News Minimalist – Only significant news(newsminimalist.com)
newsminimalist.com
News Minimalist – Only significant news
https://www.newsminimalist.com/
231 comments
A great use case for llms. I'm not expecting you to do this, but I would love to choose my own news sites. I'm a Brit living in Czech Republic. So I'd maybe have the guardian, BBC, and some Czech sources in there. Not so interested in American news, any American news that affects me will reach my local sources. But great work!
Thank you!
Adding filter for news sources should be pretty easy, I'll consider it for "advanced view".
Adding filter for news sources should be pretty easy, I'll consider it for "advanced view".
A prompt, or more like a list of them seems the most interesting customization. For example: "no crypto currency", "nothing from Keith Rupert Murdoch", "chinese realestate", "ukraine war", "forex" etc
Now that would be worth something...
Say, you want more than 6 filters they costs 50 cents/filter/month with a minimum of 5.
I think one would gradually make more and more of them?
Now that would be worth something...
Say, you want more than 6 filters they costs 50 cents/filter/month with a minimum of 5.
I think one would gradually make more and more of them?
Agree. US news are not so relevant here so source customisation would be great!
Some changes that I would find useful are:
* Make it easier to browse back in time. My biggest annoyance with news sites I've subscribed to is that they have no way to find articles after they have moved off the front page so I feel compelled to visit every day, and when I don't I feel like I'm wasting money, so I unsubscribe. I did eventually find that you have previous days available in the newsletter section, but a more discoverable interface like "previous/next day" link on the bottom of the page would be great.
* Add some less frequent newsletters, such as weekly and monthly which dedupe any stories that come up multiple times in that period, and include the top N stories, rather than everything over a threshold.
* Sections would be great for advanced users. My ideal would be to let the user set a different threshold for each section, but then still display them all together on the front page.
* Make it easier to browse back in time. My biggest annoyance with news sites I've subscribed to is that they have no way to find articles after they have moved off the front page so I feel compelled to visit every day, and when I don't I feel like I'm wasting money, so I unsubscribe. I did eventually find that you have previous days available in the newsletter section, but a more discoverable interface like "previous/next day" link on the bottom of the page would be great.
* Add some less frequent newsletters, such as weekly and monthly which dedupe any stories that come up multiple times in that period, and include the top N stories, rather than everything over a threshold.
* Sections would be great for advanced users. My ideal would be to let the user set a different threshold for each section, but then still display them all together on the front page.
Great idea and well executed - well done!
I actually created a site - https://detoxed.news - with a very similar philosophy a while back, though with a much simpler implementation. It periodically scrapes Wikipedia's Current Events Portal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) and presents that information in a nicer format.
I think there's definitely a sweet spot where you keep well-informed about current events and happenings in the world, without wasting your time on the 24 hours new cycle.
I actually created a site - https://detoxed.news - with a very similar philosophy a while back, though with a much simpler implementation. It periodically scrapes Wikipedia's Current Events Portal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) and presents that information in a nicer format.
I think there's definitely a sweet spot where you keep well-informed about current events and happenings in the world, without wasting your time on the 24 hours new cycle.
The problem with using Wikipedia as a news source is that it focuses on really flashy topics, like murder and armed conflicts. Looking at the headlines of detoxed.news confirms this:
1) Flood in Rwanda kills 109 people 2) Sudan War 3) Australia evacuation from Sudan 4) Seizing of an oil tanker
None of these headlines keep me particularly informed and are actually a more potent version of the 24 hours new cycle
1) Flood in Rwanda kills 109 people 2) Sudan War 3) Australia evacuation from Sudan 4) Seizing of an oil tanker
None of these headlines keep me particularly informed and are actually a more potent version of the 24 hours new cycle
This is an awesome idea and I'm kicking myself for not thinking about it before. Very creative.
Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases? Both whether it considers left- or right-leaning articles more significant and where it focuses most of its reporting. (Economy and the US from a first glance?)
Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases? Both whether it considers left- or right-leaning articles more significant and where it focuses most of its reporting. (Economy and the US from a first glance?)
Thank you!
> Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases?
I haven't. I can share ChatGPT's evaluation of sources credibility, maybe that will give people some insights. For example, Reuters got 9.5 (out of 10), Lifehacker 7, Oprah Mag 3.
> where it focuses most of its reporting. (Economy and the US from a first glance?)
I'd say today is just US and economy-heavy day. There were many days when other categories and geographies made the top (I especially enjoy these). One example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
> Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases?
I haven't. I can share ChatGPT's evaluation of sources credibility, maybe that will give people some insights. For example, Reuters got 9.5 (out of 10), Lifehacker 7, Oprah Mag 3.
> where it focuses most of its reporting. (Economy and the US from a first glance?)
I'd say today is just US and economy-heavy day. There were many days when other categories and geographies made the top (I especially enjoy these). One example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
> Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases? Both whether it considers left- or right-leaning articles
FWIW, when I read news I often cross check on different outlets to get a sense of the span, range and sometimes media blackouts, including the ones with extreme bias (like RT reporting on Ukraine). This can give a good reading of the meta-temperature of a developing or controversial situation with a lot of propaganda and bias. In some cases, less trustworthy outlets will cover stories that aren’t narrative-friendly to more reputable publications, and sometimes, those can be really important.
For a service like this, I’d much prefer something analogous to “here’s what different outlets are saying”, rather than trying to make its own judgment about bias.
FWIW, when I read news I often cross check on different outlets to get a sense of the span, range and sometimes media blackouts, including the ones with extreme bias (like RT reporting on Ukraine). This can give a good reading of the meta-temperature of a developing or controversial situation with a lot of propaganda and bias. In some cases, less trustworthy outlets will cover stories that aren’t narrative-friendly to more reputable publications, and sometimes, those can be really important.
For a service like this, I’d much prefer something analogous to “here’s what different outlets are saying”, rather than trying to make its own judgment about bias.
Great idea, the “here’s what different outlets are saying” feature.
Stories that aren’t narrative-friendly to main stream media.
Media blackouts to highlight propaganda and bias.
Make it easy for reader to see the "manufactured consent"!
Subscribed to newsletter.newsminimalist.
Subscribed to newsletter.newsminimalist.
