11 ms·

Kite News

181 points by tigroferoce 1y ago

freediver 1y ago
Kagi founder here. This is prematurely shared and not ready for prime time yet. Official launch with mobile apps will happen soon. Thanks!
- viraptor 1y ago
  Looks awesome though. I'm already on board with where this is going. Although it would be great to know if some money goes back to the original sources...
- nticompass 1y ago
  Is it ok to use it, or should I wait until it's officially announced? (P.S. been paying for Kagi search since January, very happy with it)
  - msdz 1y ago
    It's existed for months by now, and has been usable for nearly as long. I'd say you can decide if you need extra fluff like native apps or further "polishing" at this point.
  - yannicklesuisse 1y ago
    Kagi News (formerly Kite) Product Manager here, You can use the website and even make it a web app if you want. We’ll be releasing a mobile version that will be better suited but will have the same features :)
    - MaysonL 1y ago
      Will you have an RSS feed that can be integrated into Tapestry (mobile app by Iconfactory)?
- lemming 1y ago
  I'm very interested in this, I'm a long term kagi subscriber with the free t-shirt! One thing that would be interesting to explore would be a feed that integrated over a longer timeframe. For example, I subscribe to the guardian weekly, and I like it much more than the daily homepage. News that survives a week tends to be more newsworthy, and there's more scope for the beginnings of retrospective analysis. It would be interesting to be able to play with that timeframe - what does a 3 day window look like, or a 1 month one?
  - msqinfo 1y ago
    Sorry to plug my product again (from the comment above), but mosaique.info offers filters for three days, a week, a month, and a year (among others).
- tigroferoce 1y ago
  Ah, sorry I spoiled it out. I saw on Reddit and thought it was great (like a lot of other Kagi things). Keep up the good work!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- burkaman 1y ago
  Please, please reconsider this product and take it offline for now. The vast majority of "information" in these stories is complete garbage. You are making up numbers, facts, quotes, and entire narratives. I made a list of examples (from just one single story) in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520841. I don't think a service like this is impossible, but it cannot be done with LLMs. They are the worst possible tool for news, all they can do is generate text that looks like legitimate news but is inevitably wrong. Again, please don't do this. Think about the massive amount of lies you will spread if this gains a large user base. I've been a subscriber for years, but I will cancel my subscription in a few days if you don't do anything about this. I can't let you use my money to create this societal catastrophe. Edit: I see there is a GitHub issue raising the same problems, hopefully you can respond there with what you're doing about this: https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/issues/97 https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/issues/97
  - msqinfo 1y ago
    I've built a similar product (https://www.mosaique.info https://www.mosaique.info), but it doesn't rely on LLMs (except for generating a very short summary). I think it offers a wider set of opinions and is much more exhaustive.
    - dartharva 1y ago
      Looks like your option has a much smaller set of topics. Science, Technology, Economics and Regional news are largely absent
      - msqinfo 1y ago
        Yes the focus is largely on international news.
- olivierduval 1y ago
  Hi First, it's a great idea! The "introductory" speech is interesting then... the result is really disappointing :-( You see: I'm French (and European). So, I don't necessarily consider that "Trump" is the center of the "World" (actually quite the opposite). However, on the "World" tab, 50% of the news are about "Trump". I would have thought that the aim of this kind of newsfeed is to challenge Trump tactic's of "newsroom saturation". In particular in that tab (Trump can be the alpha & omega for the USA tab)
  - jastuk 1y ago
    As another European, I second this. I avoid Trump "news" like a plague. This was 50% Trump; 8 out of 10 was US.
  - mvieira38 1y ago
    Your feelings against news focused on America are valid, but there's no denying that the second Trump administration is such a world-shaking event, in a scale not foreseen by mainstream media or markets, that it would be weird not to have it everywhere. "President of the richest country in history unilaterally tariffs the entire world without approval of Congress" is, like it or not, a bigger headline than Europe's endless regulatory arguments
    - olivierduval 1y ago
      Actually, I dont need a "smart newsfeed" to hear about Trump. Smart is not about who is doing the show every day, it's about what's important and may be missed
  - vulkoingim 1y ago
    I'm with you on that one. An option to exclude certain words/topics/individuals would be great.
  - freediver 1y ago
    It is not by choice, but because that is what all major world outlets are writing about (and Kagi News has super diverse selection of sources). What makes an event 'significant' is number of publishers writing about it.
- Brendinooo 1y ago
  What kind of editorial policies will you have about how you frame stories and what kind of words you will use? I'm a happy subscriber to Tangle News, and its founder has spent a lot of time about about how he wants to bridge ideological divides in a way that echoes "We strive for diversity and transparency of resources and welcome your contributions to widen perspectives." He talks about looking for language to avoid those divides: where one side might speak of illegal aliens and other side might speak of undocumented immigrants, Tangle picked the term unauthorized migrants. He did a little TED talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=543mYKKh1EE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=543mYKKh1EE Anyways, just curious how you'll approach this issue. I'm interested in your project and wish you all the best!
wkat4242 1y ago
> World doesn't live in echo chambers. The reality emerges from the collision of different viewpoints and perspectives - that's how we separate signal from noise To be honest, when people start talking about "echo chambers" it's usually because they are upset that I won't listen to bigoted alt-right hate. For me this term has gained a really negative connotation. I understand the problem but hearing the same tired ranty talking points repeated is not helping my state of mind. If that means I am in an "echo chamber", so be it. Alternative viewpoints, fine, when there is something to build on. But there are limits. When differences in opinion are too extreme debating them is only causing agitation and polarisation, in my experience. I understand the point but I wouldn't use the term "echo chamber" anymore. I like this service by the way. I've been thinking of making something myself by using an AI to filter news feeds by the topics I'd be interested in. Edit: Just found out it is very configurable, that's great! My original point was that the default is very US centric in its news choice but this can be simply modified.
- esperent 1y ago
  > when people start talking about "echo chambers" it's usually because they are upset that I won't listen to bigoted alt-right hate Maybe you're in an echo chamber when it comes to echo chambers then? I usually hear the term related to social media algorithms, and usually implied is that we're all being chambered, left, right or otherwise.
- nerdjon 1y ago
  I get where you are going and I do agree with you, but I think there is some validity to still calling it an echo chamber. For example, I live in Boston and very liberal. I did not grow up in this area though, and I have noticed that among some of my friends that have... they have zero idea what most of this country is actually like. Even just other more moderate liberal people that don't have the "luxury" of living in a big city that largely shields us. Something that I feel like we saw in particular during the last election. I totally get not caring about, and not wanting to see, the alt-right hate. I don't want to be constantly reminded that people hate me just for existing. I am not sure what an alterative word for this is, and I think it goes farther than just trying to tune out the alt-right hate.
colesantiago 1y ago
I love how there are no ads on the page and it is all for free, no paywalls, private, to the point, no sponsors, just the news. Can you add RSS feeds as well? More news websites need to take a leaf out of Kagi. Edit: The RSS feed is here: https://kite.kagi.com/world.xml https://kite.kagi.com/world.xml
- rdmuser 1y ago
  I love when projects add rss feeds like this. The feed articles look great and are individual items per story not one big list as one article which I appreciate. That rss feed seems to be specifically for the world category. Anyone know if there are other feeds? Edit:nvm you can find each feed at the bottom of the page.
- pyman 1y ago
  > and it is all for free, I'm guessing it's free for now so people can test it and give feedback, since it's still an MVP. But based on the website, once the app is fully released, you'll have to pay for it. So don't get your hopes up, especially with apps that rely on expensive LLMs. Showing ads or sponsored links is one business model. Charging a subscription to remove them is a different one (like what Twitter recently did).
  - baggachipz 1y ago
    The Kagi I know would never have ads, much less charge to remove them. I'm pretty confident that this service will be another perk of the main Kagi subscription.
    - pyman 1y ago
      Kagi doesn't have ads because people pay for it. Google Search has ads because it's a free service. https://kagi.com/pricing https://kagi.com/pricing
