[HN Gopher] Show HN: The Brutalist Report - A rolling snapshot o...
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Show HN: The Brutalist Report - A rolling snapshot of the day's
headlines
Hi HN. I was inspired by so many other folks also longing for a
return to the old web that I put together a service to scratch my
own itch: An extremely fast headline aggregator done in 1990s style
HTML. Sharing it with you all for those of you that also would
enjoy this now esoteric style.
Author : cylo
Score : 128 points
Date : 2022-02-22 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (brutalist.report)
(TXT) w3m dump (brutalist.report)
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| This is pretty great. Thank you.
|
| I am newshound and I do keep several subscriptions.
|
| I was thinking just the other day how I wished I could click on a
| link to get a list of "all stories in todays paper".
|
| Just a plain list of links that can be read fast and leave more
| time for reading.
|
| So this fits in with it.
| starbase wrote:
| First impression. I like it. But some sources have 3 or 4
| headlines and others have dozens. Perhaps the sources with few
| headlines could be on a row together (or the next source in a
| column moved up) to eliminate huge chunks of whitespace.
|
| What if I want different sources, e.g. Babylon Bee instead of (or
| in addition to) The Onion? Would be great if this is doable
| without login, just give the custom feed its own URL. Yeah, it
| would become my own echo chamber but otherwise everyone is stuck
| with whatever echo chamber you choose.
|
| OK this one isn't old web but it would be sweet if I could select
| a headline (or word/words within a headline) and see all articles
| matching that topic. e.g. volcano, or FCC.
| culi wrote:
| A HN user posted a project of theirs that seems to do most of
| these things:
|
| https://sumi.news/
| indigodaddy wrote:
| This one is awesome!
| [deleted]
| abetusk wrote:
| Very well done, I like this quite a bit
| bobobob420 wrote:
| Nice this is pretty decent
| leephillips wrote:
| Something else along these lines is newshound:
| https://newshound.co/ I use it as my daily basic newspaper.
|
| I think it was also introduced on HN.
|
| By the way, is "brutalist" a good description of this style? I
| don't feel I have a great handle on how to use this term, but
| doesn't it mean something other than simply simple?
| thewakalix wrote:
| > Brutalist buildings are characterised by minimalist
| constructions that showcase the bare building materials and
| structural elements over decorative design.[4][5]
|
| This website certainly does seem to be minimalist, showcase its
| structural elements, and eschew decorative design.
| conor_f wrote:
| Had a quick look on Github for this, but didn't find any repo. Is
| it open-source? I would love to contribute to and self host this.
| Specifying my own news sources and layout on my own service would
| be ideal for me :)
| dmje wrote:
| I like it, but it needs an option to be less. Most obvious way
| would be a simple filter so you could say "show me the last X
| minutes / hours" or just the top X headlines. It'd be nice if the
| layout was a bit more forgiving too - better line spacing, nicer
| font - nothing too much, just... hurts my eyes a bit...
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| Could there be a view where I see all the news from different
| outlets ("all", per topic) in one "thread" with reverse
| chronological order?
|
| Also, for categories, may it be possible to categorize articles
| based on tags rather than the source outlet? What happens if,
| say, NYT publishes a business story?
|
| Otherwise, this is really cool site. Bravo!
| wrycoder wrote:
| Very useful. What's your monetization plan? I'd rather pay a
| small fee than see any ads!
| cylo wrote:
| No monetization plan. Nor is there the temptation to. This
| isn't really something I built to make money. As mentioned, I
| built it mostly for myself. Happy to share it with others along
| the way. :)
|
| It's interesting to see how polarizing it is to some folks.
| annowiki wrote:
| Fascinating. What did you do for scraping? I built something
| similar but to do sentiment analysis on news (it is shamefully
| slow https://maudlin.standingwater.io/ ). I used scrapy to get
| the articles and post them to a postgres database that flask
| reads.
|
| I think I'm going to take some design queues from you and
| simplify my system. Word clouds are cool but too intensive on the
| $5 server I pay for.
