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News Minimalist – Only significant news
- KMnO4 4y agoVery cool! >“Today ChatGPT read 1289 top news and gave 13 of them a significance score over 6/10.” Is an excellent hook. I wish there was more of a basis on the score it chose. For example: >“Russia suffers 100,000 casualties in Ukraine conflict, US estimates.” is #2 and ranked 6.8 >“White House estimates Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties in Ukraine since December.” is #237 and ranked 3.8.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoYeah, I'm still thinking about the scoring. Initially I asked ChatGPT to estimate three things: event scale, event magnitude and event potential. That often resulted in clickbait articles going to the top. To fix this I started to also ask it to estimate source credibility, so tabloids would get much lower score than, say New York Times. Now you noticed another problem, similar articles get very different scores. I think ideally I could do some sort of deduplication, but I don't know how to implement it yet.
- csw-001 4y agoHow hard would it be to let users tinker with this? Like could I have a set of sliders to go play with (customize) my scoring? Any chance AI could be used to dedup the stories (like these are identical - only show higher source)?
- yakhinvadim 4y agoOh, sliders for custom scoring is an amazing idea. And should be easy to add — I already have all the ChatGPT estimations for different parts of the score. Added to the TODO list. The problem with deduping is that some news get posted and reposted by different sources for several days (sometimes even weeks) in a row. That's a huge context I'd have to put in AI. 1000 news titles * 3 days * 70 symbols per title = 210,000 symbols = 40000 words = 53000 tokens. My current context window is 8000 tokens and I think 32000 tokens is max that GPT-4 allows. --- Add: now that I think about it should be possible to do in several runs. Will keep thinking about it, thanks for the suggestion.
- jrhizor 4y agoWould getting a summary from ChatGPT with a prompt to eliminate clickbait/bias be helpful before evaluating the event?
- yakhinvadim 4y agoMaybe it's my low prompting skills, but I couldn't make ChatGPT give lower importance to tabloid articles when they claimed that the "world is ending" or something similar. Every time ChatGPT saw the words "World is ending" (not real example) it gave those articles very high score. Estimating source credibility was the only solution I came up with.
- julienmarie 4y agoYou could deduplicate based on vector similarity within a few days (7 days for big stories as their news cycle is longer, 24 or 48 hours for smaller stories). Idea: The number of stories within a cluster weighted by credibility of the source could be another element of the rating.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoWow, thank you! I'm just a frontend dev and know almost nothing about this. Will research vector similarity, sounds like the solution I need.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoAgreed on the point, but your example brings up a different problem for me. 100,000 dead Russians, is very likely the propaganda number. Maybes it’s right; maybe it’s not, IDK, but I know that there has been zero negative Ukraine news since the conflict started (ghost of Kiev anyone?), and the media machine definitely only works one way on this topic. I mean, Russia isn’t the good guy here, but I don’t excuse propaganda just because it tells a story I want to hear. In this case, I don’t care what the US or Ukraine says the number is. That isn’t news. It’s narrative, true or not. So, I feel like the score should take into account if how likely an article is to be narrative vs purely an event.
- amoss 4y agoThe estimate is 100 000 casualities (20k dead and 80k wounded), and it seems to be correlated with several different intelligence sources. The number is news because Russia is waging a large-scale invasion of another country using cannon fodder tactics. Reporting on that invasion is not simply propaganda.
- afterburner 4y ago> The estimate is 100 000 casualities (20k dead and 80k wounded) Since December
- jeegsy 4y agoMaybe something to do with "US" vs "White House"
- yakhinvadim 4y agoHey HN, author of the site here! Happy to answer any questions. (below is the project description I used when posted about it on Reddit) The problem I have with most news sites is that I can't read only important news: an article about a virus outbreak is followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release. But even on sites that focus on important events articles are posted every day and there are always "top headlines" — even on days when nothing important happened. I am forced to make a choice: waste time going through unimportant updates or ignore the news and miss important events. So I built a web app that I think solves this. It uses AI (ChatGPT-4) to read the top 1000 news every day and rank them by significance on a scale from 0 to 10 based on event magnitude, scale, potential, and source credibility. The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/ I also run a newsletter where I post summaries of all the news with a score over 6.5. On average that's 1-3 articles per day, but sometimes it is 5, and sometimes — none at all. In that case, I just send an email saying that nothing important happened that day. You can read previous issues here: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/ https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/ Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas. I'm considering adding new features and looking for direction.