In case you’re not already familiar with it, there’s a site called https://www.allsides.com/ that does exactly this. I believe the creator is on HN.
The absolute best feature is selecting the LEAST significant articles. Way more whimsey! +1
“Brief downpour in Karachi turns weather pleasant.”
I get the most random articles by selecting around the mode (peak) of the distribution. The lowest of the low is all Daily Mail gossip all the time :puke:.
Overall: love the idea.
Any chance of updating the RSS feed item "summary" to something more useful than "significant news" and title to something more than the date? Or maybe an RSS feed of the newsletter format?
(I do see some of the older items have titles that include some info on what's included)
Basically, I think the ideal RSS feeds would be _two_: 1. RSS feed of every item that hits the 6/10 threshold (title and link to original, summary not too important, either same as title or paragraph summary of what the article is about) 2. RSS feed of the newsletter (title: "May 4 2023 - significant news", link: newsletter page, summary: list of article titles)
I suppose versions of #1 with diff thresholds could be nice, but I'd probably only use the default threshold.
Background: I run a bot that sends RSS feeds into discord channels (easily followable to any discord server) and this particular feed seems potentially quite handy for good news info. Probably overlaps with https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/ but that automation probably means it can catch breaking news faster than a manually-curated site like that.
Any chance of updating the RSS feed item "summary" to something more useful than "significant news" and title to something more than the date? Or maybe an RSS feed of the newsletter format?
(I do see some of the older items have titles that include some info on what's included)
Basically, I think the ideal RSS feeds would be _two_: 1. RSS feed of every item that hits the 6/10 threshold (title and link to original, summary not too important, either same as title or paragraph summary of what the article is about) 2. RSS feed of the newsletter (title: "May 4 2023 - significant news", link: newsletter page, summary: list of article titles)
I suppose versions of #1 with diff thresholds could be nice, but I'd probably only use the default threshold.
Background: I run a bot that sends RSS feeds into discord channels (easily followable to any discord server) and this particular feed seems potentially quite handy for good news info. Probably overlaps with https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/ but that automation probably means it can catch breaking news faster than a manually-curated site like that.
Thanks for the feedback. All great points.
"RSS" that I have currently is generated by the email platform that I use for daily emails. It's not a proper RSS from website.
Making a proper RSS for website items is on my list, but I need to finish some other features first.
Agree about subtitles in older items, I guess I just got lazy writing them :) your message was just what I needed to get back to older better format.
"RSS" that I have currently is generated by the email platform that I use for daily emails. It's not a proper RSS from website.
Making a proper RSS for website items is on my list, but I need to finish some other features first.
Agree about subtitles in older items, I guess I just got lazy writing them :) your message was just what I needed to get back to older better format.
Love this concept and signed up immediately.
Heads up that your plaintext emails in the newsletter have some html formatting and template artifacts in there.
Heads up that your plaintext emails in the newsletter have some html formatting and template artifacts in there.
Thanks, will look into that. I've been using the default template, which is relatively style-heavy, but will work on making it more minimal and clear.
Great idea!
Personally, I want an even higher signal to noise ratio and even fewer articles. Perhaps significance > 7, and articles from the last week.
Personally, I want an even higher signal to noise ratio and even fewer articles. Perhaps significance > 7, and articles from the last week.
Someone suggested making weekly section, I'll try to add it soon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35797568
This is great!
I've subscribed to the RSS feed. I thought the feed would provide links the significant news articles directly, but it appears to provide a link to the newsminimalist.com summary. That's totally fine, but I'd think it'd be a bit nicer if there was an option to access the articles directly.
I'm also using ChatGPT to scrape online info and reduce it. Were there any particularly interesting problems that you had to solve? For me, it was figuring out ways to reduce the number of tokens so I don't hemorrhage money!
I've subscribed to the RSS feed. I thought the feed would provide links the significant news articles directly, but it appears to provide a link to the newsminimalist.com summary. That's totally fine, but I'd think it'd be a bit nicer if there was an option to access the articles directly.
I'm also using ChatGPT to scrape online info and reduce it. Were there any particularly interesting problems that you had to solve? For me, it was figuring out ways to reduce the number of tokens so I don't hemorrhage money!
Thanks!
Yeah RSS it not great currently. Replied about it here with more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820032
Oh, exactly the same problem. The straightforward implementation would make me broke in month :)
Had to make several optimizations to make the bill reasonable. Not all of them worked, some greatly reduced the quality of significance estimations.
Reducing number of tokens was super fun, forgot about it :D
Yeah RSS it not great currently. Replied about it here with more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820032
Oh, exactly the same problem. The straightforward implementation would make me broke in month :)
Had to make several optimizations to make the bill reasonable. Not all of them worked, some greatly reduced the quality of significance estimations.
Reducing number of tokens was super fun, forgot about it :D
I really love this. Thank you.
Question: are you using ChatGPT to summarize the article and making that the title of each post?
Question: are you using ChatGPT to summarize the article and making that the title of each post?
Yes! I do exactly that. In the early version I posted the original titles, but many were too clickbait-y and hard to read. I find the rewritten titles much easier to scan through.
How do you decide how aggressively to summarize? That is, a 200-word summary of an 800-word article is very different from a 200-word summary of a 5,000-word article.
Relatedly, it would be neat if you had a slider or +/- buttons for each article summary, so someone could choose their depth based on how interesting the title sounds.
Relatedly, it would be neat if you had a slider or +/- buttons for each article summary, so someone could choose their depth based on how interesting the title sounds.
I don't decide it.
I just ask chatgpt to "summarize the article very concisely" and hope that it won't lose any important points. But chatgpt is really good at summarizing, so I don't worry much.
Having +/- buttons is a good idea, will add it to todo list as well.
I just ask chatgpt to "summarize the article very concisely" and hope that it won't lose any important points. But chatgpt is really good at summarizing, so I don't worry much.
Having +/- buttons is a good idea, will add it to todo list as well.
I assumed you did one llm batch a day and served it to all users. With +- buttons wouldn't you need to re-engage the llm?
Could just ask the model for 5 lengths/levels of detail per article and have the +/- switch between them.
This is what I was thinking, sort of like the mechanism that Newsela and others use for their leveled reading platforms.