      - pasc1878 1y ago
        The point is that Kagi would not have ads. Yes it charges for any use - but not to remove ads.
josters 1y ago
Intrigued by the World Tension Index (you can enable it in the settings under the Experimental tab) which currently reads Mild/24°: > The world is simmering gently, marked by active regional conflicts, deadly protests, and a severe flood, yet tempered by budding Gaza ceasefire talks and cooperative diplomatic meetings. > While trade disputes and political probes contribute to tension, no large-scale escalations or catastrophic events push the situation beyond the usual range of global unrest. I wonder how this is calculated and what would push the meter from normal over elevated to serious/extreme.
pyman 1y ago
I love it. This is the only site I want to read the news on. Feature request: Mark the headline as read once I tap or click on it. When I collapse a headline, would it be possible to change the text colour to grey? I don't like having to do manual tasks when I’m just trying to read the news. Amazing tool, thanks!
- pyman 1y ago
  Also, how's the Orion browser connected to all this? The https://kagi.com https://kagi.com homepage has a mix of everything: search, AI assistant, browser, now news. Are these separate products? Will I have to pay for this? It's not very clear.
- captn3m0 1y ago
  I made something quite similar, and was just using <details> tag instead with grey coloring on open (that was persisted to localstorage).
- xtracto 1y ago
  Have a look at https://www.boringreport.org/app https://www.boringreport.org/app I saw it here on HN a couple of years ago and found it pretty good. I hate the current state of news. Titles are usually pure clickbait and half of the article's content is filling text for ad prints.
tomrod 1y ago
I really love this. I also just started reading Kagi's changelog. I'm glad I subscribe, these folks rock!
mbirth 1y ago
There’s an iOS app doing something pretty similar: https://pidgeon.news/ https://pidgeon.news/
dflock 1y ago
If you could mash this together with this: https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/ - that would be great.
- onionisafruit 1y ago
  Thanks for showing this to us. The significance score is interesting. I like what kagi has done here, but news minimalist might be my real find from this post.
- yakhinvadim 1y ago
  Founder here, thanks for the shout out!
incomingpain 1y ago
>an endless stream of clickbait that destroys our ability to think deeply and clearly. Disagreed. News never changed. It was always exactly like this. The Pulitzer award was created because journalists lied and caused an assassination and the spanish war. The thing that changed is social media is letting everyone fact check the journalists and we're catching them in their lies. We are ushering in a new era of professionalism and truth in journalism and it's not going well at all. Here in Canada we have a funny one happening right now. Another whistleblower from the CBC was forced to involuntarily resign. Now the CBC is saying they refuse his resignation that he's a slave and must continue working for them. So his lawyer has to bring a human rights lawsuit. >World doesn't live in echo chambers. The reality emerges from the collision of different viewpoints and perspectives - that's how we separate signal from noise. Or at least it shouldnt be this way. >This multi-source approach helps reveal the full picture beyond any single viewpoint. Grabbed the RSS, thanks!
- Havoc 1y ago
  >News never changed. It was always exactly like this. I'd say the velocity and reach of it certainly has changed. A world leader tweeting fresh insanity to millions of people every couple hours wasn't a thing during earlier eras.
  - incomingpain 1y ago
    >I'd say the velocity and reach of it certainly has changed. A world leader tweeting fresh insanity to millions of people every couple hours wasn't a thing during earlier eras. You're describing social media where that's happening. Not journalism or news. You might argue that social media == news. That's likely true, but that makes journalists the antiquated news.
- imiric 1y ago
  > News never changed. It was always exactly like this. That's not true. Bias and agenda have always existed, but there was a time when news sources clearly distinguished facts from opinions. In the US the shift arguably happened in 1987 when the fairness doctrine was abolished, and for-profit media companies were given freedom to publish anything they wanted. The 24/7 news cycle was established, and news sources operated under incentives to keep consumers' attention above everything else, including journalistic integrity. > The thing that changed is social media is letting everyone fact check the journalists and we're catching them in their lies. We are ushering in a new era of professionalism and truth in journalism and it's not going well at all. That's a bold take, if I ever saw one. You're actually saying that social media is a good thing for journalism? If anything, social media exacerbated the free-for-all problem of reporting. Suddenly, everyone was a news reporter, with zero moral or integrity obligations. On the contrary: the larger the audience of a social media influencer, the more incentivized they are to infuse their content with bias and agenda. Companies, advertisers, and governments love that influencers can be easily bought. This is far from a "new era of professionalism and truth in journalism". What a skewed perspective you have. And now with AI tools, the world is even more flooded with (m|d)isinformation than ever before. There's nothing inherently flawed about traditional news media. It just needs to be strongly regulated to report facts rather than opinions[1]. This regulation is literally impossible on social media. Journalism is not something anyone with a social media account can or should do. I'm not saying that journalism can't exist on social media—it certainly can. But on its own it's not a place where journalism can thrive. I would go a step further and make journalism a licensed profession, with its own variant of the Hippocratic Oath. Making the line between fact and fiction as clear as possible is essential to living in reality. Otherwise, words can be weaponized and people can be manipulated into thinking and acting in ways that are beneficial to those in power. [1] To counter the argument "who gets to be the arbitrer of truth?", it's quite easy to determine when a news story is opinionated: it's loaded with adjectives and language that is crafted to elicit an emotional response in the consumer. Journalism, on the other hand, reports events that happened. It succinctly answers who, what, when, where. It doesn't describe why, or tries to put a spin on the facts. Those events can be easily fact checked. In fact, if everyone was doing journalism, every news story would be exactly the same. The differences are the bulk of the bias and agenda.
smoothbenny 1y ago
UX is nice enough but suffers from same curation (center-right leaning, tech industry-directed) that makes anything like this fundamentally pointless in the long term. Designed to keep readers within the acceptable window of mainstream media that manufactures consent for war, genocide, income inequality, and other suffering at home and abroad. For example: this site taught me that there is only one (unnamed) sticking point on the Gaza ceasefire agreement! Gee, I bet it’s really going to happen this time. Also to offer an Israel section at all, let alone without a corresponding Palestine section, is dubious.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- vdupras 1y ago
  That is indeed a problem and an unsolvable one. All major news sources are in the business of manufacturing consent. They're not trying to manufacture the exact same consent, but mash them together... you get a general direction, not unlike the ones we see at cattle ranches. But those news are still useful. There is still real information coming from it, and of better quality than all those alternative channels (which are in the business of, I guess we could call, "disrupting consent", but often with shadowy interests). What I think one must do is to get good at separating the wheat (facts) from the chaff (analysis). The "chaff" part can be rejected completely, but I find it interesting to analyze it. This sometimes allows one to derive an intent behind the consent manufacturing process. That being said, even though the information that it mashes together is flawed, I find that there's good value in this new Kite thing. Removing the attention stealing part of news, however flawed these are, is still a great service.
  - smoothbenny 1y ago
    tl;dr: It sounds like we agree that the UX is good but the aggregation is bad. To call the problem unsolvable is dismissive and makes the whole endeavor of aggregating news pointless. The mainstream sources are in fact manufacturing the exact same consent by defining the acceptable polarity of discourse on any given topic. There are plenty of non-major news sources that offer a different perspective from the mainstream but aren’t fringe in any sense. Someone as plain as Amy Goodman comes to mind. By ignoring them all and saying the mainstream sources are of “better quality” leaves me curious to know which alternative sources are on your radar as well as your overall satisfaction with the news presented on the site. The problem with this site specifically is it is not mashing everything together to get a general direction. It curates a specific set of sources to provide a center-right direction while explicitly ignoring the left of center POV. Let’s assume this takes off and people find it an easily digestible way to read the news. Readers trust the product and decide that if they want to learn more about a story they can click the source links, since those must also be trustworthy. And by extension, alternative sources may not be trustworthy. Based on what you’re saying I think we both agree that these are bad conclusions, since mainstream sources routinely lie or create narratives that allow for war, death, antisemitism, Islamophobia, etc., while alternative outlets may have heavily sourced, deeply detailed reporting that wouldn’t get picked up by major press. Facts presented in a story from either type of outlet may be doctored in many ways for any number of purposes, so it’s not so simple to say a number or a survey result or anything else is “wheat”, or that any analysis is “chaff”.