- damnesian 4y agoI am always interested in minimalist / text-oriented resources. And "importance ranking" seems like an especially valid task for AI. Thanks for sharing.
- maliker 3y agoEvery news site has some notion of top items, but you’ve done it 10x better. The de-duplication of similar stories, great summaries, and super clean interface are amazing. Bravo! It really feels like you solved news aggregation.
- hedora 4y agoI’d love for there to be sections, such as science, business, politics, etc.
- yakhinvadim 4y ago
- msla 4y agoWhat a great way to see the bias play out in real time.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoI noticed some bias because I only analyze sources in English. It should be easy to make ChatGPT also read news in other languages, maybe that will help. Is that what you meant?
- tfourb 4y agoIt also seems to be very US-centric and seems to put a strong focus on reporting on the economy. I personally found nothing particularly relevant to my existence featured on the site. These two biases are probably indicative of a host of other, less obvious biases. To be clear: all media is biased, because it is created by biased humans and it has been well demonstrated that algorithms replicate the biases of their creators. A good newspaper/website knows their audience and delivers reporting relevant to it in a language they appreciate and cognizant of its societal impact.
- TinkersW 4y agoThe recent one is economic focused, but if you look back it does focus on other stuff like Starship launch, climate, health, geopolitics, energy etc.
- e12e 4y ago> It should be easy to make ChatGPT also read news in other languages This should indeed be easy, and given how good it is at translation, very interesting - taking too news sources and national broadcast services; rate as you do now - filter the top, summarize in English, store and dedup on similarity vector - it would be great. For example i don't read any Chinese or African news sources - but it would be great to have them in the mix. Might even index on similarity first then ask for a summary on all different reports on the same story?
- spaceprison 4y ago
- codemonkey-zeta 4y agoThis is awesome! I've used thefactual and ground news briefly in the past to try to stay informed without becoming a news-junkie-zombie or exposing myself to propaganda unnecessarily, but ultimately gave up on even "staying informed" because the political nonsense always leaked in and required manual filtering on my part. These headlines are the tiny little tidbits of information that I actually care about, and nothing else. Love that there's no commentary, no extra context, nothing. Just some headlines.
- azinman2 4y agoI really like the simplicity all the way around. Really great job!
- readthenotes1 4y agoAny chance of RSS? I get all my news through Feedly
- yakhinvadim 4y agoOh, good point, just created it: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml I have no control over it, but let me know if there are any problems with it — I'll see what I can do.
- Galicarnax 4y agoAdded it into Feedly, the news appear not as expected: https://postimg.cc/KKNps2xk https://postimg.cc/KKNps2xk
- yakhinvadim 4y agoI see, newlines are missing, will try to fix soon.
- nextaccountic 4y agoCould you make a feed that posts one news article per post, rather than one day per post? That is, for a day with 5 news, post 5 times on the feed, one for each. I'm using a RSS reader that only shows the title of each day (and not the body of the post), and right now it's showing only > Tuesday, May 2 — 4 significant news > Only significant news. All signal, no noise. But I would like to be able to skim all headlines in the RSS reader itself (I know I could probably make a custom RSS feed out of this though)
- jesusofnazarath 4y ago[dead]
- readthenotes1 4y agoThanks!
- voisin 4y agoIt would be amazing if an archive.ph or similar link could be included.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoI'll look into that. For now, I thought of adding a ChatGPT summary of an article, but being able to also read the source is important.
- ghotli 4y agoMy take is that this has legs and please iterate on it to it's natural conclusion, whatever that looks like. It's executed well as is but seems sparse on features overall. Cool idea
- atonse 4y agoI love this idea. For a while this has been the filtering function that HN provided for me (in addition to higher quality discourse) but this does it for general news. Kudos!
- aneeqdhk 4y agoCan we vary the time span? Example: weekly as opposed to daily?
- yakhinvadim 4y agoGreat idea. I'll do two website sections: daily and weekly. Weekly section will have it's own newsletter with, say, only news with score over 7.0.
- tasuki 4y agoAnd monthly please while you're at it!
- 1123581321 4y agoNice job! The high-rates articles all seem weighty. 0.5/10 might be the sweet spot for best of the worst. - WWE Draft 2021: Triple H announces draft picks and new brand exclusivity. - Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson reunite at 2023 Met Gala. - Vladimir Putin's lover Alina Kabaeva makes rare appearance at gymnastics event in Siberia. I’d love to see some dials to find even worse news in the future. :)
- AlstZam 4y agoStrangely i enjoyed it more like that also but it's probably not the goal :)
- ivanstegic 4y agoVery cool. Q: Could you please add RSS? I’d use this every day if I could get it in Feedly. (NM found it in a comment https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml) Q: Why’d you choose 6.5 as the default? Sorry if you answered that already.