If you were so inclined, it would probably be pretty trivial to also offer leveled versions as well, which would be very useful for schools/teachers to use with students. There are a handful of companies that have bespoke leveled reading articles created from standard news articles. ChatGPT would make the workflow for creating news articles much easier, though manual QC would still be necessary to ensure that the article summaries are accurate and appropriate for students.
If you were so inclined, it would probably be pretty trivial to also offer leveled versions as well, which would be very useful for schools/teachers to use with students. There are a handful of companies that have bespoke leveled reading articles created from standard news articles. ChatGPT would make the workflow for creating news articles much easier, though manual QC would still be necessary to ensure that the article summaries are accurate and appropriate for students.
Great work! I'd consider specifying the list of criteria for significance further, in order to counteract the heavy US bias of ChatGPT and, therefore, your site. I'm not a prompt engineer, but perhaps something on relevance for people from different countries, or simply adding to your prompt a sentence on ensuring geographical diversity.
The idea of filtering news sourced mentioned elsewhere is nice, but will necessitate considerable input from users, kind of negating the purpose of the site
The idea of filtering news sourced mentioned elsewhere is nice, but will necessitate considerable input from users, kind of negating the purpose of the site
Just published today's issue: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/wednesday-may-3-3-si...
I bet spam algorithms didn't like that I sent email to 30 people yesterday and 900 people today. Good problem to have :) Please check your spam folder if you don't see today's issue in inbox.
I bet spam algorithms didn't like that I sent email to 30 people yesterday and 900 people today. Good problem to have :) Please check your spam folder if you don't see today's issue in inbox.
Hi and congrats, that's a great idea ? Is your project open source by any chance ? And if so, are you open to contributions ?
RSS: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml
(some people had complaints about formatting there, will try to fix soon)
Amazing project. Would be cool if the RSS feed could accept a parameter for either top x stories, or all stories with score greater than y.
I am always interested in minimalist / text-oriented resources. And "importance ranking" seems like an especially valid task for AI. Thanks for sharing.
Every news site has some notion of top items, but you’ve done it 10x better. The de-duplication of similar stories, great summaries, and super clean interface are amazing. Bravo! It really feels like you solved news aggregation.
very good idea and good website, but very US focused. so not very useful. one thing that people tend to ignore about google and apple is how good their localization are. ofc i am not expecting the same sophistication from a team of 1, and i am not expecting anything at all. but i just want to encourage developers to think global from the get go.
True for today, many US-centric news made the cut. But that's not always the case. Here's recent issue with no US news: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
Some news entries appear to be of the "Top 5 things you should know today" variety, where it covers multiple topics. Example screenshot.[0] Might want to filter those out somehow?
[0] https://cln.sh/s44CS9tmwkC79NHcXPP3
[0] https://cln.sh/s44CS9tmwkC79NHcXPP3
These headlines are basically the same as I get going to Bloomberg.com/markets over the past couple of of days.
Yeah, today is very economy-heavy day. But in the past issues there were more articles about health, science and environment.
Recent example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
Recent example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
I'm sure you're aware, but I don't see a comment - the site is down.
Wasn't aware, thank you. Can't find anything in logs, is it still down for you?
I’d love for there to be sections, such as science, business, politics, etc.
Similar aesthetic, different execution, but you could check out brutalist.report
I had them at one point, but decided to remove for simplicity. Will bring them back :)
Maybe make it optional because there’s huge value in keeping it simple like you currently have, so please don’t lose that
Eg default (no topic sections like what you have today), and optional advanced (with sections)
Eg default (no topic sections like what you have today), and optional advanced (with sections)
I think it's the best solution, will do it soon.
Also, is you’re looking for a simpler domain name - http://BigNews.today is available.
( I used ChatGPT to help me find it, via https://smartynames.com/ )
( I used ChatGPT to help me find it, via https://smartynames.com/ )
Seems like someone bought it and set up a redirect to newsminimalist.com
Thank you kind stranger!
Thank you kind stranger!
Such a great idea! Good job!
I have a question: when watching shows like Last Week Tonight by John Oliver, it feels like the important news that make direct impact on people’s lives are more local than national or even international. The state changing a law here, the city building something new or make it harder to X..etc.,
Have you considered/thought about this aspect of news?
Have you considered/thought about this aspect of news?
So cool! Would you be able to explain your architecture?
great work!
How did you gain access to GPT-4 API?
or are you manually inserting the article text into chat-gpt 4's web interface?
Thank you! I asked for GPT-4 access via form on OpenAI website, they gave me the one with 8k context window, which is enough for 99% of articles.
I am European and see another US news oriented site which ironically is not "minimalist" from my perspective. It is (to me) littered with US domestic concerns. My point is that _minimalist_ is highly subjective and a pretty huge promise from a site.
But kudos to the effort and the idea of keeping news small is a most noble cause
But kudos to the effort and the idea of keeping news small is a most noble cause
A simple geographic bias for proximity would probably help with that - I'd love a curated news feed that has reporting on both major world events and news local to my hometown.
In the ChatGPT prompt I make emphasis on evaluating article from the perspective of humanity as a whole, not prioritizing any individual country. But still, it's not ideal.
I don't know ChatGPT's logic, but it might be it's giving higher scores to news about US economic difficulties because they tend to cause ripples all over the world. But I've never seen articles about US internal politics getting score over 6.5 (or maybe there were none in the last month).
I don't know ChatGPT's logic, but it might be it's giving higher scores to news about US economic difficulties because they tend to cause ripples all over the world. But I've never seen articles about US internal politics getting score over 6.5 (or maybe there were none in the last month).
Agree, as a Canadian, I also find that today too many US-centric news made the cut, but often it's not the case. Here's a recent issue covering different topics and not mentioning US at all: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
Oddly enough in the 'least significant section', with scores <0.5, it's nearly all Daily Mail articles focused on the UK.
Also, the second to last least significant article seems to be incorrectly categorized: "Regenerative medicine has come a long way, baby"
Which is actually a serious look back at the advancements over the last quarter century, hardly deserving the second to last position.
It seems like ChatGPT is ranking them not based on actual content significance but presumed significance of the headline. (Which would also make sense technically as ~1200 headlines is about the max context length of GPT-4).
Also, the second to last least significant article seems to be incorrectly categorized: "Regenerative medicine has come a long way, baby"
Which is actually a serious look back at the advancements over the last quarter century, hardly deserving the second to last position.