ks2048 1y ago
I clicked on a story and at the bottom, it lists "sources" (19 in this case). Following one of these sources (a lesser-known site), there is an article, and at the end it says "REUTERS". So, I guess its source was another source. Maybe a site like this should try to root-out the "root source" of information - official press releases or press conferences, eye-witness accounts. I think some editorializing is worthwhile to place things in context and to decide what information to put together into a readable article, but things could be more explicit and should always link to the source material.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Maybe derivative articles could be placed under the source article hierarchically, with some kind of badge on each sub-article indicating percent of significant difference.
  - onionisafruit 1y ago
    That would be great. I get frustrated when I want to read more about a news event and find that all the additional articles just rehash the same information. Instead I want to find other articles about the same event that have additional information.
- mvieira38 1y ago
  Offering a non-editorialized solution for news in 2025 is the opposite of what I thought Kagi stood for. They make a "small web" feature and the best fediverse search index, both to highlight human created content, but then make an AI news aggregator? Are we supposed to form communities and read stuff written by people or are we not?
- soerxpso 1y ago
  > Maybe a site like this should try to root-out the "root source" of information - official press releases or press conferences, eye-witness accounts. I'd personally pay for that. It feels like 90% of the "news" I see these days is just some site telephoning what a different reporter said. I regularly see "study finds x" articles that completely bury the original academic source. Often, "politician said x" articles that spend a lot of time going over everyone's reactions to whatever the politician said without letting me have the full video or press release where he actually said it. This would also fix an issue I'm seeing on Kite where some stories seem to be the same thing from different angles (one article about the Texas floods is directly above an article about how the Texas floods are "testing FEMA", and there are two separate articles for the recent Trump-Netanyahu deal, one in World and one in USA. X's CEO resigning is three different articles in different feeds. The Business tab has two different articles about Trump tariffs that could really be one article).
Havoc 1y ago
This looks great!
nop_slide 1y ago
Love seeing this is a true “SPA”, a literal single index.html page built using one of my favorite little libraries Alpine.js https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/blob/main/src/index.html https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/blob/main/src/inde... My pendulum has swung so far away from react and its ilk that this is refreshing to see.
psychoslave 1y ago
>The reality emerges from the collision of different viewpoints and perspectives - that's how we separate signal from noise. No, representations, not reality is what is obtained from this process. Reality is the encompassing whole where these processes happen and whose absolute actual relevant interpretation is beyond what the most sophisticated educated intelligent human will either be able to grab. I agree this is being very picky about words, and generally speaking, sure shame on me to bring to much focus on such a triviality. But in this specific case of a public announcement of how a company is going to greatly improve news, I feel like it's very relevant that they consider their words with caution. All that said, good chance to them in the endeavor, that's a nice goal.
elashri 1y ago
That's great. As a long time kagi subscription (with free t-shirt because I forgot to order) I think this needs some polishing Here are my suggestions 1- Add ability to have different languages. The feed should allow having one language or more and move between them or mix them 2- It is better if feeds with different languages keeps their our json file for contributing to be easier but build curated one automatically for them 3- This currently does not support RTL languages (or content languages in any of them) 4- It is good if the user can ban certain keywords because of the news fatigue about them. I might want the tech category but don't want to hear about LLM news 5- While the diversity of feeds is good in general. Sometimes you would want to block a certain website feed. Kite should support this in some sense. I understand that this might be beyond the envisioned view if it as generic news app but I think it should be more personal.
saubeidl 1y ago
The announcement talks a big talk of trying to avoid echo-chambers, but the sources it quotes seem to be exclusively on the center-right (i.e. liberal) to far-right spectrum. Not a single left wing source as far as I can see. Everything contained within the pro-capitalist echochamber. No Jacobin, No Novara Media, No WSWS. Just another way of rearranging the same pro-market propaganda. As a paying Kagi subscriber, it's deeply disappointing to see this.
- pasc1878 1y ago
  I see the Guardian - which is considered left wing in the UK - so I would think would be in the US as well.
  - smoothbenny 1y ago
    It’s center-right. Even something as boring as Democracy Now would be a major improvement for this list.
  - wredcoll 1y ago
    This seems like a perfect example of the weirdness of our overton window. Is the the guardian out here campaigning for socialism and democracy and labor right and gender equality and such?
    - pasc1878 1y ago
      Yes it definitely supports those things. It will give platforms to those campaigning for those things. It is a newspaper so its job is to report but not necessarily campaign. But look at the subheadings on the Opion page to see what opinons it pushes.
      - smoothbenny 1y ago
        citation needed
        1y ago
c16 1y ago
"World doesn't live in echo chambers.", yet 1/2 of the articles are about Trump. I appreciate this is likely coincidence, but my my news sources are far more varied.
presbyterian 1y ago
I can't find where it specifies how the news is "distilled". I assume it's an LLM summarization, given Kagi is in the AI business in other ways, but it would be nice if they could clearly state that. Knowing who or what I'm listening to is a fundamental part of being able to trust it or not.
maxehmookau 1y ago
If this is not meant to be an echo chamber, why is "Bay" one of the default categories? Most people don't live in the SF Bay Area. Most people who don't, don't even know what "Bay" would mean. I only know because I spend enough time in tech circles to 'get it'.
raincole 1y ago
> Kite reads public RSS feeds of thousands of (community-curated) world-wide news sources and distills them into one perfect daily briefing So AI-summarized version of /r/worldnews? I know people love Kagi, but I really don't know how it is better than other news sources except the UI.
- arandomusername 1y ago
  /r/worldnews is not a balanced view and is clearly extremely left-leaning. I imagine Kagi thrives to portray a more balanced view.
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    In my experience /r/worldnews is extremely right-leaning. The power of echo chambers, huh?
    - arandomusername 1y ago
      Show me one article that's on the front page of r/worldnews that is right leaning.
      - saubeidl 1y ago
        https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1lvzd7k/north_korean_defector_sues_kim_jongun_in_historic/ https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1lvzd7k/north_ko...
        arandomusername 1y ago
        Anti Kim Jong-un, a dictator, article is right leaning?
        raincole 1y ago
        That's just how the left works today. Anything remotely aligns with the US's interest (criticizing NK, China, etc) is right leaning.
mfro 1y ago
I like this a lot. A suggestion, I think it would be good to have a 'latest update' date on the articles, indicating the latest update of any source used. I understand this could be difficult but it would be nice.
ksec 1y ago
Damn I was hoping Kite would be done with Crystal as well. I was actually working on a similar hobby project that is 80%+ similar even the Today In History! But the AI summary and execution is just so much better. Kite actually got me to look at Kagi again. Joined the Trail, and downloaded Orion. Turns out Webkit Browser can actually be good with Multi Tab usage. It is just Desktop Safari implementations sucks. Will try to run it for a few months and see how it goes. I really hope Kagi would succeed.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
burkaman 1y ago