- yakhinvadim 4y ago6.5 seemed like a sweet spot for number of news. It results in 1-5 news each day. I tried 6.0 at some point, but I think it resulted in like 10-20 articles each day which seemed a bit much.
- MrJagil 4y agoYou can sub to HN and put a score threshold: https://hnrss.github.io/#firehose-feeds https://hnrss.github.io/#firehose-feeds I will definitely sub to News Minimalist if the same is possible.
- neongodzilla 4y agoAnother request for RSS please!
- yakhinvadim 4y agoYeah, sorry, should've made it earlier! Here's the default one from the newsletter platform, but some people had complaints about it: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml Will try to improve it.
- t0bia_s 4y agoRSS please!
- yakhinvadim 4y agoHere's the default one from the newsletter platform, but some people had complaints about it: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml Added "good RSS" to the TODOs.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoSeems us/eu-centric? I’ll definitely keep an eye on it to see if the composition changes with important events elsewhere in the world. Even if only English language sources are considered, there are available ones for non-English-speaking countries, example from Spain https://english.elpais.com/ https://english.elpais.com/
- megmogandog 4y agoThis would make sense, since the world is 'us/eu-centric' and has been for all of modern history. It might not be for much longer though...
- yakhinvadim 4y agoGood point, I noticed this as well. As you said analyzing news in other languages should help with bringing up different perspectives. I'll work on that. But I'm still not sure what to do about chatgpt's bias. For now I just accept it.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y agoNews isn't significant, only relevant, as the significance is relative. Who's reading it, where they are, what their interests are, what impacts them, and so on. There's no way to generalize it because even some people who it directly impacts may simply not care; it's not significant for them. So the best way to deliver significant news is to personalize, not generalize.
- carabiner 4y agoYou could also just read the Financial Times.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoYeah, today there were many economy articles that ChatGPT found significant. But in the past issues there were more articles about health, science and environment. Recent example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-most-significant-news https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
- mongol 4y agoWhat would be even cooler would be to let GPT4 summarize everything, not just rank it.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoAgree. I did it at first, but quickly realized that it's too expensive. GPT-4 is 15 times more expensive for prompt and 30 times more expensive for completion than GPT-3.5-turbo. But I think GPT-3.5-turbo gives 90% as good summaries as GPT-4.
- marban 4y agoAlso recently added an OAI-driven trending cluster view on BizToc (https://biztoc.com/hot https://biztoc.com/hot)
- Pilottwave 4y agoVery nice I have subscribed to test it out for a couple of weeks. I would love a simple mobile app, it's just easy to tap your news app on a phone, ideally with a way to customize the notification timing. I have certain moments each day when I want to consume this type of content (breakfast, lunch break) A small community driven comment section with Karma system would also be nice. I like to discuss news and it enables knowledgeable people to add some additional insights. See the dutch tech news site for inspiration. they explain their karma system here: https://tweakers.net/info/faq/karma/#tab:1-2 https://tweakers.net/info/faq/karma/#tab:1-2
- RamblingCTO 4y agoWhy not open it in the mobile browser? Or put a reference for the website on your home screen? You could use newsletterify.com (disclaimer: author here) to read them in the browser, not your inbox.
- iansinnott 4y agoNow, if only I had this for Slack...
- yunohn 4y agoHow exactly does ChatGPT perform scoring of articles? I don’t understand this aspect.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoGood question. I gave a small description of it on about page: https://www.newsminimalist.com/about https://www.newsminimalist.com/about > For each article ChatGPT estimates: > Magnitude: how big was the effect; > Scale: how many people the event affected; > Potential: how likely is it that the event will cause bigger events; > Credibility: how credible is the source. Then I do `Credibility * cbrt(Magnitude * Scale * Potential)` cbrt = cubic root Maybe the formula could be improved but I was satisfied with the result, so kept it that way.
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- yunohn 4y agoYes, I understood the idea of the formula. Rather, my question is - how does chatGPT know how to value those variables? It doesn't have a real understanding AFAIK.
