[HN Gopher] Show HN: Real-time system that tracks how news sprea...
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Show HN: Real-time system that tracks how news spreads across 200k
websites
I built a system that monitors ~200,000 news RSS feeds in near
real-time and clusters related articles to show how stories spread
across the web. It uses Snowflake's Arctic model for embeddings
and HNSW for fast similarity search. Each "story cluster" shows who
published first, how fast it propagated, and how the narrative
evolved as more outlets picked it up. Would love feedback on the
architecture, scaling approach, and any ways to make the clusters
more accurate or useful. Live demo: https://yandori.io/news-flow/
Author : antiochIst
Score : 213 points
Date : 2025-11-26 01:27 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (yandori.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (yandori.io)
| masterphai wrote:
| Interesting project - it's rare to see news-flow tracking done in
| real time at this scale. One thing you may want to stress-test is
| how stable the clustering remains when stories evolve
| semantically over a few hours. Embeddings tend to drift as
| outlets rewrite or localize a piece, and HNSW can sometimes over-
| merge when the centroid shifts.
|
| A trick that helped in a similar system I built was doing a
| second-pass "temporal coherence" check: if two articles are close
| in embedding space but far apart in publish time or share no
| common entities, keep them in adjacent clusters rather than
| forcing a merge. It reduced false positives significantly.
|
| Also curious how you handle deduping syndicated content -
| AP/Reuters can dominate the embedding space unless you weight
| publisher identity or canonical URLs.
|
| Overall, really nice work. The propagation timeline is especially
| useful.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Thanks for your comment, unfortunately it seems that your
| comments are primarily LLM-generated (for people looking for
| evidence, the first comments of this user should provide enough
| evidence, although they're getting better by fine tuning the
| prompt). As HN is primarily a place for humans, please do not
| do this here. Thanks.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| How can I bait this bot?
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| The style of the account comments and "about" definitely
| give off LLM vibes, but it's not a particularly active
| account so I feel not a true bot. It's also possible the
| account owner just runs their own comment through an LLM
| before posting it. I do that for most business emails I
| send these days but they are still reflecting my own
| thoughts and details.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| this apecific comment shows no sign of LLM authorship
|
| maybe the author uses LLMs in some comments and not others.
| that is, it's not a bot, just someone manually using LLM
| tools sometimes
| Oras wrote:
| I really like the idea. I would love a feature to add keywords
| and see related news.
| KomoD wrote:
| I think the idea is interesting but it includes a lot of spam and
| non-news (e.g. archive.fo, .vn, .today, etc.)
| psychoslave wrote:
| Can it be tuned to get a sense of how it reach Wikimedia
| projects?
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Cool idea! What I liked the most was the breakdown into
| categories like "breaking" and "trending" plus the number of
| sources.
|
| The view showing the flow with a play animation was a nice
| concept but I couldn't see much value in it, wondering if you
| could try to get a more aggregate stats that shows a connection
| between these different flows, maybe they follow a pattern like
| ad-based campaigns or publishers who own these domains, which
| would explain things. Expanding on this idea, could even try and
| setup different scores and metrics based on major groups and
| sponsored content versus organic spread.
| jMyles wrote:
| Just tried it, and clicking on the stories doesn't seem to do
| anything. Console shows "TypeError: can't access property "time",
| flowData[Math.min(...)] is undefined"
|
| Ubuntu 24.04, Firefox 145.0.1 (64-bit)
| guillem_lefait wrote:
| same
| juujian wrote:
| Very cool. Our lab will want to do something like this
| eventually. Do you have a repo?
| Havoc wrote:
| That's really cool!
|
| Curious how you sourced the feeds? It seems to have a bias
| towards Indian/Srilanka/Iran/Indonesia/Turkey etc - i.e. not the
| traditional western centric reporting. Always interested in
| trying to get a more balanced news diet so anything you could
| share around that would be interesting. Most out of the box news
| tools seem to automatically lean west
|
| FYI layout sometimes breaks like so:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/FXeqB9R.png
| supermatt wrote:
| "Traditional western reporting" is traditionally a western
| thing. That's only 15% of the global population - so if
| anything it seems bias towards that.
| ewuhic wrote:
| Without evaluating it thoroughly and judging just from
| description - I really hope this ends up open-sourced - will help
| drastically to many good-intent parties.
| rvz wrote:
| This looks a lot like a combination of spam and slop posed as
| "breaking news".
|
| > Opinion: Operation Holiday serves a critical need in our
| communities
|
| > Dhru Fusion WooCommerce Integration Plugin
|
| > Powering the Future of Wellness Through Premium Food Supplement
| Ingredients
|
| That isn't even remotely important at all so really unreliable.
| hopelite wrote:
| Have you ever considered providing feedback in a constructive
| and supportive manner?
| rvz wrote:
| I am just being a substantiative counterweight so that
| everyone gets the _full picture_ whilst being objective at
| the same time.
|
| The following headlines look more like spam rather than
| factual breaking news.