This currently has an extremely serious hallucination (aka lying) problem, and I am begging people to not use AI-written "news" services. AI aggregation of links to real stories is maybe ok, but you cannot trust anything that claims to be "summarizing" sources while actually just making things up. The first item I clicked on as a test was "Texas floods raise alarms over weather service cuts" in the Science section. Here are all the issues I found in about 2 minutes, again on the first and only item I've looked at: - The first image is from the New York Times, but it links to an AP article that doesn't contain the image. - "The Guadalupe surged more than 30 feet in five hours, overwhelming campsites and low-lying neighborhoods." These figures are wrong, all sources I can find say 30 feet at most, over a time period of much less than 5 hours. - "A Trump-backed spending bill passed the House with a 22 % cut to NWS operations and satellite procurement." No idea what bill this is talking about or where this number came from, despite some effort to find out. Some sources say the local NWS had lost 22% of its staff, maybe the LLM saw this number somewhere and threw it in here for fun. - "Kerr County’s applications for federal hazard-mitigation grants in 2017 and 2018 were rejected, leaving it without sirens or modern river gauges." This is very misleading wording, the grant applications were denied by Texas, not by the federal government. - "“We know the river rises, but we can’t warn people with equipment we don’t have.” - Judge Rob Kelly, Kerr County" This is a hallucinated quote attributed to a real person. He never said the "we can’t warn people with equipment we don’t have" part, nor did anyone else. This is an incredibly serious issue and it is deeply irresponsible to release a product that does this. - The second image is a graphic that says Disaster 101. It is from a link inside a Grist article about the floods for another article about general disaster preparedness. However, Kagi links it to a Reddit post about Ted Cruz. Kagi's caption is "Trees partially submerged along the swollen Guadalupe River on July 4, 2025.". This is lightly paraphrased from the caption of a completely different image in the Grist article. - The Perspectives section cites three real articles, but hallucinates their content including quotes that don't exist in the articles. I won't quote them fully here because this post is already pretty long. - "At least 110 people are confirmed dead and 161 remain missing; survivors urgently need clean water, temporary shelter and mental-health support as temperatures climb above 100 °F." Are temperatures above 100? I don't think this is true. - "Doppler radar gap: Hill Country sits at the edge of overlapping radar beams, making river-level gauges crucial for flash-flood warnings." This is completely made up as far as I can tell. - "Lead-time metric: NWS aims for 15-minute flash-flood warning lead-times; staff fear this could shrink if vacancies and equipment gaps grow." Could not confirm this, and 15 minutes seems like an absurdly short goal. I can't believe this is true. - "A recent AP-NORC poll found that 76 % of Americans trusted National Weather Service forecasts before the Texas disaster, one of the highest confidence levels for any federal agency." This is a lie, the poll didn't even ask a question about trust in forecasts. This is just the surface-level issues that are easy to spot, I did not get into more technical claims that would take domain knowledge to fact check, and I did not mention overall "editorial" decisions about what was and was not included in the story, which were also very bad. I have been a Kagi customer for a long time and I like the search engine, but I will probably cancel my subscription if you don't take this down. I can't have my money funding a literal fake news engine.
yakhinvadim 1y ago
I made a similar project where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10. Because the significance is determined by an LLM, it surfaces many stories that are usually missed by major media. https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/
mvieira38 1y ago
Remember when we paid for Kagi because it was "search"? I was basically an unpaid sponsor of them for the last year or so, but damn this constant pipeline of new shiny stuff is getting on my nerves. How can a company focus on building a good search engine with a good index and algo if they are also developing a translator, an LLM assistant and now a damn news app? Please, Vlad, just build different companies and stop piping my money to these other offerings I didn't ask for
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  Who offers a better search engine?
  - mvieira38 1y ago
    No one from what I can tell, that's why I still pay and give a damn. But they are missing a lot of desired features: Financial: can't pay with Monero or cash, can't just buy Privacy Pass tokens instead of generating them from my account. Usability: can't access other features than Search with Privacy Pass, looking for a location doesn't pop a Maps widget, missing useful/cool search widgets from google and ddg (coinflip, rng, minigames, weather), bad Tor Browser integration (requires installing an add-on), bad/missing Mastodon search But resources are being funneled towards replacing Google the company/stack instead of Google the search engine/app, so it begs the question if search is still really the top priority or not
    - carlosjobim 1y ago
      My philosophy in life is that if nobody else does it better, then I'm not going to complain about the people who are doing something. Would I prefer they do only the search engine? Sure, but until anybody else makes something equivalent, I'm not going to complain. Same for Apple. Are they wasting time and money on things which doesn't make sense? Sure, but in the past 20 years no other of their billion dollar competitors have even tried to make a decent laptop.
- davikr 1y ago
  Having to use Google for translation services sucks, and I use the Assistant everyday. I hope Kagi keeps building more stuff with my money.
8organicbits 1y ago
I've been thinking a lot about LLMs for RSS categorization. The long tail of feeds have interesting content but rarely tag posts with categories. Planets (like https://planet.ubuntu.com/ https://planet.ubuntu.com/) are good for finding feeds that post about a certain topic, but without per-post-category metadata, you get off topic stuff mixed in. There are deeper challenges too, like lack of consistent taxonomy/topic naming, which makes things messy even when categories are present. I still believe you're better off curating your own feed instead of delegating to AI, but I'm curious to see how Kite evolves. I'm experimenting with these ideas at https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/ and https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/ https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/ . I hope to publish some more recent ideas soon.
bodash 1y ago
I’ve also been experimenting with a curated webdev related newsfeed based on HN submissions: lessnews.dev The goal is not to keep users on the site. If some dev visit the site once in a while, and finds a link useful, that’s it.
yread 1y ago
I get 5 out of 10 news about Trump! Is there really nothing else happening in the world?
- smoothbenny 1y ago
  He is a pretty important guy who does a lot of stuff all of the time that causes ripples throughout the entire world! I don’t read much about him beyond the headlines since I feel the same way about everything he does, but I understand why it fills up so much space. Tbf it was different during his first term when every word he uttered made front-page news but rarely set off an actual major chain of events. That’s when I learned to tune out.
carol_lina 1y ago
Great to see innovation in how we digest news. I’m a big fan of: [1] https://www.mosaique.info https://www.mosaique.info
- msqinfo 1y ago
  Thanks for the shoutout. I appreciate it!
xtracto 1y ago
I've been using something called BoringReport https://www.boringreport.org/app https://www.boringreport.org/app For news consumption. I'm not the author. But saw it here on HN dome time ago, and found it pretty good.
laacz 1y ago
When they first got mentioned, I started aggregating their links. Just now did a quick analysis to look if they've changed something. At the beginning Kite contained a lot of rt.com (Russian propaganda) and a few other discutable sources. rt.com has not surfaced since May 22, which is good. Hope they'll reconsider Kagi's Yandex integration as well.
xk_id 1y ago
I’d call this performative news consumption. Information overload is mainly a result of legitimate complexities in the world. It took only a little while to find in today’s item about Hamas a timeline describing October 7th as “the beginning of the current conflict”. A very neat and comfortable summarisation, that also happens to be vehemently rejected by many people. It’s very silly.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Overly AI processed stories from suspect sources (BoingBoing is a source for tech business news vs CNBC, NYT, Reuters etc?) and days old stories (Grok antisemitic posts) ranking high, Prime Day sales as 'news'. Not good first impression. Moving on.
tareqak 1y ago
How is Kagi compensating the sources for its news beyond the sources section at the bottom of each story (the part that appears after clicking a headline)?
exiguus 1y ago
Perhaps I don't understand it correctly, but doesn't journalism mean examining a topic from different perspectives based on evidence? Additionally, if someone writes an op-ed or commentary, the author is expressing their personal opinion. So why should I buy a newspaper that does not align with my political or personal opinions? I thought that was the point. From a reader's perspective, it would be beneficial to have a scoring and warning system that identifies poor journalism or indicates when something is a commentary or op-ed rather than objective journalism. Based on that, I can adjust, where I get my news from. Basically, every newspaper works like this. Isn't it? And when I read two or three different newspaper, that fact-checks every article and mark opinions as commentary, there is no "echo chamber" right?.
icar 1y ago
"World" seems to be much like "US" from my southern European point of view
misonic 1y ago
if u r a programmer, u may also like which has been here for sometime. https://feed.pixelstech.net/ https://feed.pixelstech.net/