It seems like ChatGPT is ranking them not based on actual content significance but presumed significance of the headline. (Which would also make sense technically as ~1200 headlines is about the max context length of GPT-4).
Nice catch. Just checked that article — it actually got rating 2.8 just based on the news content, but the source credibility 1/10 brought it down to 0.3.
I don't think it's fair, I think ChatGPT hallucinated that it's a tabloid.
Not sure how to fix this. I don't want to adjust sources credibility manually, that will introduce too much bias. My hope is that OpenAI will update ChatGPT with newer data and I could rerun the credibility evaluation.
I don't think it's fair, I think ChatGPT hallucinated that it's a tabloid.
Not sure how to fix this. I don't want to adjust sources credibility manually, that will introduce too much bias. My hope is that OpenAI will update ChatGPT with newer data and I could rerun the credibility evaluation.
Assuming an average of 20 tokens per headline (~10-14 words), 1200 headlines would be 24000 tokens, which is already near the limit of the API-exclusive GPT-4's window of 32,768 tokens, and way beyond the 8,192 token length of the ChatGPT version.
So it's exceedingly unlikely the actual content, beyond the headline, is processed if your using the ChatGPT version.
So it's exceedingly unlikely the actual content, beyond the headline, is processed if your using the ChatGPT version.
I score each article individually, so there's no need to put many news in one context window.
In 99% cases a single news article fits within the context.
I drop those that don't fit, since several examples I saw were announcement of lottery numbers (too many tokens) and articles with broken html.
In 99% cases a single news article fits within the context.
I drop those that don't fit, since several examples I saw were announcement of lottery numbers (too many tokens) and articles with broken html.
The score has to be in relation to other articles. Or else it's too random to have meaning. ChatGPT doesn't even given consistent scores from session-to-session for the same article.
And the context length limit prevents that relation from extending to more then a few articles, if that's your method.
i.e. Your method doesn't actually produce a meaningful score that can be ranked in some linear order with the 1200 other articles.
At most it would make sense to rank a discrete score in relation to the few other articles it remembers.
Anything beyond that should be placed in 'score ranges' from 5 to 7 for example, not given a discrete score.
And the context length limit prevents that relation from extending to more then a few articles, if that's your method.
i.e. Your method doesn't actually produce a meaningful score that can be ranked in some linear order with the 1200 other articles.
At most it would make sense to rank a discrete score in relation to the few other articles it remembers.
Anything beyond that should be placed in 'score ranges' from 5 to 7 for example, not given a discrete score.
You are spot on. I use temperature 0, but even with it, ChatGPT can be unpredictable.
Sometimes I'm very frustrated about the news that get to the top. When I try to debug it, it gives me a completely different score.
I considered using ranges over discrete score, but dropped the idea, as it makes it too hard to find 1-5 articles that should make it to newsletter (there are 71 articles in this range right now) and it's hard to clearly display that idea in UI.
I guess my position right now is — it's not perfect, there are obvious errors (like the one you found above), and improvements are definitely possible.
But I hope that some people would find it "good enough" even with these inconsistencies. I also hope that ChatGPT or another LLM will make a big progress soon that would solve this problem automatically.
Sometimes I'm very frustrated about the news that get to the top. When I try to debug it, it gives me a completely different score.
I considered using ranges over discrete score, but dropped the idea, as it makes it too hard to find 1-5 articles that should make it to newsletter (there are 71 articles in this range right now) and it's hard to clearly display that idea in UI.
I guess my position right now is — it's not perfect, there are obvious errors (like the one you found above), and improvements are definitely possible.
But I hope that some people would find it "good enough" even with these inconsistencies. I also hope that ChatGPT or another LLM will make a big progress soon that would solve this problem automatically.
So how exactly is the credibility score determined? Is it just asking "On a scale of 0 to 10, how credible is this source?"
It's a bit longer, but that's the gist of it.
I just realized, for that particular news article about Regenerative medicine it was my mistake all along. I asked ChatGPT to give unknown sources a score of 1 and completely forgot about. I think that's what it did.
For now it marked only 8 sources as unknown out of 1700.
I just realized, for that particular news article about Regenerative medicine it was my mistake all along. I asked ChatGPT to give unknown sources a score of 1 and completely forgot about. I think that's what it did.
For now it marked only 8 sources as unknown out of 1700.
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The problem is that .com is a de facto US TLD… as an American it doesn’t strike me as odd that a .com site is implicitly USA centric any more than a US news channel or US newspaper.
(Yes I know .us exists but it’s not as common as .com)
If it was newsminimalist.co.uk I don’t think anyone would really complain that it’s UK-specific news, right?
(Yes I know .us exists but it’s not as common as .com)
If it was newsminimalist.co.uk I don’t think anyone would really complain that it’s UK-specific news, right?
No, .com isn't implicitly USA centric, it's just the internet default. You mention .us yourself but then dismiss it because reasons.
Your American bias is just shining through, where of course you're not surprised.
Your American bias is just shining through, where of course you're not surprised.
> .com isn't implicitly USA centric, it's just the internet default
Those both mean the exact same thing in this context. Genuinely interesting that you're not the only person who understood it a different way and suggested "default" instead. Neither would stand up to such pedantic scrutiny if you want to argue that one of them is wrong.
In such a short sentence about a topic that everyone here surely knows about, the words only reference the relevant aspect of the underlying information. You can't know if they have the wrong or right view without more information.
Those both mean the exact same thing in this context. Genuinely interesting that you're not the only person who understood it a different way and suggested "default" instead. Neither would stand up to such pedantic scrutiny if you want to argue that one of them is wrong.
In such a short sentence about a topic that everyone here surely knows about, the words only reference the relevant aspect of the underlying information. You can't know if they have the wrong or right view without more information.
$ whois com.
% IANA WHOIS server
% for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
% This query returned 1 object
domain: COM
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address: 12061 Bluemont Way
address: Reston VA 20190
address: United States of America (the)
DNS was originally a DARPA project, and was implicitly US focused from the very beginning of the internet, because it was a US project. ".com" carries that legacy because it predates the concept of country-specific TLD's.