| dmix wrote:
| How do you handle time zone issues with the dates?
|
| I've been curious how much news starts from social media. So many
| news stories today are "someone said x on twitter".
| YmiYugy wrote:
| The idea is pretty cool, but it doesn't work super well. 1. I
| imagine most major news outlets don't have RSS feeds these days.
| 2. A lot of stuff originates from news agencies, so they don't
| spread from website to website, but radiate out from the agency.
| 3. Most of the included sources are pretty small. To draw
| meaningful conclusions we would need infos like popularity,
| political leaning, nation of origin, etc. 4. The similarity check
| doesn't appear to do translation. So when news spreads from one
| country to another we loose the thread.
| badestrand wrote:
| The devil really is always in the details.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Being consistent in message framing even when its not in the
| best interest of the public should not reasonably be
| considered "news" =3
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
| andai wrote:
| >the similarity check doesn't appear to do translation
|
| This surprises me. The system is based on embeddings. AFAIK
| embeddings cluster the same concept in different languages in
| roughly the same place? Maybe it depends on the model (or maybe
| it's not exact and the clustering cutoff loses it).
| fcarraldo wrote:
| > I imagine most major news outlets don't have RSS feeds these
| days
|
| I'm not aware of any that don't. RSS is alive and well.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Also, not all information spreads through public channels, and
| might not even be/become publicly known. But that doesn't mean
| news refraction based on textual similarity isn't worthwhile to
| pursue, as it can reveal a lot about the self-organising
| principles by which the media operate.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. For example, this story about Ukraine [1] is credited to
| WNYT as first, but the story itself credits the Associated
| Press. This problem is worth solving, because it's something
| search engines should be doing.
|
| [1] https://wnyt.com/ap-top-news/rubio-says-us-ukraine-talks-
| on-...
| pbiggar wrote:
| See also Newscord, which does very similar work to analyze bias
| across news media:
|
| - https://newscord.org/latest
|
| - https://www.instagram.com/newscord_org
| codethief wrote:
| Cool idea! On mobile (Chromium on Android) I was confused at
| first because nothing happened when I tapped any of the stories -
| until I realized I can zoom out and the info about how the story
| propagated is at the end of the page.
| hk1337 wrote:
| This seems like it could have an additional use case of labeling
| each news source left, right, center, neutral/factual and
| tracking how or if each one releases an article.
| patrick4urcloud wrote:
| great !
| gioele wrote:
| Kudos on releasing Yandori!
|
| We have been (low-keep) working on something similar (more from
| an academic point of view) for the past few years:
|
| This is the introductory article (open access): "Comparison of
| news commonality and churn in international news outlets with
| TARO" https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3603163.3609062
|
| (Allow me a moment of pride for the student leading this project:
| the paper won the Ted Nelson Award at ACM Hypertext 2023.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Is there a way you could use this system to track propaganda?
| analogears wrote:
| Tried this on iPhone - the category tabs (Sports, World News,
| Business) get cut off on the right and there's no horizontal
| scroll indicator, so I didn't realise there were more options at
| first. The story cards also aren't using the full screen width,
| leaving wasted space on both sides.
|
| Cool concept though - the source count and "+N" spread metrics
| give a quick sense of which stories have legs.
| kburman wrote:
| This is absolutely brilliant. If you integrate Reddit and
| Twitter/X, you'd get a much more complete picture of how stories
| spread across the internet.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Yep. I have some suspicions on how the information travels
| lately ( it is kinda both ways depending on the 'type' of news
| ), but it would absolutely be of general interest.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Good idea. Clean execution. Nice UI. I will repeat other poster's
| plea to make it open source. The information this provides is
| useful.
| leobg wrote:
| I dream of having that for video:
|
| For any given clip, short or excerpt, find the most complete,
| unedited version that it was taken from.
| actinium226 wrote:
| Very cool. I'm curious what frontend and backend technologies are
| used?
| keepamovin wrote:
| I feel a graph diagram (hub and spoke, showing "data flow") would
| be a useful alt view here.
|
| Cool website. As others note if this could tie in deep sources
| like FB, X, Reddit, etc...it would be almost "chain of evidence"
| canonical.
|
| A view where websites/sources were associated with geo data
| (possibly involving a globe or map) would be very cool, too.
| Triphibian wrote:
| This is interesting, but it seems like it is tracking stories
| with similar headlines and that's not always how news propagates.
| Frequently a blogger will read an interview, select an quote from
| the interview and write a new headline around the quote they
| cherry picked. It used to be common practice to link the original
| source, but that always doesn't happen.
|
| I have long thought that search engines, news aggregators and
| social media companies have a journalistic responsibility to
| favor the original/primary source of every story, but things have
| not worked out that way. If you can manage to truly develop
| something like this it would be a valuable tool for rewarding the
| work of reporting over SEO.
|
| Anyway, please consider that headlines and time stamps do not
| tell the entire story when it comes to sourcing.
|
| For example: Your website offers this story
| (https://hotspotatl.com/6587626/dr-jackie-married-to-medicine...)