- e12e 4y agoIt doesn't. But by the magic of insanely large training corpus, it does anyway. Similar to how it can "roll a die" or "pick a card"[1], the weighted model can do some (to me) mind bending stuff, just by answering "which tokens are likely to come next, in this given context" (which, in some ways, is the same as me trying to guess what you are going to say next; "Thank you for explaining"? (Actually chatgpt is much better at that game than me...). [1] I tried it with gpt4: > Pick a card. >> As an AI language model, I am unable to physically pick a card for you. However, if you're referring to a card from a standard 52-card deck, I can randomly select one for you. >> Your randomly selected card is the 7 of Hearts. > Again. >> Alright, let's randomly select another card for you. >> Your new randomly selected card is the Jack of Diamonds.
- sanitycheck 4y agoI must remember to check this again on a day with some very significant news, because at the moment everything it's showing me is kinda below the bar of what I want to read. It's a nice idea and looks like it's implemented well. My problem is probably that different things are significant to different people. Following that thread leads to filter bubbles, of course. For big international (usually bad!) news I tend to go to Wikipedia Current Events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events Could News Minimalist have an option to only show good news with some significance? I think that might be popular and quite useful for the mental health of lots of people. Good things do happen but they're under-reported because death, destruction and conflict draw more clicks & views. A way to surface the less depressing news would be welcome.
- parasti 4y agoSeems like this is just another algorithmic feed? They're great at trimming down large amounts of data, but I always feel like algorithmic feeds always miss something, that a human never would, as I do just now reading the front page.
- m3nu 4y agoRSS feed would be nice for those who prefer that over email. Otherwise looks great!
- yakhinvadim 4y agoHere's the default one from the newsletter platform, but some people had complaints about it: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml Will try to improve it.
- feeela 4y agoThis seems to be highly focused on global financial news, which are unsignificant to most people on this planet. It would be nice to be able to include or exclude certain news-categories to actually produce a list that has some significance to the reader.
- ggm 4y agoI'm guessing the Arithmetic to maximising significance to population favours economics because 10 cents for every Indian outweighs 300 dead in a train crash several times over.
- Self-Perfection 4y agoIndeed. The perfect news feed has to be tailored to the reader. For instance, events in my city have rather large impact on me but are not interesting for most of the planet.
- boredhedgehog 4y ago> This seems to be highly focused on global financial news, which are unsignificant to most people on this planet. Or perhaps they are more significant than they feel because their trickle-down effect is slow and hard to trace.
- Aeolun 4y agoI built a news app in the past that just read the headline news from a news source of every country on the planet (well, ones we could find English news sources for anyway), and then presented this in a single page where news from every country was equally represented. You’d get super interesting contrasts, and when western media would be going wild over the latest Trump gaffe, right next to it there’d be news from some island in the middle of pacific saying their antelope conservation efforts were finally paying off. In hindsight it was super cool, and I’m really sad I didn’t keep up with it.
- motoxpro 4y agoThis is awesome. It actually works out that when you reduce the "importance" you get more pop culture, tech, etc news which is just amazing. Would easily pay 10$ a month for this in its current state.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoReally? I can't sustain this website for long without some income, and I don't want to put ads, so this is great to hear.
- klabb3 4y agoJust remember that unless you’re selling an open hardware e-ink RISC computer with a serial interface running Doom, hacker news isn’t representative of your customer base. This goes both for the cheers and the boos. (Great product/PoC btw, this seems like an awesome application of LLMs!)
- lordgrenville 4y agoWould be great to make the significance threshold an adjustable parameter. Personally I think a site like this should have way less than 1-3 articles/day - probably closer to 0.1.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoIt is possible currently! There's a slider under the chart that let's you adjust that. For now it doesn't save the position though.
- Zanovis 4y agoFYI On Firefox Mobile, the slider touch area seems small, it's pretty difficult to get a gesture recognized.
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- dotcoma 4y agoRun another instance of it on a different tld only for positive news, and I will sign up!
- yakhinvadim 4y ago"Positive news" filter is a very requested feature, will try to prioritize soon!
- dotcoma 4y agoThanks!
- nikita2206 4y agoThis is great! You’re going to get a lot of ‘I want weekly’, ‘I want categories’, ‘I want settings for this and that’ here, obviously up to you to decide if it’s a good fit but I’d assume that a simple feed without much settings is good enough for most people. From my side the only thing I wished to have once I clicked on the first link is if there were links to de-paywalled websites (I guess Pocket works for that, or webarchive).
- yakhinvadim 4y agoThank you, and great reality check. De-paywalling is on my todo list, was thinking of solving it either as you suggested, or through summaries on the website.