A similar idea exists in reddit: /r/news is very US-focused, even though it's not called "US news". Since Reddit is an American site with an (at least initially) predominantly American audience, it's not surprising at all that things are American-biased by default unless explicitly named accordingly.
If we were all using Minitel instead of The Internet, we would have similar bias where services would be biased towards France unless shown otherwise, because Minitel was a French technology.
The point is, it's not explicitly a problem that somebody puts up a website and it's US-centric. Nobody owes the world an international version of whatever project they want to make, and you don't need to get upset that they only bother to cater to a US audience.
Obviously it doesn't strike you as odd as an American.
I'd say, .com is just the default. If you go location/topic specific, you go with another TLD.
To the 130 million (domainnamestat.com) domains, registered in the US, there are like 500 million domains, registered somewhere else. I couldn't find any numbers for how many of those are .com and how many aren't, but you cannot just ignore those. Just because most domains registered in the US are .com domains, doesn't make .com a US domain. That's a really egocentric point of view.
I'd say, .com is just the default. If you go location/topic specific, you go with another TLD.
To the 130 million (domainnamestat.com) domains, registered in the US, there are like 500 million domains, registered somewhere else. I couldn't find any numbers for how many of those are .com and how many aren't, but you cannot just ignore those. Just because most domains registered in the US are .com domains, doesn't make .com a US domain. That's a really egocentric point of view.
.com is a US domain though. It's run by a US corporation (Verisign). Check whois.
That said corporation lets non-US entities buy domain names doesn't change this fact.
Similarly, if a site with a .tv address published articles explicitly about Tuvalu, in the Tuvaluan language, you probably wouldn't complain about a Tuvaluan bias, right? After all, it's a Tuvaluan TLD. The fact that lots of companies around the world use .tv addresses for other reasons that have nothing to do with Tuvalu, doesn't change the fact that it's a Tuvaluan TLD.
If you want more information on this, the intro in the Wikipedia article on .com is quite informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com ... particularly:
> The domain was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law.[2][3][4] Additionally, as the Internet was invented in the United States, most American businesses and enterprises have used the .com domain instead of a more U.S.-specific .us.
That said corporation lets non-US entities buy domain names doesn't change this fact.
Similarly, if a site with a .tv address published articles explicitly about Tuvalu, in the Tuvaluan language, you probably wouldn't complain about a Tuvaluan bias, right? After all, it's a Tuvaluan TLD. The fact that lots of companies around the world use .tv addresses for other reasons that have nothing to do with Tuvalu, doesn't change the fact that it's a Tuvaluan TLD.
If you want more information on this, the intro in the Wikipedia article on .com is quite informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com ... particularly:
> The domain was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law.[2][3][4] Additionally, as the Internet was invented in the United States, most American businesses and enterprises have used the .com domain instead of a more U.S.-specific .us.
Verisign is contracted to run .com
.tv addresses are different, because ccTLDs are explicitly tied to countries (hence "ccTLD"). generic TLDs (gTLDs) like .com are not.
.tv addresses are different, because ccTLDs are explicitly tied to countries (hence "ccTLD"). generic TLDs (gTLDs) like .com are not.
Huh? Contracted by who? DARPA originally invented the internet and DNS in the first place (it was originally an American project) and gave over control over .com to Network Solutions which was eventually bought by Verisign. What do you mean "contracted to run"?
.com registrations are ultimately under US jurisdiction. It's what happens when you have a name system that was originally intended for one country's project (The Internet) and said project ended up becoming internationally used. The original TLD's are grandfathered in even after we got country-specific ones.
Nobody complains that .mil is US-centric either. .mil isn't a ccTLD but of course it means US military.
.com is a very popular TLD used all over the world. It doesn't make it non-American. Just as .tv is also very popular outside of Tuvalu, it doesn't make it non-Tuvaluan.
.com registrations are ultimately under US jurisdiction. It's what happens when you have a name system that was originally intended for one country's project (The Internet) and said project ended up becoming internationally used. The original TLD's are grandfathered in even after we got country-specific ones.
Nobody complains that .mil is US-centric either. .mil isn't a ccTLD but of course it means US military.
.com is a very popular TLD used all over the world. It doesn't make it non-American. Just as .tv is also very popular outside of Tuvalu, it doesn't make it non-Tuvaluan.
> I'd say, .com is just the default
That means the exact same thing in this context. Genuinely interesting that you're not the only person who understood it a different way and suggested "default" instead. Neither would stand up to such pedantic scrutiny if you want to argue that one of them is wrong.
In such a short sentence about a topic that everyone here surely knows about, the words only reference the relevant aspect of the underlying information. You can't know if they have the wrong or right view without more information.
That means the exact same thing in this context. Genuinely interesting that you're not the only person who understood it a different way and suggested "default" instead. Neither would stand up to such pedantic scrutiny if you want to argue that one of them is wrong.
In such a short sentence about a topic that everyone here surely knows about, the words only reference the relevant aspect of the underlying information. You can't know if they have the wrong or right view without more information.
I think it's because I only analyze news in English currently. I was thinking of adding other languages to the evaluation and ask GPT to translate them. It should at least partially fix the US bias.
I'd been waiting/hoping for someone to make something like this. Well done. A few ideas that will not clutter the UI but you might consider:
- when a user changes the score slider, encode that in the URL with a hash tag, so they can bookmark the page with their preferred settings
- a left button allowing me to step back to yesterday's news
- to simplify newsletter signups, just accept an e-mail address right on that page
- your **advanced** options:
- have GPT score each news story across common labels: science, politics, entertainment, news, etc. Then allow these as a filter. If I want to see the top science stories of the day, that should be easy.
- have GPT write a 2 sentence summary of each story as a lead-in after the headline title
- a user/saved whitelist/blacklist of news sites
- any advanced setting should be shareable. For example, if someone puts the effort in to make a page with just Australian news sources, focused on sports, with a minimum score of 5.0, they could save that with a title that can be shared for anyone.
Thank you!
All great suggestions — will try to add them soon (wasn't really ready for the unexpected launch on HN, but glad it went this way, got a much clearer vision for the future)
All great suggestions — will try to add them soon (wasn't really ready for the unexpected launch on HN, but glad it went this way, got a much clearer vision for the future)
I must remember to check this again on a day with some very significant news, because at the moment everything it's showing me is kinda below the bar of what I want to read.