| as first to publish. But right in the text it cites another
| website BOSSIP as the source of the interview.
|
| Also: there doesn't appear to be a way to link results from your
| website.
| dkdcio wrote:
| not linking primary sources is one of my biggest pet peeves
| with modern ad-driven "journalism".
|
| e.g. the recent Mark Kelly story, I went through many articles
| trying to find a link to the actual video of what he said.
| couldn't find it
|
| headlines with "[person said X]" tend to be bullshit
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Go hunt down the lineage of the "AI water use" articles
| floating around.
|
| It's all circular.
|
| I don't know how one is supposed to trust any of the media at
| this point. Especially "reputable" ones that are just as
| guilty of circular nonsense as anything else.
|
| If you don't follow the media, you are uninformed. If you
| follow it, you are misinformed.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _I have long thought that search engines, news aggregators
| and social media companies have a journalistic responsibility
| to favor the original /primary source of every story_
|
| This is complicated somewhat by the few that take an already-
| circulating story and then add their own actual research rather
| than just rewording and opining.
| 65 wrote:
| I think you will need to filter out wire services like AP and
| Reuters, as I'm seeing stories that are mostly republished wire
| stories on random websites.
| ai_updates wrote:
| Really cool project -- I like how clearly the flow of information
| is visualized. It's interesting to see how fast certain stories
| propagate across networks. Curious: have you noticed patterns in
| which types of sources tend to spark the fastest spread?
| andai wrote:
| This is related to my interests!
|
| Where'd you find all those RSS feeds? Have you done anything else
| with RSS feeds? :)
|
| Also agree with the others this definitely needs interactive
| graphs!
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I feel like there's a huge necessary civil virtue to this sort of
| understanding the news project.
|
| Thanks for sharing some details. Its cool that HNSW is useful for
| near realtime usage. For some reason I had categorized it in my
| head as having very very high insertion cost, needing to rebuild
| worlds to work but that's not at a well founded belief; very cool
| that it's usable here.
|
| I really hope we see some open source work of this variety.
| Trying to understand news or even social media is something the
| world seems to unprepared for. Different subject sort of, but
| watching Internet Observatory be dismantled by the current
| political administration, by disinformation grifters, was a
| woeful loss of one of the few mirrors the that humanity had to
| understand itself with, to see how we networked.
| ble wrote:
| Cool idea. Given that it transferred ~29 mb when loading, is it
| safe to assume that the actual page is doing some of the
| processing? Is the front-end just doing the HNSW or is it doing
| the mapping of stories or headlines into vectors, or am I totally
| off base?
|
| Front-end downstream of clicking on a card doesn't seem to work
| correctly on every reload... but it works sometimes.
| hbarka wrote:
| It's performing really slow right now. Is it possible to tell if
| virality of a news article is organic or manufactured? Organic is
| when it is produced by a reporting organization but can you see
| direct lineage to re-spreaders?
| lmeyerov wrote:
| I don't see news spread, eg, direct lineage graphs showing viral
| attribution & rewrites as a narrative propagates..
|
| Afaict, it is the usual topic trending over time, or maybe it is
| showing direct sindication?
|
| Computing actual derivation flow would be neato, esp precisely at
| scale vs just the usual embeddings
| maximator wrote:
| Some time ago, I wrote a scientific article in which I applied
| and modified the SIR model of disease spread to the spread of
| fake news. I simulated the whole thing in a Watts-Strogaz graph.
| It would be interesting to see whether the theory and formula are
| applicable to the real world.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Is there something similar that could be built to track spreading
| across social media? For example to track misinformation and its
| patterns? Or is that no longer possible because of changes to the
| Twitter API or whatever?
| elorant wrote:
| More important for me is how you identify news sites, let alone
| 200k of them. Is there any online source that lists them? Or do
| you cherry pick them one by one?
| rationably wrote:
| And to add to the above, is there a list of the websites you
| use and any information on sampling methodology? Is it
| perfectly random or weighted? Do you trust the timestamp from
| an RSS feed?
| cyrusradfar wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of the problem and I think this is a really solid
| approach vector to learn what user problems exist in this design.
|
| I'll dump a few thoughts as they come for the creators, feel free
| to riff with me on the thread if that'll be of value.
|
| My perspective, as a User, is I'm interested in rooting out bias
| and where it's coming from. Moreover, the influence networks are
| fascinating as well.
|
| I think, for example, understanding which publications "picked
| up" a story vs didn't is very very viral use case as you could
| imagine people using you as a backdrop to a social post about
| editorial bias. That said, I think you need to pick who you serve
| because the folks who will be interested in this aren't the
| average person as they're not super news focused.
|
| One way to learn may be looking at the types of meta-stories
| posted about the analysis on media and see how you could support
| those types of ongoing analysis. Scoring, honestly, is an another
| really interesting idea. What are publications "for" or "against"
| based on how they do editorial, and how they bias their
| headlines, and ledes.
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