[HN Gopher] Show HN: News Minimalist - News ranked by significance
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Show HN: News Minimalist - News ranked by significance
Hey HN! I'm the author of News Minimalist -- a news aggregator
where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10.
The project was born out of personal pain -- I wanted a way to read
_only_ significant news, like major humanity milestones, or
historical political events, filtering out all the celebrity gossip
and smartphone releases. But I couldn 't find a way to do that --
everywhere I looked, the news was ranked by popularity, coverage,
or relevance, not significance. I first tried to solve the problem
in the beginning of 2023 with GPT-3 (the top model at that time) by
asking it to estimate the significance of some news stories. The
results were painfully bad -- for some reason, the model preferred
tragic, personal stories, completely missing the essence of what
makes the news significant. No amount of prompt engineering could
fix that. But it all changed in March 2023 when GPT-4 came out.
The scores it gave made much more sense. After a month of work, the
first version was ready. News Minimalist had its first successful
Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388),
and I realized that a lot of people had the same problem I had.
I've been working on improving the project ever since. As probably
most tech founders, I spent too much time on technical
improvements, completely ignoring marketing. But I think that work
paid off, and I'm finally satisfied with the scores it gives. The
results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/
Let me know what you think! Vadim
Author : yakhinvadim
Score : 21 points
Date : 2025-01-15 20:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newsminimalist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newsminimalist.com)
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| The default sorting is "new first", but perhaps a better first
| impression would come from selecting "more significant first":
|
| https://www.newsminimalist.com/?sort=significance
| dvh wrote:
| I've been using rss feed for few months but recently it became
| borderline useless. For example here is grep of pubDate:
| $ wget -qO - https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml | grep
| pubDate <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:56:47
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:56:47
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2025 17:22:34
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Sat, 11 Jan 2025 16:42:01
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Thu, 09 Jan 2025 17:52:38
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2025 16:19:25
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Sat, 28 Dec 2024 17:44:35
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2024 16:44:00
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:01:56
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:00:55
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Fri, 06 Dec 2024 17:43:37
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Wed, 04 Dec 2024 16:38:38
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Sun, 01 Dec 2024 18:57:43
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Fri, 29 Nov 2024 18:07:14
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Sun, 24 Nov 2024 15:26:59
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Thu, 21 Nov 2024 17:25:22
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:47:19
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2024 17:28:00
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Tue, 12 Nov 2024 17:44:08
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Fri, 08 Nov 2024 17:22:01
| +0000</pubDate> <pubDate>Wed, 06 Nov 2024 16:43:10
| +0000</pubDate>
|
| So since 6th november there were only 21 articles. Longest streak
| was 10 days and common is 3 days without any news whatsoever.
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| This rss is not exactly an rss with articles from the main
| page, but a newsletter I send manually every few days once
| enough significant stories happen to warrant an email. Each
| newsletter issue includes 2-5 main articles and 3-7 trending
| articles.
|
| https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/
| dvh wrote:
| So where is the rss feed of most important news per day?
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| I know it's not going to be popular, but to cover the cost
| of running ChatGPT on that many articles, I made it a part
| of a premium subscription:
| https://www.newsminimalist.com/premium#rss
| jamie_ca wrote:
| As an RSS user, I would love an RSS of the main page content,
| one entry per story over 5.5 is a perfectly reasonable
| baseline.
|
| Also: It'd be great if you had a feed tag in your HTML head,
| so RSS readers could pick it up straight out of your homepage
| URL instead of needing to manually hunt for the right RSS
| link.
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| Ah, I didn't know it was a thing! I'll add it to HTML head.
| elicash wrote:
| How would this compare "significance" of news about the ceasefire
| in Israel/Palestine vs, say, a genocide that's large in numbers
| but smaller in world attention? (edited for clarity, given your
| reply)
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| It'd be interesting to see, but I don't fully trust ChatGPT to
| rate historic events that it already knows are significant. A
| much more fair comparison would be between events that it
| doesn't have in it's training data.
|
| But from what I've seen it's pretty indifferent to "sides",
| it's more focused on raw numbers of people affected and
| magnitude of the event.
| jackphilson wrote:
| This is so cool. I love this application of LLMs
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I think LLMs are really underutilized as a "judgement tool". A
| couple similar ideas people reached out to me with were:
| evaluating which pull requests are more significant in a big
| repo, or which grant applications have more merit.
|
| The LLMs will always make mistakes, but they could work great
| as the first filter.
| jackphilson wrote:
| you may like @JungleSilicon on twitter.
| loxias wrote:
| neato! Curious where you're sourcing the raw feed from. Wire
| service (AP, Reuters, AFP)? Google news? "the wikipedia current
| events page"? Something else?
|
| As in every other engineering endeavor, the raw data you start
| off with has a lot to do with what you end up with, no matter
| what transforms happen. :)
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| Thanks! I mainly rely on Paid APIs, but additionally go over
| some RSS feeds for prominent sources that they don't cover.
|
| Wikipedia current events page was actually one of the reasons
| for creating this project! I was disagreeing a lot with their
| selection of news, for example one of the recent entries is:
|
| "Two people are killed and eleven others are injured when a bus
| flips on its side on a highway near Prenzlau, northeast of
| Berlin, Germany."
|
| My system gave it a significance score of 1.8:
| https://www.newsminimalist.com/articles/two-dead-and-four-in...
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| To your point about raw data - I wasn't expecting there to be
| so much junk in news. I think I automatically filter out like a
| third of articles that I get: historic recaps (something cool
| happened 50 years ago), round-ups (Here's what happened last
| week), a ton of opinion articles, and AI-slop.
| randcraw wrote:
| Yeah, this is a great idea. Filtering the ranked output would be
| even better, especially if you could also exclude content by
| class (or keyword), as in...
|
| rank by significance: NOT politics; NOT Trump;
| NOT republican; NOT democrat
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| It's actually available in paid subscription! Users asked for
| it a lot, mostly to block the recent political drama in US and
| Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Palestine conflicts.
|
| https://www.newsminimalist.com/premium#block-topics
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Isn't significance heavily subjective though?
|
| A lot of the most signficant stories are political, for example,
| which someone may have no interest in.
|
| I have had this same idea in the past, tuning to my personal
| interests.
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| Good point! I actually have this exact question on about page
| [0], I'll copy my thoughts from there:
|
| I separate significance from importance (or relevance).
|
| Importance is subjective. News about the health of my family
| members is important to me, but it is not significant to the
| world.
|
| Significance is objective. It's about how much the event
| affects humanity as a whole.
|
| [0] https://www.newsminimalist.com/about
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Makes sense that way. I think you nailed the execution. Good
| job!
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Nice. Similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35905437
| (which summarizes for free)
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| I think the main differentiator for my project is news
| selection.
|
| Most other aggregators show news based on 1) relevance, 2)
| upvotes or 3) coverage.
|
| Relevance-based algorithms tend to put reader into a bubble,
| where the more they read on a certain topic, the more news they
| see on that topic.
|
| Upvotes-based algorithms usually bring up a lot of clickbait
| and drama.
|
| Sorting by coverage doesn't really work either, media often
| just follows people's interests and churns articles on what is
| "hot".
|
| For example, last summer, a fight between Zuckerberg and Musk
| was at the top of most feeds based both on upvotes and
| coverage. Significance-based algorithm didn't even put it in
| the top 50.
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(page generated 2025-01-16 23:00 UTC)