It's a nice idea and looks like it's implemented well. My problem is probably that different things are significant to different people. Following that thread leads to filter bubbles, of course.
For big international (usually bad!) news I tend to go to Wikipedia Current Events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Could News Minimalist have an option to only show good news with some significance? I think that might be popular and quite useful for the mental health of lots of people.
Good things do happen but they're under-reported because death, destruction and conflict draw more clicks & views. A way to surface the less depressing news would be welcome.
It's a nice idea and looks like it's implemented well. My problem is probably that different things are significant to different people. Following that thread leads to filter bubbles, of course.
For big international (usually bad!) news I tend to go to Wikipedia Current Events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Could News Minimalist have an option to only show good news with some significance? I think that might be popular and quite useful for the mental health of lots of people.
Good things do happen but they're under-reported because death, destruction and conflict draw more clicks & views. A way to surface the less depressing news would be welcome.
Very cool!
>“Today ChatGPT read 1289 top news and gave 13 of them a significance score over 6/10.”
Is an excellent hook.
I wish there was more of a basis on the score it chose. For example:
>“Russia suffers 100,000 casualties in Ukraine conflict, US estimates.” is #2 and ranked 6.8
>“White House estimates Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties in Ukraine since December.” is #237 and ranked 3.8.
>“Today ChatGPT read 1289 top news and gave 13 of them a significance score over 6/10.”
Is an excellent hook.
I wish there was more of a basis on the score it chose. For example:
>“Russia suffers 100,000 casualties in Ukraine conflict, US estimates.” is #2 and ranked 6.8
>“White House estimates Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties in Ukraine since December.” is #237 and ranked 3.8.
Yeah, I'm still thinking about the scoring.
Initially I asked ChatGPT to estimate three things: event scale, event magnitude and event potential. That often resulted in clickbait articles going to the top.
To fix this I started to also ask it to estimate source credibility, so tabloids would get much lower score than, say New York Times.
Now you noticed another problem, similar articles get very different scores. I think ideally I could do some sort of deduplication, but I don't know how to implement it yet.
Initially I asked ChatGPT to estimate three things: event scale, event magnitude and event potential. That often resulted in clickbait articles going to the top.
To fix this I started to also ask it to estimate source credibility, so tabloids would get much lower score than, say New York Times.
Now you noticed another problem, similar articles get very different scores. I think ideally I could do some sort of deduplication, but I don't know how to implement it yet.
How hard would it be to let users tinker with this? Like could I have a set of sliders to go play with (customize) my scoring?
Any chance AI could be used to dedup the stories (like these are identical - only show higher source)?
Any chance AI could be used to dedup the stories (like these are identical - only show higher source)?
Oh, sliders for custom scoring is an amazing idea. And should be easy to add — I already have all the ChatGPT estimations for different parts of the score. Added to the TODO list.
The problem with deduping is that some news get posted and reposted by different sources for several days (sometimes even weeks) in a row. That's a huge context I'd have to put in AI.
1000 news titles * 3 days * 70 symbols per title = 210,000 symbols = 40000 words = 53000 tokens. My current context window is 8000 tokens and I think 32000 tokens is max that GPT-4 allows.
---
Add: now that I think about it should be possible to do in several runs. Will keep thinking about it, thanks for the suggestion.
The problem with deduping is that some news get posted and reposted by different sources for several days (sometimes even weeks) in a row. That's a huge context I'd have to put in AI.
1000 news titles * 3 days * 70 symbols per title = 210,000 symbols = 40000 words = 53000 tokens. My current context window is 8000 tokens and I think 32000 tokens is max that GPT-4 allows.
---
Add: now that I think about it should be possible to do in several runs. Will keep thinking about it, thanks for the suggestion.
You could deduplicate based on vector similarity within a few days (7 days for big stories as their news cycle is longer, 24 or 48 hours for smaller stories).
Idea: The number of stories within a cluster weighted by credibility of the source could be another element of the rating.
Wow, thank you! I'm just a frontend dev and know almost nothing about this.
Will research vector similarity, sounds like the solution I need.
Would getting a summary from ChatGPT with a prompt to eliminate clickbait/bias be helpful before evaluating the event?
Maybe it's my low prompting skills, but I couldn't make ChatGPT give lower importance to tabloid articles when they claimed that the "world is ending" or something similar.
Every time ChatGPT saw the words "World is ending" (not real example) it gave those articles very high score.
Estimating source credibility was the only solution I came up with.
Every time ChatGPT saw the words "World is ending" (not real example) it gave those articles very high score.
Estimating source credibility was the only solution I came up with.
Maybe something to do with "US" vs "White House"
Agreed on the point, but your example brings up a different problem for me.
100,000 dead Russians, is very likely the propaganda number. Maybes it’s right; maybe it’s not, IDK, but I know that there has been zero negative Ukraine news since the conflict started (ghost of Kiev anyone?), and the media machine definitely only works one way on this topic.
I mean, Russia isn’t the good guy here, but I don’t excuse propaganda just because it tells a story I want to hear.
In this case, I don’t care what the US or Ukraine says the number is. That isn’t news. It’s narrative, true or not.
So, I feel like the score should take into account if how likely an article is to be narrative vs purely an event.
100,000 dead Russians, is very likely the propaganda number. Maybes it’s right; maybe it’s not, IDK, but I know that there has been zero negative Ukraine news since the conflict started (ghost of Kiev anyone?), and the media machine definitely only works one way on this topic.
I mean, Russia isn’t the good guy here, but I don’t excuse propaganda just because it tells a story I want to hear.
In this case, I don’t care what the US or Ukraine says the number is. That isn’t news. It’s narrative, true or not.
So, I feel like the score should take into account if how likely an article is to be narrative vs purely an event.
The estimate is 100 000 casualities (20k dead and 80k wounded), and it seems to be correlated with several different intelligence sources.
The number is news because Russia is waging a large-scale invasion of another country using cannon fodder tactics. Reporting on that invasion is not simply propaganda.
The number is news because Russia is waging a large-scale invasion of another country using cannon fodder tactics. Reporting on that invasion is not simply propaganda.
> The estimate is 100 000 casualities (20k dead and 80k wounded)
Since December
Since December
This is a good idea but I already disagree with the output. Of the top stories, the majority of them are "could" and "probably" -- that isn't news.
