banans and claim that the site is suppressing relevant stories. Relevant can better judged in hindsight. I’d try to find an outlet which publish stories once a week, or less. That filters out the less important stories.
selfhoster11 5y ago
Or you could just have a tag-like approach to news. If something new interests you, subscribe to a tag. If it ceases to interest you, unsubscribe from that tag or snooze it for some months. You discover new tags by seeing them referenced in stories from tags you already follow. That's pretty similar to what Reddit does. And it doesn't even need much user data, other than the user expressing what they are interested in.

newacc9 5y ago

I think the product you are looking for is a weekly or monthly email/magazine analysis of the news. There must be a large number of companies in the space, fwiw I get my weekly update from worldaffairsbrief.com.

vpribish 5y ago
isn't that the Chemtrails guy? yep https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/Chemtrails.html https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/Chemtrails.html
- newacc9 5y ago
  His major research focus is deep state and triggers for world war. https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/threats.html https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/threats.html
  - subandi 5y ago
    I don't know what he's peddling, the truth it is not. Headlines straight from his homepage: "Ben Swann Exposes Institutional Failure Surrounding The Legitimate PizzaGate Investigation" "Germany’s Deep State Murders Doctor for Spilling the Truth"
    - newacc9 5y ago
      I told you what he's "peddling", ie his research focus. You just read the headlines. That's not smart, you have to read the articles. https://www.bitchute.com/video/IEmsdn8tf7Rc/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/IEmsdn8tf7Rc/

webscout 5y ago

https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com and https://upstract.com https://upstract.com are the exact opposite but also feature Wikipedia Current events (among many others).

arasx 5y ago

I've briefly worked on an idea that was "pandora for news" when pandora was the hot music app. The app would learn from your votes and cater news/aggregations based on your preferences every day to your news dashboard. I was in love with the idea but never pursued it. Is there something like this now?

BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
That sounds like it would be a radicalization engine for at least some portion of the population. I strongly encourage you to not pursue this idea.
- arasx 5y ago
  call this a romanticized view, but for every tool mankind has created - there are ways to utilize it in good VS bad outcomes. I didn't really think of it as; the learning would concentrate around opposing views. Instead of "liberal views on middle east" vs "conservative views on middle east" it would be about "middle east politics" whether you are interested in the topic or not in general - if that makes sense. I would use a tool like this. That being said, that is not always a good indicator for a broad adoption interest.
  - BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
    > for every tool mankind has created - there are ways to utilize it in good VS bad outcomes Counter point: Slot machines exist. (I suppose you might find some few instances of them being used to raise money for charity or something, but I don't think that redeems the technology.) Recommendation engines are generally benign when the input content is benign. Pandora itself doesn't seem to cause trouble. Though even with benign content, content recommendation can encourage unhealthy behavior, such the content recommendation engine of netflix/etc encouraging binge consumption and couch potatoism. But what does it mean for content to be benign and how is that determination made? When you have relatively little content that changes relatively infrequently, like netflix, you can have trusted humans perform the selection. That bakes the biases of those humans into the system, which is not inherently a problem (it's not as though any newspaper or book was ever any different in this regard.) But with things like youtube or the hypothetical Pandora for News, the the depth and breadth of content is too large for trusted human curation. I think we've actually already seen some examples of this manifest on Facebook, where the recommendation engine sends people down radicalizing holes of local news particularly. There has been a lot of talk recently about the identification and suppression of disinformation and misinformation. D&M is problematic and tasking independent fact checkers to fight it may have some merit, but I think there is much more to consider. For starters, the local fact-checkers, who understand the language and cultural context of the material they are evaluating, are imposing their own potentially harmful biases onto the system. Secondly, and more importantly, some propaganda is neither misinformation nor disinformation. An example: racists love to pass around links to factually correct local news articles about crime. They will inundate their targets with news stories that support their narrative. Each of those stories, evaluated independently, might be factual and come from a reputable news organization. But the sum of those stories may mislead people by not presenting mitigating considerations, social or historical context, etc. If you create a system that recommends people the intersection of 'local news' and 'crime', you've automated the job of the racist propagandists. But if your content recommendation engine doesn't recommend such intersections, by lumping all local news into a single category, then it has little utility over simply visiting the websites of local news organizations. And if your system forbids local news entirely because the breadth of local news across the world is too much to moderate, then your system omits the news that directly impacts the lives of news readers the most. I don't see any way around the above, but what makes a recommendation engine any worse than the local newspaper itself? Simply this: a newspaper is the same for everybody who reads it, when somebody is being sent down some bizarre radical rabbit-hole, those around them can read the newspaper and see what sort of thing their friend is reading. But recommendation engines provide personalized experiences. People can be radicalized without others in their community seeing what is happening, denying that community the opportunity to effectively respond and intervene. People withdraw into their own personal realities, losing touch with those around them. The further apart people grow, the harder reconciliation becomes.