- ranting-moth 4y agoIt's more like "top world news". It's a nice project OP! I'm just ranting about terminology. "Significant" has a very personal context. Things that affects significance to me are things like: proximity to my home/work, my hobbies, my age, my financial situation, etc. For example, if my neighbourhood's crime rate had gone up by 100%, I'd want to see that amongst the top news of the day.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoThank you! And great point. At first I used the word "important", but I thought importance is personal, so switched to "significant". I guess it also doesn't convey the actual meaning. I don't like the word "top" because even on the most uneventful day there's going to be something that qualifies as top (because of the lack of competition). So proper term would probably be "globally significant news" or "news significant to humanity as a whole".
- quinncom 4y agoExactly! I came here to say the same thing. This project is very cool, but the top results are only significant for people concerned with politics and economics. It would be amazing to generate a custom score for the articles based on topics that impact me and my community the most.
- aardvark179 4y agoI understand the idea of only wanting to read important news, but I’m not sure I agree about what counts as important. Maybe no individual bit of celebrity gossip is important, but would this site have picked up any of the #metoo stories? They certainly indicate an important cultural shift, but it feels like the site would only count it as significant when they had a financial impact on a film studio or something.
- james-bcn 4y agoExcellent work! Keep the minimalism of the home page, but add a way for users to customise what is significant for them. It reminds me of The Economist's daily The World in Brief, which I currently subscribe to and is quite expensive...
- MoSattler 4y agoReally happy to pay for journalism like the economist. But not sure what a solution could be for people unable to afford it.
- drooby 4y agoHow are you scraping all this content?
- cloudhead 4y agoThis is great! Would be nice if it didn’t include sites with paywalls as an option.
- rexsteroxxy 4y agoyeah, thought the same thing... Nothing more dissappointing :(
- edge-records 4y ago> we use AI (ChatGPT-4) [...] Credibility: how credible is the source. Mirror mirror on the wall, who is credible at all?
- ksala_ 4y agoThat's a neat idea OP - I usually give https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief give a quick scroll, but I quite like sourcing from several news sites, and the summaries are good. Where and how are you getting the ~1000 news articles you feed to GPT4? I think it would go a long way for transparency to list that somewhere on the website. Also, are you using international news agencies? Quite a lot of them publish an English feed too. I would also love to see the difference it would make given a different geographical prompt ("in the context of China/India/Asia/Europe... How would you are this article") and political ideology prompt ("how would you rate this article for a Republican/Democrat/Libertarian/Socialist...")
- h1fra 4y agoAmazing. Apart from the AI stuff, I think what really makes a difference is the very minimalist design which help reading and choosing more appropriately than a congested design with a lot of images. Alternatively (or complementary), I would recommend https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/ which looks like a classic news outlet, but they pick only the relevant info and more importantly explains where the news fits in the political spectrum.
- shoubidouwah 4y agoLove it, subscribed! some thoughts: - people are harping on bias, but I think they miss the point. Use the tool, get the tool result, and let god sort them out. - Multilingual sources are core to the value proposition. Make it a community list with tags, e.g: a user from india add their favourite local UP political news source with tags [india] [politics]. then you can taylor the reports by interests (yes, like all news aggregation websites before. they do it because it's needed I think) - likewise,store the summaries, then enable users to ask for a rewighing with their interests in the prompt, e.g: "I am a well educated, religious Emirati interested mainly in news about the wars and tensions in the middlke east, as well as car racing" - get news by actual news, not by news source. E.g: get the embeddings of the news, cluster, get summarization of "best" sources of cluster with added info like likely primary source, histograms of reputation vs sentiment vs political leaning - todays news give you also access to the comments, both on the site and e.g: on reddit and twitter. add maybe a comment summarization / sentiment analysis (e.g: 90% of comments on this new york post article were racist one-liners. Dicscusion on this Korean article revolve around effects on workforce mental health, etc) - you mention cost: make accounts able to add their ChatGPT API keys, with an estimation of how much you'll use, ang keep these accounts free. For the others, warn that in time you'll add a small charge maybe?
- cyberdummy 4y agoGreat idea, going to try it out. The RSS feed combined with the source filtering idea would be great.
- aresende 4y agoI liked and, as some people commented, for wide adoption it is important to have some sort of customisation since every person have their own sense of what is relevant or not. But one thing that is missing imho is a RSS Feed. RSS is not dead and a lot of people still uses instead of consume a newsletter at their e-mails.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoHere's the one generated by email platform (will work on improving it, some people had complaints) https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml
- mrzool 4y agoAgreed, an RSS feed is the first thing I looked for on the website. Didn't find it, moved on, will probably forget about the website in a couple of hours. From the footer: > simply visit newsminimalist.com when you feel like it. That's exactly what RSS feeds are for, so you can subscribe to a website and get the updates without the need to visit it again or even think about it again.