News is something that either has happened or is going to happen. If it might not happen, then it's speculation, that isn't news (imo).
e.g.
- "US Braces for potential recession" -- no, the REAL story is the interest rate is going up
- "US Debt default could happen by 2023" -- pure speculation, not news
- "WEF predicts jobs disrupted" -- speculation, not news
And also I echo the other comments about it being overly US-centric, but that's par for the course.
Edit: I should also say, good job! It's a nice website
News is something that either has happened or is going to happen. If it might not happen, then it's speculation, that isn't news (imo).
e.g.
- "US Braces for potential recession" -- no, the REAL story is the interest rate is going up
- "US Debt default could happen by 2023" -- pure speculation, not news
- "WEF predicts jobs disrupted" -- speculation, not news
And also I echo the other comments about it being overly US-centric, but that's par for the course.
Edit: I should also say, good job! It's a nice website
> - "US Debt default could happen by 2023" -- pure speculation, not news
It seems like this will happen unless something significant changes. It also seems likely something significant will change, such as GOP and Dems agreeing. But until that happens, Federal Government seems to be on track to default.
It seems like this will happen unless something significant changes. It also seems likely something significant will change, such as GOP and Dems agreeing. But until that happens, Federal Government seems to be on track to default.
It's more like "top world news". It's a nice project OP! I'm just ranting about terminology.
"Significant" has a very personal context. Things that affects significance to me are things like: proximity to my home/work, my hobbies, my age, my financial situation, etc.
For example, if my neighbourhood's crime rate had gone up by 100%, I'd want to see that amongst the top news of the day.
"Significant" has a very personal context. Things that affects significance to me are things like: proximity to my home/work, my hobbies, my age, my financial situation, etc.
For example, if my neighbourhood's crime rate had gone up by 100%, I'd want to see that amongst the top news of the day.
Thank you! And great point. At first I used the word "important", but I thought importance is personal, so switched to "significant". I guess it also doesn't convey the actual meaning.
I don't like the word "top" because even on the most uneventful day there's going to be something that qualifies as top (because of the lack of competition).
So proper term would probably be "globally significant news" or "news significant to humanity as a whole".
I don't like the word "top" because even on the most uneventful day there's going to be something that qualifies as top (because of the lack of competition).
So proper term would probably be "globally significant news" or "news significant to humanity as a whole".
Exactly! I came here to say the same thing.
This project is very cool, but the top results are only significant for people concerned with politics and economics. It would be amazing to generate a custom score for the articles based on topics that impact me and my community the most.
This project is very cool, but the top results are only significant for people concerned with politics and economics. It would be amazing to generate a custom score for the articles based on topics that impact me and my community the most.
Very cool.
Q: Could you please add RSS? I’d use this every day if I could get it in Feedly. (NM found it in a comment https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml)
Q: Why’d you choose 6.5 as the default? Sorry if you answered that already.
Q: Could you please add RSS? I’d use this every day if I could get it in Feedly. (NM found it in a comment https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml)
Q: Why’d you choose 6.5 as the default? Sorry if you answered that already.
6.5 seemed like a sweet spot for number of news. It results in 1-5 news each day. I tried 6.0 at some point, but I think it resulted in like 10-20 articles each day which seemed a bit much.
You can sub to HN and put a score threshold: https://hnrss.github.io/#firehose-feeds
I will definitely sub to News Minimalist if the same is possible.
I will definitely sub to News Minimalist if the same is possible.
Another request for RSS please!
Yeah, sorry, should've made it earlier! Here's the default one from the newsletter platform, but some people had complaints about it: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml
Will try to improve it.
Will try to improve it.
RSS please!
Here's the default one from the newsletter platform, but some people had complaints about it: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml
Added "good RSS" to the TODOs.
Added "good RSS" to the TODOs.
I would really love a service like this, but the problems for achieving it are pretty big, define significant? This varies a lot from person to person and I feel it is hugely important that it gets this right for someone that wants to stay informed, because if it misses something that would be annoying and the reason you'd revert back to traditional sources.
Secondly, it's more of a local thing, most of this is US news as people have pointed out, significant varies again based on location.
Being able to manage information is not a battle I feel is being won right now, because content publishers have the complete opposite goals and curation tools aren't adequate enough.
Secondly, it's more of a local thing, most of this is US news as people have pointed out, significant varies again based on location.
Being able to manage information is not a battle I feel is being won right now, because content publishers have the complete opposite goals and curation tools aren't adequate enough.
Great product! It's been a while since I bookmarked something so quickly. This may very well become my new homepage, or I might parse the RSS into something that appears in my terminal welcome message.
Quick suggestion: parse the URL to determine which media organization published the content, and then allow for users and/or the LLM to leverage info from Media Bias/Fact Check[1] to determine if a source is valid. I'd like to see how it arrived at the conclusion of why the article got it's given score.
I would 100% pay something like $2 month for a daily feed of ranked headlines with links.
I (somewhat ashamedly) get most of my knowledge of current events through reddit, because it's more convenient than aggregating that knowledge myself. However, I also completely agree with the idea that a collective of Internet users is not the best tool for aggregating news, as many popular news/current event subreddits have devolved into echo chambers and astroturfing.
The point of saying this is that I know my approach to collecting knowledge about current events is flawed so I'm okay with replacing it with something else that isn't perfect: it just has to be better and more reliable than my current method.
1:https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
Quick suggestion: parse the URL to determine which media organization published the content, and then allow for users and/or the LLM to leverage info from Media Bias/Fact Check[1] to determine if a source is valid. I'd like to see how it arrived at the conclusion of why the article got it's given score.
I would 100% pay something like $2 month for a daily feed of ranked headlines with links.
I (somewhat ashamedly) get most of my knowledge of current events through reddit, because it's more convenient than aggregating that knowledge myself. However, I also completely agree with the idea that a collective of Internet users is not the best tool for aggregating news, as many popular news/current event subreddits have devolved into echo chambers and astroturfing.
The point of saying this is that I know my approach to collecting knowledge about current events is flawed so I'm okay with replacing it with something else that isn't perfect: it just has to be better and more reliable than my current method.