181 points by tigroferoce 1y ago

Kagi founder here. This is prematurely shared and not ready for prime time yet. Official launch with mobile apps will happen soon. Thanks!

viraptor 1y ago
Looks awesome though. I'm already on board with where this is going. Although it would be great to know if some money goes back to the original sources...
nticompass 1y ago
Is it ok to use it, or should I wait until it's officially announced? (P.S. been paying for Kagi search since January, very happy with it)
- msdz 1y ago
  It's existed for months by now, and has been usable for nearly as long. I'd say you can decide if you need extra fluff like native apps or further "polishing" at this point.
- yannicklesuisse 1y ago
  Kagi News (formerly Kite) Product Manager here, You can use the website and even make it a web app if you want. We’ll be releasing a mobile version that will be better suited but will have the same features :)
  - MaysonL 1y ago
    Will you have an RSS feed that can be integrated into Tapestry (mobile app by Iconfactory)?
lemming 1y ago
I'm very interested in this, I'm a long term kagi subscriber with the free t-shirt! One thing that would be interesting to explore would be a feed that integrated over a longer timeframe. For example, I subscribe to the guardian weekly, and I like it much more than the daily homepage. News that survives a week tends to be more newsworthy, and there's more scope for the beginnings of retrospective analysis. It would be interesting to be able to play with that timeframe - what does a 3 day window look like, or a 1 month one?
- msqinfo 1y ago
  Sorry to plug my product again (from the comment above), but mosaique.info offers filters for three days, a week, a month, and a year (among others).
tigroferoce 1y ago
Ah, sorry I spoiled it out. I saw on Reddit and thought it was great (like a lot of other Kagi things). Keep up the good work!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
burkaman 1y ago
Please, please reconsider this product and take it offline for now. The vast majority of "information" in these stories is complete garbage. You are making up numbers, facts, quotes, and entire narratives. I made a list of examples (from just one single story) in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520841. I don't think a service like this is impossible, but it cannot be done with LLMs. They are the worst possible tool for news, all they can do is generate text that looks like legitimate news but is inevitably wrong. Again, please don't do this. Think about the massive amount of lies you will spread if this gains a large user base. I've been a subscriber for years, but I will cancel my subscription in a few days if you don't do anything about this. I can't let you use my money to create this societal catastrophe. Edit: I see there is a GitHub issue raising the same problems, hopefully you can respond there with what you're doing about this: https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/issues/97 https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/issues/97
- msqinfo 1y ago
  I've built a similar product (https://www.mosaique.info https://www.mosaique.info), but it doesn't rely on LLMs (except for generating a very short summary). I think it offers a wider set of opinions and is much more exhaustive.
  - dartharva 1y ago
    Looks like your option has a much smaller set of topics. Science, Technology, Economics and Regional news are largely absent
    - msqinfo 1y ago
      Yes the focus is largely on international news.
olivierduval 1y ago
Hi First, it's a great idea! The "introductory" speech is interesting then... the result is really disappointing :-( You see: I'm French (and European). So, I don't necessarily consider that "Trump" is the center of the "World" (actually quite the opposite). However, on the "World" tab, 50% of the news are about "Trump". I would have thought that the aim of this kind of newsfeed is to challenge Trump tactic's of "newsroom saturation". In particular in that tab (Trump can be the alpha & omega for the USA tab)
- jastuk 1y ago
  As another European, I second this. I avoid Trump "news" like a plague. This was 50% Trump; 8 out of 10 was US.
- mvieira38 1y ago
  Your feelings against news focused on America are valid, but there's no denying that the second Trump administration is such a world-shaking event, in a scale not foreseen by mainstream media or markets, that it would be weird not to have it everywhere. "President of the richest country in history unilaterally tariffs the entire world without approval of Congress" is, like it or not, a bigger headline than Europe's endless regulatory arguments
  - olivierduval 1y ago
    Actually, I dont need a "smart newsfeed" to hear about Trump. Smart is not about who is doing the show every day, it's about what's important and may be missed
- vulkoingim 1y ago
  I'm with you on that one. An option to exclude certain words/topics/individuals would be great.
- freediver 1y ago
  It is not by choice, but because that is what all major world outlets are writing about (and Kagi News has super diverse selection of sources). What makes an event 'significant' is number of publishers writing about it.
Brendinooo 1y ago
What kind of editorial policies will you have about how you frame stories and what kind of words you will use? I'm a happy subscriber to Tangle News, and its founder has spent a lot of time about about how he wants to bridge ideological divides in a way that echoes "We strive for diversity and transparency of resources and welcome your contributions to widen perspectives." He talks about looking for language to avoid those divides: where one side might speak of illegal aliens and other side might speak of undocumented immigrants, Tangle picked the term unauthorized migrants. He did a little TED talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=543mYKKh1EE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=543mYKKh1EE Anyways, just curious how you'll approach this issue. I'm interested in your project and wish you all the best!

wkat4242 1y ago

> World doesn't live in echo chambers. The reality emerges from the collision of different viewpoints and perspectives - that's how we separate signal from noise To be honest, when people start talking about "echo chambers" it's usually because they are upset that I won't listen to bigoted alt-right hate. For me this term has gained a really negative connotation. I understand the problem but hearing the same tired ranty talking points repeated is not helping my state of mind. If that means I am in an "echo chamber", so be it. Alternative viewpoints, fine, when there is something to build on. But there are limits. When differences in opinion are too extreme debating them is only causing agitation and polarisation, in my experience. I understand the point but I wouldn't use the term "echo chamber" anymore. I like this service by the way. I've been thinking of making something myself by using an AI to filter news feeds by the topics I'd be interested in. Edit: Just found out it is very configurable, that's great! My original point was that the default is very US centric in its news choice but this can be simply modified.

esperent 1y ago
> when people start talking about "echo chambers" it's usually because they are upset that I won't listen to bigoted alt-right hate Maybe you're in an echo chamber when it comes to echo chambers then? I usually hear the term related to social media algorithms, and usually implied is that we're all being chambered, left, right or otherwise.
nerdjon 1y ago
I get where you are going and I do agree with you, but I think there is some validity to still calling it an echo chamber. For example, I live in Boston and very liberal. I did not grow up in this area though, and I have noticed that among some of my friends that have... they have zero idea what most of this country is actually like. Even just other more moderate liberal people that don't have the "luxury" of living in a big city that largely shields us. Something that I feel like we saw in particular during the last election. I totally get not caring about, and not wanting to see, the alt-right hate. I don't want to be constantly reminded that people hate me just for existing. I am not sure what an alterative word for this is, and I think it goes farther than just trying to tune out the alt-right hate.

colesantiago 1y ago

I love how there are no ads on the page and it is all for free, no paywalls, private, to the point, no sponsors, just the news. Can you add RSS feeds as well? More news websites need to take a leaf out of Kagi. Edit: The RSS feed is here: https://kite.kagi.com/world.xml https://kite.kagi.com/world.xml

rdmuser 1y ago
I love when projects add rss feeds like this. The feed articles look great and are individual items per story not one big list as one article which I appreciate. That rss feed seems to be specifically for the world category. Anyone know if there are other feeds? Edit:nvm you can find each feed at the bottom of the page.
pyman 1y ago
> and it is all for free, I'm guessing it's free for now so people can test it and give feedback, since it's still an MVP. But based on the website, once the app is fully released, you'll have to pay for it. So don't get your hopes up, especially with apps that rely on expensive LLMs. Showing ads or sponsored links is one business model. Charging a subscription to remove them is a different one (like what Twitter recently did).
- baggachipz 1y ago
  The Kagi I know would never have ads, much less charge to remove them. I'm pretty confident that this service will be another perk of the main Kagi subscription.
  - pyman 1y ago
    Kagi doesn't have ads because people pay for it. Google Search has ads because it's a free service. https://kagi.com/pricing https://kagi.com/pricing
    - pasc1878 1y ago
      The point is that Kagi would not have ads. Yes it charges for any use - but not to remove ads.