- kevincox 4y agoI would also love to see RSS with a filter parameter. I want something roughly once a week. It would be best if the feed can also update one-by-one rather than the daily batch, but not a deal breaker.
- wiesson 4y agoA filter by country would be great!
- finnjohnsen2 4y agoI am European and see another US news oriented site which ironically is not "minimalist" from my perspective. It is (to me) littered with US domestic concerns. My point is that _minimalist_ is highly subjective and a pretty huge promise from a site. But kudos to the effort and the idea of keeping news small is a most noble cause
- yakhinvadim 4y agoAgree, as a Canadian, I also find that today too many US-centric news made the cut, but often it's not the case. Here's a recent issue covering different topics and not mentioning US at all: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-most-significant-news https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
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- MichaelZuo 4y agoOddly enough in the 'least significant section', with scores <0.5, it's nearly all Daily Mail articles focused on the UK. Also, the second to last least significant article seems to be incorrectly categorized: "Regenerative medicine has come a long way, baby" Which is actually a serious look back at the advancements over the last quarter century, hardly deserving the second to last position. It seems like ChatGPT is ranking them not based on actual content significance but presumed significance of the headline. (Which would also make sense technically as ~1200 headlines is about the max context length of GPT-4).
- yakhinvadim 4y agoNice catch. Just checked that article — it actually got rating 2.8 just based on the news content, but the source credibility 1/10 brought it down to 0.3. I don't think it's fair, I think ChatGPT hallucinated that it's a tabloid. Not sure how to fix this. I don't want to adjust sources credibility manually, that will introduce too much bias. My hope is that OpenAI will update ChatGPT with newer data and I could rerun the credibility evaluation.
- noduerme 4y agoJust throwing out there a useless startup idea I had a couple months ago (useless because if you implemented it there would be no moat to anyone else): Show the same news story and have GPT generate left, right and center versions of it that you can diff side by side.
- Johannski 4y agoVery cool idea! Since I‘m not checking news too often, for me a possibility to also define the time range would be a cool feature - or even better a cookie that remembers when I was on the site and gives me the best articles since I last visited (with a min and max range).
- anonymous344 4y agowhen all the news sources are from the same owner's and only to manipulate the masses, it doesn't matter which news you pick, better not to read any news at all
- uxns 4y agoLove the minimalistic approach. May I ask what library have you used for chart?
- yakhinvadim 4y agoThanks! It's Chart.js: https://www.chartjs.org/ https://www.chartjs.org/
- fyhfuhfg 4y agowhat the world needs is news maximalist. where someone with minimal brains read the article before reposting it. critical thinking like chatgpt can't. for example your minimalist list shows "ibm to layoff thousands to replace them with ai". that's not minimizing the news, because now i I'm less informed. someone with knowledge of ibm know they are dead and would layoff with our without the magic ai excuse. so your site kept the non news part of a headline. same about US default. everyone know there will be no default. the headline with minimal critical thinking should be "legislative keep pushing executive for concessions to raise the bureaucratic debt limit" see, thinking is not that hard. but there's zero of it in news and your site minimize it even more.
- hkt 4y agoOne of the first things journalism students learn is that news, by its nature, is significant or it isn't news. The "significance score" is deeply subjective and clearly defaults to an american worldview. So if I were a subeditor tasked with writing a standfiest for this, my headline would be: "american tech people miss point of journalism" More seriously, it takes a human's judgement to do this well. Editors will often read all the other daily papers, weeklies, magazines, and other periodicals. They're highly attuned to "relevance". ChatGPT is clearly editorially very naive
- botanical 4y agoI think it's too US-centric, but maybe that's due to sources like Reuters giving a bigger preference and airtime to US stories rather than the implementation. It'd be great to filter out keywords
- ChildOfChaos 4y agoI would really love a service like this, but the problems for achieving it are pretty big, define significant? This varies a lot from person to person and I feel it is hugely important that it gets this right for someone that wants to stay informed, because if it misses something that would be annoying and the reason you'd revert back to traditional sources. Secondly, it's more of a local thing, most of this is US news as people have pointed out, significant varies again based on location. Being able to manage information is not a battle I feel is being won right now, because content publishers have the complete opposite goals and curation tools aren't adequate enough.