| Shank wrote:
| There's also Legible News, which is similar, but aggregates news
| sources from Wikipedia articles instead of just pulling different
| site feeds: https://legiblenews.com/
| yumaikas wrote:
| So, is this mostly using RSS/Atom feeds from the various websites
| in question?
| winwhiz wrote:
| Sure they say: > The day's headlines delivered to you without
| bullshit.
|
| But there is a whole lot of •shit.
| thmorriss wrote:
| I like this a lot. I set it to open every morning at 8am using an
| extension :)
| john-doe wrote:
| This is great! May I suggest some small improvements for
| scannability?
|
| ul {line-height:1.3;} ul li {padding-left:1ch;text-indent:-1ch}
| ul li + li {margin-top:.2em;} a:hover, a:focus {text-
| decoration:revert;}
|
| Also, using <ol> lists instead of <ul> could help too.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| The Drudge Report's headlines look hilarious when rendered in a
| consistent, normal font size, in a plain unordered list of links.
| I'm sure the same is true of sensationalist outlets across the
| political spectrum, but this is the one that stood out to me.
|
| I like it. It won't replace my RSS reader, but it's well done.
| One thought: could you link to articles on text.npr.org rather
| than the full-fat NPR site?
| Friday_ wrote:
| Done the similair project in the past, main discovery was that
| without breaking news headlines, images, font size, color
| flickering, all the senzationalism was gone from the portal.
|
| Maybe i will next do the opposite, in plain text insert
| senzationalism, but that's called marketing.
| avereveard wrote:
| idk when brutalist became synonim of ugly and minimum effort, but
| I assure you it's not.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Yes, and brutalist refers to French word for raw concrete,
| Brut, not in relation to the adjective Brutal.
| hellisothers wrote:
| I'd say, to the average person the Brutalist aesthetic is
| certainly synonymous with ugly minimalism.
| cpach wrote:
| Ugly? I don't agree. I think it's a clean and fresh layout. I
| don't think it's incorrect to call it brutalist.
| granitepail wrote:
| Maybe the backend was written in concrete.
| culi wrote:
| I agree. Just look through some of the listed sites on
| brutalistwebsites.com[0] and you'll quickly realize most of
| these designs are NOT easy to pull off
|
| [0] https://brutalistwebsites.com/
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Brutalism means making the form support the function, and being
| true to the materials you're using. I'd say this qualifies.
| zie wrote:
| Also see: text.npr.org and lite.cnn.com
| awb wrote:
| Interesting project and appreciate the simple / brutalist layout.
|
| A couple questions:
|
| 1) That's a lot of news! Just browsing the headlines would take a
| long time. Any ideas on how to make it more compact? I'd
| definitely be interested in a site that could give me 15-30 high
| quality links per day across a diverse spectrum of content and
| sources.
|
| 2) I personally appreciate the discussion aspect of HN and
| wouldn't enjoy just visiting the links alone. Any thoughts around
| including a link back to the original HN discussion?
|
| Thanks for sharing!
| cylo wrote:
| 1.) It is a lot! The frontpage in particular is almost
| overwhelming. Browsing by individual topics makes it a bit more
| digestible. One element I could support is a parameter you can
| supply in the URL to limit the amount of articles returned per
| source. The challenge with providing 15-30 high quality links
| is the "human editing" element required to do that effectively.
| I'd like to avoid that if at all possible, as well as not get
| into the business of harvesting visitors' personal information.
| There's no tracking or harvesting going on here whatsoever and
| I intend to keep it that way.
|
| 2.) Great idea, I could perhaps add an [hn] tag to those
| stories to preserve the link to the discussion.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Re 1): I agree. The source in small writing, then the top 3
| stories only? With a drop down if you wanted more?
| kloch wrote:
| Very nice!
|
| Now it needs an algorithm to detect related stories across
| different sites so they can have their own "popular stories"
| section or ignored after you have browsed them.
| bicx wrote:
| This reminds me of the right-wing news site
| https://www.drudgereport.com/ (not a news site I recommend at
| all, it just reminds me of what it looks like).