josters 1y ago

Intrigued by the World Tension Index (you can enable it in the settings under the Experimental tab) which currently reads Mild/24°: > The world is simmering gently, marked by active regional conflicts, deadly protests, and a severe flood, yet tempered by budding Gaza ceasefire talks and cooperative diplomatic meetings. > While trade disputes and political probes contribute to tension, no large-scale escalations or catastrophic events push the situation beyond the usual range of global unrest. I wonder how this is calculated and what would push the meter from normal over elevated to serious/extreme.

pyman 1y ago

I love it. This is the only site I want to read the news on. Feature request: Mark the headline as read once I tap or click on it. When I collapse a headline, would it be possible to change the text colour to grey? I don't like having to do manual tasks when I’m just trying to read the news. Amazing tool, thanks!

pyman 1y ago
Also, how's the Orion browser connected to all this? The https://kagi.com https://kagi.com homepage has a mix of everything: search, AI assistant, browser, now news. Are these separate products? Will I have to pay for this? It's not very clear.
captn3m0 1y ago
I made something quite similar, and was just using <details> tag instead with grey coloring on open (that was persisted to localstorage).
xtracto 1y ago
Have a look at https://www.boringreport.org/app https://www.boringreport.org/app I saw it here on HN a couple of years ago and found it pretty good. I hate the current state of news. Titles are usually pure clickbait and half of the article's content is filling text for ad prints.

tomrod 1y ago

I really love this. I also just started reading Kagi's changelog. I'm glad I subscribe, these folks rock!

mbirth 1y ago

There’s an iOS app doing something pretty similar: https://pidgeon.news/ https://pidgeon.news/

dflock 1y ago

If you could mash this together with this: https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/ - that would be great.

onionisafruit 1y ago
Thanks for showing this to us. The significance score is interesting. I like what kagi has done here, but news minimalist might be my real find from this post.
yakhinvadim 1y ago
Founder here, thanks for the shout out!

incomingpain 1y ago

>an endless stream of clickbait that destroys our ability to think deeply and clearly. Disagreed. News never changed. It was always exactly like this. The Pulitzer award was created because journalists lied and caused an assassination and the spanish war. The thing that changed is social media is letting everyone fact check the journalists and we're catching them in their lies. We are ushering in a new era of professionalism and truth in journalism and it's not going well at all. Here in Canada we have a funny one happening right now. Another whistleblower from the CBC was forced to involuntarily resign. Now the CBC is saying they refuse his resignation that he's a slave and must continue working for them. So his lawyer has to bring a human rights lawsuit. >World doesn't live in echo chambers. The reality emerges from the collision of different viewpoints and perspectives - that's how we separate signal from noise. Or at least it shouldnt be this way. >This multi-source approach helps reveal the full picture beyond any single viewpoint. Grabbed the RSS, thanks!

Havoc 1y ago
>News never changed. It was always exactly like this. I'd say the velocity and reach of it certainly has changed. A world leader tweeting fresh insanity to millions of people every couple hours wasn't a thing during earlier eras.
- incomingpain 1y ago
  >I'd say the velocity and reach of it certainly has changed. A world leader tweeting fresh insanity to millions of people every couple hours wasn't a thing during earlier eras. You're describing social media where that's happening. Not journalism or news. You might argue that social media == news. That's likely true, but that makes journalists the antiquated news.
imiric 1y ago
> News never changed. It was always exactly like this. That's not true. Bias and agenda have always existed, but there was a time when news sources clearly distinguished facts from opinions. In the US the shift arguably happened in 1987 when the fairness doctrine was abolished, and for-profit media companies were given freedom to publish anything they wanted. The 24/7 news cycle was established, and news sources operated under incentives to keep consumers' attention above everything else, including journalistic integrity. > The thing that changed is social media is letting everyone fact check the journalists and we're catching them in their lies. We are ushering in a new era of professionalism and truth in journalism and it's not going well at all. That's a bold take, if I ever saw one. You're actually saying that social media is a good thing for journalism? If anything, social media exacerbated the free-for-all problem of reporting. Suddenly, everyone was a news reporter, with zero moral or integrity obligations. On the contrary: the larger the audience of a social media influencer, the more incentivized they are to infuse their content with bias and agenda. Companies, advertisers, and governments love that influencers can be easily bought. This is far from a "new era of professionalism and truth in journalism". What a skewed perspective you have. And now with AI tools, the world is even more flooded with (m|d)isinformation than ever before. There's nothing inherently flawed about traditional news media. It just needs to be strongly regulated to report facts rather than opinions[1]. This regulation is literally impossible on social media. Journalism is not something anyone with a social media account can or should do. I'm not saying that journalism can't exist on social media—it certainly can. But on its own it's not a place where journalism can thrive. I would go a step further and make journalism a licensed profession, with its own variant of the Hippocratic Oath. Making the line between fact and fiction as clear as possible is essential to living in reality. Otherwise, words can be weaponized and people can be manipulated into thinking and acting in ways that are beneficial to those in power. [1] To counter the argument "who gets to be the arbitrer of truth?", it's quite easy to determine when a news story is opinionated: it's loaded with adjectives and language that is crafted to elicit an emotional response in the consumer. Journalism, on the other hand, reports events that happened. It succinctly answers who, what, when, where. It doesn't describe why, or tries to put a spin on the facts. Those events can be easily fact checked. In fact, if everyone was doing journalism, every news story would be exactly the same. The differences are the bulk of the bias and agenda.

smoothbenny 1y ago

UX is nice enough but suffers from same curation (center-right leaning, tech industry-directed) that makes anything like this fundamentally pointless in the long term. Designed to keep readers within the acceptable window of mainstream media that manufactures consent for war, genocide, income inequality, and other suffering at home and abroad. For example: this site taught me that there is only one (unnamed) sticking point on the Gaza ceasefire agreement! Gee, I bet it’s really going to happen this time. Also to offer an Israel section at all, let alone without a corresponding Palestine section, is dubious.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
vdupras 1y ago
That is indeed a problem and an unsolvable one. All major news sources are in the business of manufacturing consent. They're not trying to manufacture the exact same consent, but mash them together... you get a general direction, not unlike the ones we see at cattle ranches. But those news are still useful. There is still real information coming from it, and of better quality than all those alternative channels (which are in the business of, I guess we could call, "disrupting consent", but often with shadowy interests). What I think one must do is to get good at separating the wheat (facts) from the chaff (analysis). The "chaff" part can be rejected completely, but I find it interesting to analyze it. This sometimes allows one to derive an intent behind the consent manufacturing process. That being said, even though the information that it mashes together is flawed, I find that there's good value in this new Kite thing. Removing the attention stealing part of news, however flawed these are, is still a great service.
- smoothbenny 1y ago
  tl;dr: It sounds like we agree that the UX is good but the aggregation is bad. To call the problem unsolvable is dismissive and makes the whole endeavor of aggregating news pointless. The mainstream sources are in fact manufacturing the exact same consent by defining the acceptable polarity of discourse on any given topic. There are plenty of non-major news sources that offer a different perspective from the mainstream but aren’t fringe in any sense. Someone as plain as Amy Goodman comes to mind. By ignoring them all and saying the mainstream sources are of “better quality” leaves me curious to know which alternative sources are on your radar as well as your overall satisfaction with the news presented on the site. The problem with this site specifically is it is not mashing everything together to get a general direction. It curates a specific set of sources to provide a center-right direction while explicitly ignoring the left of center POV. Let’s assume this takes off and people find it an easily digestible way to read the news. Readers trust the product and decide that if they want to learn more about a story they can click the source links, since those must also be trustworthy. And by extension, alternative sources may not be trustworthy. Based on what you’re saying I think we both agree that these are bad conclusions, since mainstream sources routinely lie or create narratives that allow for war, death, antisemitism, Islamophobia, etc., while alternative outlets may have heavily sourced, deeply detailed reporting that wouldn’t get picked up by major press. Facts presented in a story from either type of outlet may be doctored in many ways for any number of purposes, so it’s not so simple to say a number or a survey result or anything else is “wheat”, or that any analysis is “chaff”.