- fideli0 4y agoI like your minimalist, clean approach. Great work! Could you describe how you extract the texts from the news websites?
- jll29 4y agoThe question is whether one should reduce one's news consumption to only "core" stories. In all likelihood that would show you only today's disasters but not the build-up of tomorrow's. Personally, I highly recommend you to rely on more than one source of news, ideally with different country and political biases (for instance, I enjoy reading in The Guardian about Germany, and watching Al Jazeera to learn about what's new in the UK).
- krapp 4y agoI feel like if you have to hear about it on "the news" to begin with, it probably isn't relevant to you.
- fstrazzante 4y agoLove the idea! It already outdo most of news aggregators. I also agree on comments say: minimalist is subjective, but this might be covered with filters.
- uptime 4y agoI feel silly for asking but does ChatGPT have subscriptions to all the things? I wonder how the initial reads are getting done. Very nice concept - thanks for sharing!
- camillomiller 4y agoThe factors for assessing the news score are broken or misplaced. For example this piece of news gets less than 5: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-may-run-short-cash-after-june-1-without-debt-limit-hike-treasury-2023-05-01/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-may-run-short-cash-aft... Yet it’s certainly important, affecting a large number of people, and matching other criteria. As someone who works in media I agree with the premise this comes from, but the implementation is a typical examples of the complexities and nuances that LLMs do not get. Also you’re just under the illusion to escape an agenda, but you’re just swapping human agendas for a technobabble view of journalism that is arid as it can possibly get.
- malgorithms 4y agoI'd been waiting/hoping for someone to make something like this. Well done. A few ideas that will not clutter the UI but you might consider: - when a user changes the score slider, encode that in the URL with a hash tag, so they can bookmark the page with their preferred settings - a left button allowing me to step back to yesterday's news - to simplify newsletter signups, just accept an e-mail address right on that page - your **advanced** options: - have GPT score each news story across common labels: science, politics, entertainment, news, etc. Then allow these as a filter. If I want to see the top science stories of the day, that should be easy. - have GPT write a 2 sentence summary of each story as a lead-in after the headline title - a user/saved whitelist/blacklist of news sites - any advanced setting should be shareable. For example, if someone puts the effort in to make a page with just Australian news sources, focused on sports, with a minimum score of 5.0, they could save that with a title that can be shared for anyone. Congrats on a well-executed project.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoThank you! All great suggestions — will try to add them soon (wasn't really ready for the unexpected launch on HN, but glad it went this way, got a much clearer vision for the future)
- swah 4y agoI love that there are no news over 7.0 significant. FOMO cured.
- erenyeager 4y agoI think I’d like a more comprehensive via location version also. Might also help to include English summaries of news from other languages or from English sources in other countries. For example, I had to scroll to number 32 to see news about the Sudan, which is very significant news that seems marginalized compared to the news about Europe and the US that shows up on the earlier entries.
- nrvn 4y agoWhat about positive news? Is “news” supposed to be about worrying/negative signals incentivizing doom scrolling? Out of the first 20 headlines only one is truly positive(HPV vaccine). The rest show how broken and dreadful our world is. This does not (exclusively) apply to this particular website. It is a common trait across all media platforms - all about politics, war and economic and social problems. It is like, yeah, we have many problems but just pointing out those is an imbalanced way to feed the idol of misery. Where are the news about solutions? One guy even wrote a book called “Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life”.
- laputan_machine 4y agoThis is a good idea but I already disagree with the output. Of the top stories, the majority of them are "could" and "probably" -- that isn't news. News is something that either has happened or is going to happen. If it might not happen, then it's speculation, that isn't news (imo). e.g. - "US Braces for potential recession" -- no, the REAL story is the interest rate is going up - "US Debt default could happen by 2023" -- pure speculation, not news - "WEF predicts jobs disrupted" -- speculation, not news And also I echo the other comments about it being overly US-centric, but that's par for the course. Edit: I should also say, good job! It's a nice website
- gnulinux 4y ago> - "US Debt default could happen by 2023" -- pure speculation, not news It seems like this will happen unless something significant changes. It also seems likely something significant will change, such as GOP and Dems agreeing. But until that happens, Federal Government seems to be on track to default.