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| No longer right wing. Drudge sold it. Left leaning now.
| [deleted]
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I appreciate look and approach ( and not only because I toyed
| with a similar idea but failed due to editorial work I thought it
| would need ).
|
| I think this is what people need. I favorited. Keep it up!
| Dotnaught wrote:
| I wrote an RSS app to aggregate headlines:
| https://github.com/Dotnaught/rssputin
| 123pie123 wrote:
| Thanks, added as a bookmark
|
| I do like the basic style, not a massive fan of the color, needs
| better contrast for the text - imho
| mfontani wrote:
| Ha! Thanks for including ElReg :)
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I like this, thank you.
|
| Could you make an "api" (maybe just a csv or static json file)
| available? Alternatively, is it ok if I scrape your page
| occasionally?
| cylo wrote:
| Thanks. Absolutely, please feel free to scrape. Though that's
| always a brittle solution. I've added a JSON API to my todo
| list for it.
| wittjeff wrote:
| This is a boon for blind and low vision people.
| programmarchy wrote:
| This is pretty sweet. What tools did you use to build it?
| justusthane wrote:
| There was something similar posted here a couple (few?) years
| ago, but I think it was curated by hand - can't find it now.
|
| Also worth mentioning https://text.npr.org/ and
| https://lite.cnn.com/en
| ziftface wrote:
| Maybe you're referring to http://readspike.com? I don't think
| it's curated, but also aggregates links.
| goblinux wrote:
| It immediately reminded me of http://68k.news/
|
| Warning about HTTP; no HTTPS if you're concerned about that
| sort of thing.
| vymague wrote:
| Looks really similar to https://sumi.news/.
|
| I wonder why these aggregators don't do a weekly version. I don't
| want to read the news every day.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| How do you decide what to include in a weekly digest?
| bradwood wrote:
| Politics section is very US-centric and the timestamp defaults to
| PT.
|
| Would be cool to make it more global in coverage and
| presentation.
| searchableguy wrote:
| I built something similar a long time ago using deno and deploy.
|
| https://github.com/searchableguy/burger
|
| Although, after trying out different feeds and approaches. I must
| admit, I don't care about every item that is posted on a news
| site or someone's blog.
|
| Anything interesting will get posted here.
|
| So I figured I need a way to clean up HN stories that I don't
| find useful. I built an API server which does this using
| sentiment analysis.
|
| Another problem I noticed is I tend to click on comments of
| stories I know won't be any useful (web3?) but it's hard to stop
| the urge so I check if comments are overly negative and return a
| score which is used to hide or show the see discussion button.
|
| I also return all the urls from the discussion separately because
| those are usually good resources.
|
| Meet cabbage news - https://github.com/searchableguy/cabbage_news
|
| I haven't updated the repo so it is probably outdated and that's
| my first time writing a python application.
|
| Oh here's the block list of keywords I recommend to everyone
| using HN
|
| https://github.com/searchableguy/cabbage_news/blob/main/app/...
| janfoeh wrote:
| I'm a fan of no-frills layouts and I do miss the web of old, but
| this could be easier to read than it is. I like
| body { font-family: monospace; } li {
| color: grey; padding-bottom: 0.5rem; }
| li a { color: blue; }
| stickfigure wrote:
| Meta: I thought HN submissions get either a link _or_ explanatory
| text, but this item has both. Is this something a mod does?
| embit wrote:
| This [1] is my attempt at tech news but with tag cloud. Feedback
| most welcome.
|
| [1] https://embit.ca
| kqr wrote:
| So basically a web-based RSS reader hardcoded to a few feeds?
| davidjhall wrote:
| Like it - reminds me of a cleaner popurls.com. As someone else
| suggested, would love to custom add sites (via url).
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(page generated 2022-02-22 23:00 UTC)