ks2048 1y ago

I clicked on a story and at the bottom, it lists "sources" (19 in this case). Following one of these sources (a lesser-known site), there is an article, and at the end it says "REUTERS". So, I guess its source was another source. Maybe a site like this should try to root-out the "root source" of information - official press releases or press conferences, eye-witness accounts. I think some editorializing is worthwhile to place things in context and to decide what information to put together into a readable article, but things could be more explicit and should always link to the source material.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Maybe derivative articles could be placed under the source article hierarchically, with some kind of badge on each sub-article indicating percent of significant difference.
- onionisafruit 1y ago
  That would be great. I get frustrated when I want to read more about a news event and find that all the additional articles just rehash the same information. Instead I want to find other articles about the same event that have additional information.
mvieira38 1y ago
Offering a non-editorialized solution for news in 2025 is the opposite of what I thought Kagi stood for. They make a "small web" feature and the best fediverse search index, both to highlight human created content, but then make an AI news aggregator? Are we supposed to form communities and read stuff written by people or are we not?
soerxpso 1y ago
> Maybe a site like this should try to root-out the "root source" of information - official press releases or press conferences, eye-witness accounts. I'd personally pay for that. It feels like 90% of the "news" I see these days is just some site telephoning what a different reporter said. I regularly see "study finds x" articles that completely bury the original academic source. Often, "politician said x" articles that spend a lot of time going over everyone's reactions to whatever the politician said without letting me have the full video or press release where he actually said it. This would also fix an issue I'm seeing on Kite where some stories seem to be the same thing from different angles (one article about the Texas floods is directly above an article about how the Texas floods are "testing FEMA", and there are two separate articles for the recent Trump-Netanyahu deal, one in World and one in USA. X's CEO resigning is three different articles in different feeds. The Business tab has two different articles about Trump tariffs that could really be one article).

Havoc 1y ago

This looks great!

nop_slide 1y ago

Love seeing this is a true “SPA”, a literal single index.html page built using one of my favorite little libraries Alpine.js https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/blob/main/src/index.html https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/blob/main/src/inde... My pendulum has swung so far away from react and its ilk that this is refreshing to see.

psychoslave 1y ago

>The reality emerges from the collision of different viewpoints and perspectives - that's how we separate signal from noise. No, representations, not reality is what is obtained from this process. Reality is the encompassing whole where these processes happen and whose absolute actual relevant interpretation is beyond what the most sophisticated educated intelligent human will either be able to grab. I agree this is being very picky about words, and generally speaking, sure shame on me to bring to much focus on such a triviality. But in this specific case of a public announcement of how a company is going to greatly improve news, I feel like it's very relevant that they consider their words with caution. All that said, good chance to them in the endeavor, that's a nice goal.

elashri 1y ago

That's great. As a long time kagi subscription (with free t-shirt because I forgot to order) I think this needs some polishing Here are my suggestions 1- Add ability to have different languages. The feed should allow having one language or more and move between them or mix them 2- It is better if feeds with different languages keeps their our json file for contributing to be easier but build curated one automatically for them 3- This currently does not support RTL languages (or content languages in any of them) 4- It is good if the user can ban certain keywords because of the news fatigue about them. I might want the tech category but don't want to hear about LLM news 5- While the diversity of feeds is good in general. Sometimes you would want to block a certain website feed. Kite should support this in some sense. I understand that this might be beyond the envisioned view if it as generic news app but I think it should be more personal.

saubeidl 1y ago

The announcement talks a big talk of trying to avoid echo-chambers, but the sources it quotes seem to be exclusively on the center-right (i.e. liberal) to far-right spectrum. Not a single left wing source as far as I can see. Everything contained within the pro-capitalist echochamber. No Jacobin, No Novara Media, No WSWS. Just another way of rearranging the same pro-market propaganda. As a paying Kagi subscriber, it's deeply disappointing to see this.

pasc1878 1y ago
I see the Guardian - which is considered left wing in the UK - so I would think would be in the US as well.
- smoothbenny 1y ago
  It’s center-right. Even something as boring as Democracy Now would be a major improvement for this list.
- wredcoll 1y ago
  This seems like a perfect example of the weirdness of our overton window. Is the the guardian out here campaigning for socialism and democracy and labor right and gender equality and such?
  - pasc1878 1y ago
    Yes it definitely supports those things. It will give platforms to those campaigning for those things. It is a newspaper so its job is to report but not necessarily campaign. But look at the subheadings on the Opion page to see what opinons it pushes.
    - smoothbenny 1y ago
      citation needed
      - 1y ago

c16 1y ago

"World doesn't live in echo chambers.", yet 1/2 of the articles are about Trump. I appreciate this is likely coincidence, but my my news sources are far more varied.

presbyterian 1y ago

I can't find where it specifies how the news is "distilled". I assume it's an LLM summarization, given Kagi is in the AI business in other ways, but it would be nice if they could clearly state that. Knowing who or what I'm listening to is a fundamental part of being able to trust it or not.

maxehmookau 1y ago

If this is not meant to be an echo chamber, why is "Bay" one of the default categories? Most people don't live in the SF Bay Area. Most people who don't, don't even know what "Bay" would mean. I only know because I spend enough time in tech circles to 'get it'.

raincole 1y ago

> Kite reads public RSS feeds of thousands of (community-curated) world-wide news sources and distills them into one perfect daily briefing So AI-summarized version of /r/worldnews? I know people love Kagi, but I really don't know how it is better than other news sources except the UI.

arandomusername 1y ago
/r/worldnews is not a balanced view and is clearly extremely left-leaning. I imagine Kagi thrives to portray a more balanced view.
- saubeidl 1y ago
  In my experience /r/worldnews is extremely right-leaning. The power of echo chambers, huh?
  - arandomusername 1y ago
    Show me one article that's on the front page of r/worldnews that is right leaning.
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1lvzd7k/north_korean_defector_sues_kim_jongun_in_historic/ https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1lvzd7k/north_ko...
      - arandomusername 1y ago
        Anti Kim Jong-un, a dictator, article is right leaning?
        raincole 1y ago
        That's just how the left works today. Anything remotely aligns with the US's interest (criticizing NK, China, etc) is right leaning.

mfro 1y ago

I like this a lot. A suggestion, I think it would be good to have a 'latest update' date on the articles, indicating the latest update of any source used. I understand this could be difficult but it would be nice.