- jesusofnazarath 4y ago[dead]
- mk89 4y agoThis is a great idea, the only issue is that in many cases "news" or "what I want to read" can be very subjective. If I want to know what's happening from an authoritative source I go straight to Reuters and that's it. However, there is also objectively less interesting news out there that I might want to click and read, and reducing the score to 3,4,5... (?) will give me a ton of crappy news which I don't want to read, and then I am back to square 1: google news or similar. You need to provide a better way to select or filter out, otherwise you'll only get proxies of Reuters and similar, which we probably already go to during the day.
- yakhinvadim 4y agoGood point, filters are essential (category, source, maybe country). Will try to add them soon.
- ap916 4y agoThis is really cool, and I can see myself using it over the long term. I can't help but wonder that with the rise of tools like this, news agencies might start publishing exploding news to make it seem more important. It'll be interesting to see how the model works with that kind of data and if it's able to figure that out.
- ArcherGorgonite 4y agoIs the web opensource? Do you plan to add dark mode?
- yakhinvadim 4y agoIt's not open source. Dark mode is already there, but it follows the system settings, no manual toggle.
- kkukshtel 4y agoFor people looking for something similar and actually minimalist, I highly recommend http://68k.news http://68k.news I don't know what algo it uses, but it basically grabs top headlines, aggregates similar stories with their headlines (so you can see how other news sites headlined the same news), and then most importantly presents a plaintext version of the article that is accessible without visiting the news site directly. It's honestly the best news site I've ever used, and would recommend it a thousand times over. I also believe I found out about it on HN a few years back http://68k.news http://68k.news
- ksala_ 4y agoIt seems to be just parsing Google News, and displaying the articles in publication order instead of whatever smart order Google News is doing. I do like the design (or lack of) quite a bit.
- seneca 4y agoThe difficulty here is figuring out a definition of "significant news" enough people agree on. For example, you've missed my definition for the same reason many mainstream outlets do: I don't care about the Russian/Ukrainian conflict. That alone is 4 out of 14 of your front page stories. It's a good idea, but it will be difficult to execute in a way useful to a significant number of people.
- kdamica 4y agoThis is awesome. And it has an RSS feed! Would be cool to publish multiple feeds corresponding to each integer significance threshold. Like 6+, 7+ etc Update: turns out the RSS feed doesn’t work like I expected. I wanted it to publish each news item to the feed, but it’s actually just a feed of the newsletter.
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- przybytniewski 4y agoCongrats on the idea and execution. I was thinking about launching similar product, but I thought it'd be too costly to parse all these articles. I was thinking more of first summarizing these articles (avg article has like 1000 words) and then implementing a recommendation module. Without a successful paid plan,I think I'd fail hardly with cost :(
- zttg 4y ago[dead]
- dwrodri 4y agoGreat product! It's been a while since I bookmarked something so quickly. This may very well become my new homepage, or I might parse the RSS into something that appears in my terminal welcome message. Quick suggestion: parse the URL to determine which media organization published the content, and then allow for users and/or the LLM to leverage info from Media Bias/Fact Check[1] to determine if a source is valid. I'd like to see how it arrived at the conclusion of why the article got it's given score. I would 100% pay something like $2 month for a daily feed of ranked headlines with links. I (somewhat ashamedly) get most of my knowledge of current events through reddit, because it's more convenient than aggregating that knowledge myself. However, I also completely agree with the idea that a collective of Internet users is not the best tool for aggregating news, as many popular news/current event subreddits have devolved into echo chambers and astroturfing. The point of saying this is that I know my approach to collecting knowledge about current events is flawed so I'm okay with replacing it with something else that isn't perfect: it just has to be better and more reliable than my current method. 1:https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
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- sogen 4y agoJust one suggestion: - Mark as read Dim already read headlines, be able to mark each one as read or "done"
- yakhinvadim 3y agoGreat idea, I already dim visited links, but it'd be nice to also mark items as done where just reading the title was enough.
- sogen 3y agoCool! Bug or some fine tuning: Saw news repeated about 4 times today, about the European Central Bank/ECB. Some different wording but it was essentially the same.
- pissedoff1 4y agoYour ranking isnt very good, and I see repeated articles; google auth and drone on kremlin, which is really not significant news at all. The google auth thing is given a ranking of 6.8 (highest currently) and "debt limit could send US economy into recession is lower at 6.5", which seems like a much much bigger issue New effective Alzheimer drug is even lower
- llimos 4y agoOn April 18, 1930, BBC radio famously announced, "There is no news tonight. Here is some music." [1] Those were the days. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-39633603 https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-39633603
- yakhinvadim 3y agoThanks for the great link, I included it in today's issue: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/friday-may-5-nothing-important-happened https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/friday-may-5-nothing...