hankchinaski 5y ago

the only lightweight news site i like is lite.cnn.com although with US focus i would love to see a more EU/UK/Worldwide focused one

dfghdfhs 5y ago

Depends on what you mean by "relevant". Personally I don't think Miss Universe is super relevant for the world. It's just some show that someone owns and monetizes. Or that some kid detonated himself. Or something something about the NFL....

als0 5y ago

This is just a reskin of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

nickstinemates 5y ago

The most valuable/relevant news includes original sources. As an example,, If there's a summary about court proceedings, link to the transcript. Gone are the day we need someone to interpret the original event for us with their own bias.

Sommer 5y ago

In the spirit of several projects mentioned here, this is an NLP-based RSS feed generator I put up recently- it takes a news story as a search parameter and it creates a latest, related story feed from it. add any url or search term to https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=[url or search term] Here is a good example using a Harpers story on disinformation: https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/ https://followthisstory.com/rss/?q=https://harpers.org/archi... It is a WiP (new filter parameters shortly), but you can also visit the root of that domain if you rather get email alerts or use a slack notification. The UI in particular is very alpha, so please feel free to send suggestions. [edit:learning about formatting]

ricardobayes 5y ago

Soo... essentially a clone of Reuters? Failing to see why this is new.

benbristow 5y ago

I've been quite enjoying these two Twitter accounts (primarily UK-centric) https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI https://twitter.com/NewsForAllUK https://twitter.com/NewsForAllUK Bite-sized news headlines with sources in the replies if you need them, and the standard Twitter discussion thread.

u2077 5y ago

Winno is an iOS app that I’ve been using and it’s amazing. They don’t have a web app, however that is in the pipeline. For now you can join their discord server and there is a bot that posts summaries. (Unfortunately the read-more urls are only available within the app) The only downsides I’ve found is that the only way they make money is buymeacoffee. I haven’t looked into their privacy policy as well. https://winno.app/ https://winno.app/

lorenzfx 5y ago

I like the economist, for keeping up with the latest news especially the brief updates on the first 2-4 pages.

evandwight 5y ago

How do you decide what qualifies? I'm trying to build something like that. Take hacker news and let the community curate it into a weekly newsletter of just the important posts. It's a work in progress and I'm a little starved for feedback. https://efficientdemocracy.com https://efficientdemocracy.com

wheels 5y ago

Here's one that I personally find really interesting: Spiegel is one of the major German news magazines, and it has a small international section, where it takes the most important important, almost always long-form articles per day and translates them into English. As a result, it's both better than the German language Spiegel (which contains the usual fluff), and better than most English language publications (in curation, not sum of good content). It's EU focused, but maybe worth a gander: https://www.spiegel.de/international/ https://www.spiegel.de/international/

ComputerGuru 5y ago

BBC news is the closest to “just the facts, ma’am” to the extent that the app shows me (untouched, unbumped) months old news stories for categories that have had no recent updates. Their articles have a “news only with a narrative” main section and then any opinion is separated by an hr with the name of the person and their take on the news.

dmingod666 5y ago

I am thinking of building a simple comments per hour and total comments driven alert from HN. I missed the whole log4j news few days back. It will just ping me when something interesting comes up.

jcgoette 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542718

galfarragem 5y ago

https://www.slowernews.com https://www.slowernews.com I cherry-pick articles that dissect trends, unveil lesser known trends or are interesting edge cases, and are relevant, at least, for some months. It's like a generalist and slow HN once most articles appeared here. I couldn't find something similar so I built it... RSS, quarterly newsletter[0] and open source[1]. It's my pet project: I feed him, he doesn't feed me but in the end he makes me a better person. [0] https://slowernews.substack.com/ https://slowernews.substack.com/ [1] https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews

goblin89 5y ago

It’s not an Ask HN but a promotion for Legible News, which has a paid product and is apparently based off content written by Wikipedia’s contributors. It doesn’t seem like Legible News uses any part of its profits to donate to Wikimedia or its contributors, or at least this isn’t stated anywhere on the website.

gpm 5y ago
OP just messed up posting it, see explanation here [1] and his "original comment" which was meant to be the question here [2]. I also feel like me and my as-of-yet unnamed/unreleased product is probably the main benefactor, since my top level comment has gotten a lot of attention (>20 emails too). I promise that I don't know the OP. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552591 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551687

gladinovax 5y ago

[dead]

thoughtstheseus 5y ago

The congressional research service produces comprehensive reports on most topical issues. Filled with facts, sourcing, and data.