ksec 1y ago

Damn I was hoping Kite would be done with Crystal as well. I was actually working on a similar hobby project that is 80%+ similar even the Today In History! But the AI summary and execution is just so much better. Kite actually got me to look at Kagi again. Joined the Trail, and downloaded Orion. Turns out Webkit Browser can actually be good with Multi Tab usage. It is just Desktop Safari implementations sucks. Will try to run it for a few months and see how it goes. I really hope Kagi would succeed.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

burkaman 1y ago

This currently has an extremely serious hallucination (aka lying) problem, and I am begging people to not use AI-written "news" services. AI aggregation of links to real stories is maybe ok, but you cannot trust anything that claims to be "summarizing" sources while actually just making things up. The first item I clicked on as a test was "Texas floods raise alarms over weather service cuts" in the Science section. Here are all the issues I found in about 2 minutes, again on the first and only item I've looked at: - The first image is from the New York Times, but it links to an AP article that doesn't contain the image. - "The Guadalupe surged more than 30 feet in five hours, overwhelming campsites and low-lying neighborhoods." These figures are wrong, all sources I can find say 30 feet at most, over a time period of much less than 5 hours. - "A Trump-backed spending bill passed the House with a 22 % cut to NWS operations and satellite procurement." No idea what bill this is talking about or where this number came from, despite some effort to find out. Some sources say the local NWS had lost 22% of its staff, maybe the LLM saw this number somewhere and threw it in here for fun. - "Kerr County’s applications for federal hazard-mitigation grants in 2017 and 2018 were rejected, leaving it without sirens or modern river gauges." This is very misleading wording, the grant applications were denied by Texas, not by the federal government. - "“We know the river rises, but we can’t warn people with equipment we don’t have.” - Judge Rob Kelly, Kerr County" This is a hallucinated quote attributed to a real person. He never said the "we can’t warn people with equipment we don’t have" part, nor did anyone else. This is an incredibly serious issue and it is deeply irresponsible to release a product that does this. - The second image is a graphic that says Disaster 101. It is from a link inside a Grist article about the floods for another article about general disaster preparedness. However, Kagi links it to a Reddit post about Ted Cruz. Kagi's caption is "Trees partially submerged along the swollen Guadalupe River on July 4, 2025.". This is lightly paraphrased from the caption of a completely different image in the Grist article. - The Perspectives section cites three real articles, but hallucinates their content including quotes that don't exist in the articles. I won't quote them fully here because this post is already pretty long. - "At least 110 people are confirmed dead and 161 remain missing; survivors urgently need clean water, temporary shelter and mental-health support as temperatures climb above 100 °F." Are temperatures above 100? I don't think this is true. - "Doppler radar gap: Hill Country sits at the edge of overlapping radar beams, making river-level gauges crucial for flash-flood warnings." This is completely made up as far as I can tell. - "Lead-time metric: NWS aims for 15-minute flash-flood warning lead-times; staff fear this could shrink if vacancies and equipment gaps grow." Could not confirm this, and 15 minutes seems like an absurdly short goal. I can't believe this is true. - "A recent AP-NORC poll found that 76 % of Americans trusted National Weather Service forecasts before the Texas disaster, one of the highest confidence levels for any federal agency." This is a lie, the poll didn't even ask a question about trust in forecasts. This is just the surface-level issues that are easy to spot, I did not get into more technical claims that would take domain knowledge to fact check, and I did not mention overall "editorial" decisions about what was and was not included in the story, which were also very bad. I have been a Kagi customer for a long time and I like the search engine, but I will probably cancel my subscription if you don't take this down. I can't have my money funding a literal fake news engine.

yakhinvadim 1y ago

I made a similar project where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10. Because the significance is determined by an LLM, it surfaces many stories that are usually missed by major media. https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/

mvieira38 1y ago

Remember when we paid for Kagi because it was "search"? I was basically an unpaid sponsor of them for the last year or so, but damn this constant pipeline of new shiny stuff is getting on my nerves. How can a company focus on building a good search engine with a good index and algo if they are also developing a translator, an LLM assistant and now a damn news app? Please, Vlad, just build different companies and stop piping my money to these other offerings I didn't ask for

carlosjobim 1y ago
Who offers a better search engine?
- mvieira38 1y ago
  No one from what I can tell, that's why I still pay and give a damn. But they are missing a lot of desired features: Financial: can't pay with Monero or cash, can't just buy Privacy Pass tokens instead of generating them from my account. Usability: can't access other features than Search with Privacy Pass, looking for a location doesn't pop a Maps widget, missing useful/cool search widgets from google and ddg (coinflip, rng, minigames, weather), bad Tor Browser integration (requires installing an add-on), bad/missing Mastodon search But resources are being funneled towards replacing Google the company/stack instead of Google the search engine/app, so it begs the question if search is still really the top priority or not
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    My philosophy in life is that if nobody else does it better, then I'm not going to complain about the people who are doing something. Would I prefer they do only the search engine? Sure, but until anybody else makes something equivalent, I'm not going to complain. Same for Apple. Are they wasting time and money on things which doesn't make sense? Sure, but in the past 20 years no other of their billion dollar competitors have even tried to make a decent laptop.
davikr 1y ago
Having to use Google for translation services sucks, and I use the Assistant everyday. I hope Kagi keeps building more stuff with my money.

8organicbits 1y ago

I've been thinking a lot about LLMs for RSS categorization. The long tail of feeds have interesting content but rarely tag posts with categories. Planets (like https://planet.ubuntu.com/ https://planet.ubuntu.com/) are good for finding feeds that post about a certain topic, but without per-post-category metadata, you get off topic stuff mixed in. There are deeper challenges too, like lack of consistent taxonomy/topic naming, which makes things messy even when categories are present. I still believe you're better off curating your own feed instead of delegating to AI, but I'm curious to see how Kite evolves. I'm experimenting with these ideas at https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/ and https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/ https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/ . I hope to publish some more recent ideas soon.

bodash 1y ago

I’ve also been experimenting with a curated webdev related newsfeed based on HN submissions: lessnews.dev The goal is not to keep users on the site. If some dev visit the site once in a while, and finds a link useful, that’s it.

yread 1y ago

I get 5 out of 10 news about Trump! Is there really nothing else happening in the world?

smoothbenny 1y ago
He is a pretty important guy who does a lot of stuff all of the time that causes ripples throughout the entire world! I don’t read much about him beyond the headlines since I feel the same way about everything he does, but I understand why it fills up so much space. Tbf it was different during his first term when every word he uttered made front-page news but rarely set off an actual major chain of events. That’s when I learned to tune out.

carol_lina 1y ago

Great to see innovation in how we digest news. I’m a big fan of: [1] https://www.mosaique.info https://www.mosaique.info

msqinfo 1y ago
Thanks for the shoutout. I appreciate it!

xtracto 1y ago

I've been using something called BoringReport https://www.boringreport.org/app https://www.boringreport.org/app For news consumption. I'm not the author. But saw it here on HN dome time ago, and found it pretty good.

laacz 1y ago

When they first got mentioned, I started aggregating their links. Just now did a quick analysis to look if they've changed something. At the beginning Kite contained a lot of rt.com (Russian propaganda) and a few other discutable sources. rt.com has not surfaced since May 22, which is good. Hope they'll reconsider Kagi's Yandex integration as well.

xk_id 1y ago

I’d call this performative news consumption. Information overload is mainly a result of legitimate complexities in the world. It took only a little while to find in today’s item about Hamas a timeline describing October 7th as “the beginning of the current conflict”. A very neat and comfortable summarisation, that also happens to be vehemently rejected by many people. It’s very silly.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Overly AI processed stories from suspect sources (BoingBoing is a source for tech business news vs CNBC, NYT, Reuters etc?) and days old stories (Grok antisemitic posts) ranking high, Prime Day sales as 'news'. Not good first impression. Moving on.

tareqak 1y ago

How is Kagi compensating the sources for its news beyond the sources section at the bottom of each story (the part that appears after clicking a headline)?

exiguus 1y ago

Perhaps I don't understand it correctly, but doesn't journalism mean examining a topic from different perspectives based on evidence? Additionally, if someone writes an op-ed or commentary, the author is expressing their personal opinion. So why should I buy a newspaper that does not align with my political or personal opinions? I thought that was the point. From a reader's perspective, it would be beneficial to have a scoring and warning system that identifies poor journalism or indicates when something is a commentary or op-ed rather than objective journalism. Based on that, I can adjust, where I get my news from. Basically, every newspaper works like this. Isn't it? And when I read two or three different newspaper, that fact-checks every article and mark opinions as commentary, there is no "echo chamber" right?.

icar 1y ago

"World" seems to be much like "US" from my southern European point of view

misonic 1y ago

if u r a programmer, u may also like which has been here for sometime. https://feed.pixelstech.net/ https://feed.pixelstech.net/