1:https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
I liked and, as some people commented, for wide adoption it is important to have some sort of customisation since every person have their own sense of what is relevant or not. But one thing that is missing imho is a RSS Feed. RSS is not dead and a lot of people still uses instead of consume a newsletter at their e-mails.
Here's the one generated by email platform (will work on improving it, some people had complaints) https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml
I would also love to see RSS with a filter parameter. I want something roughly once a week.
It would be best if the feed can also update one-by-one rather than the daily batch, but not a deal breaker.
It would be best if the feed can also update one-by-one rather than the daily batch, but not a deal breaker.
Agreed, an RSS feed is the first thing I looked for on the website. Didn't find it, moved on, will probably forget about the website in a couple of hours.
From the footer:
> simply visit newsminimalist.com when you feel like it.
That's exactly what RSS feeds are for, so you can subscribe to a website and get the updates without the need to visit it again or even think about it again.
From the footer:
> simply visit newsminimalist.com when you feel like it.
That's exactly what RSS feeds are for, so you can subscribe to a website and get the updates without the need to visit it again or even think about it again.
My take is that this has legs and please iterate on it to it's natural conclusion, whatever that looks like. It's executed well as is but seems sparse on features overall. Cool idea
For people looking for something similar and actually minimalist, I highly recommend http://68k.news
I don't know what algo it uses, but it basically grabs top headlines, aggregates similar stories with their headlines (so you can see how other news sites headlined the same news), and then most importantly presents a plaintext version of the article that is accessible without visiting the news site directly.
It's honestly the best news site I've ever used, and would recommend it a thousand times over. I also believe I found out about it on HN a few years back
http://68k.news
I don't know what algo it uses, but it basically grabs top headlines, aggregates similar stories with their headlines (so you can see how other news sites headlined the same news), and then most importantly presents a plaintext version of the article that is accessible without visiting the news site directly.
It's honestly the best news site I've ever used, and would recommend it a thousand times over. I also believe I found out about it on HN a few years back
http://68k.news
It seems to be just parsing Google News, and displaying the articles in publication order instead of whatever smart order Google News is doing. I do like the design (or lack of) quite a bit.
On April 18, 1930, BBC radio famously announced, "There is no news tonight. Here is some music." [1]
Those were the days.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-39633603
Those were the days.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-39633603
Thanks for the great link, I included it in today's issue: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/friday-may-5-nothing...
This is awesome! I've used thefactual and ground news briefly in the past to try to stay informed without becoming a news-junkie-zombie or exposing myself to propaganda unnecessarily, but ultimately gave up on even "staying informed" because the political nonsense always leaked in and required manual filtering on my part. These headlines are the tiny little tidbits of information that I actually care about, and nothing else. Love that there's no commentary, no extra context, nothing. Just some headlines.
Love it, subscribed!
some thoughts:
- people are harping on bias, but I think they miss the point. Use the tool, get the tool result, and let god sort them out.
- Multilingual sources are core to the value proposition. Make it a community list with tags, e.g: a user from india add their favourite local UP political news source with tags [india] [politics]. then you can taylor the reports by interests (yes, like all news aggregation websites before. they do it because it's needed I think)
- likewise,store the summaries, then enable users to ask for a rewighing with their interests in the prompt, e.g: "I am a well educated, religious Emirati interested mainly in news about the wars and tensions in the middlke east, as well as car racing"
- get news by actual news, not by news source. E.g: get the embeddings of the news, cluster, get summarization of "best" sources of cluster with added info like likely primary source, histograms of reputation vs sentiment vs political leaning
- todays news give you also access to the comments, both on the site and e.g: on reddit and twitter. add maybe a comment summarization / sentiment analysis (e.g: 90% of comments on this new york post article were racist one-liners. Dicscusion on this Korean article revolve around effects on workforce mental health, etc)
- you mention cost: make accounts able to add their ChatGPT API keys, with an estimation of how much you'll use, ang keep these accounts free. For the others, warn that in time you'll add a small charge maybe?
- people are harping on bias, but I think they miss the point. Use the tool, get the tool result, and let god sort them out.
- Multilingual sources are core to the value proposition. Make it a community list with tags, e.g: a user from india add their favourite local UP political news source with tags [india] [politics]. then you can taylor the reports by interests (yes, like all news aggregation websites before. they do it because it's needed I think)
- likewise,store the summaries, then enable users to ask for a rewighing with their interests in the prompt, e.g: "I am a well educated, religious Emirati interested mainly in news about the wars and tensions in the middlke east, as well as car racing"
- get news by actual news, not by news source. E.g: get the embeddings of the news, cluster, get summarization of "best" sources of cluster with added info like likely primary source, histograms of reputation vs sentiment vs political leaning
- todays news give you also access to the comments, both on the site and e.g: on reddit and twitter. add maybe a comment summarization / sentiment analysis (e.g: 90% of comments on this new york post article were racist one-liners. Dicscusion on this Korean article revolve around effects on workforce mental health, etc)
- you mention cost: make accounts able to add their ChatGPT API keys, with an estimation of how much you'll use, ang keep these accounts free. For the others, warn that in time you'll add a small charge maybe?
This seems to be highly focused on global financial news, which are unsignificant to most people on this planet.
It would be nice to be able to include or exclude certain news-categories to actually produce a list that has some significance to the reader.
I'm guessing the Arithmetic to maximising significance to population favours economics because 10 cents for every Indian outweighs 300 dead in a train crash several times over.
Indeed. The perfect news feed has to be tailored to the reader. For instance, events in my city have rather large impact on me but are not interesting for most of the planet.
> This seems to be highly focused on global financial news, which are unsignificant to most people on this planet.
Or perhaps they are more significant than they feel because their trickle-down effect is slow and hard to trace.
Or perhaps they are more significant than they feel because their trickle-down effect is slow and hard to trace.
Can we vary the time span? Example: weekly as opposed to daily?
Great idea. I'll do two website sections: daily and weekly. Weekly section will have it's own newsletter with, say, only news with score over 7.0.
And monthly please while you're at it!
Very nice I have subscribed to test it out for a couple of weeks.
I would love a simple mobile app, it's just easy to tap your news app on a phone, ideally with a way to customize the notification timing. I have certain moments each day when I want to consume this type of content (breakfast, lunch break)
A small community driven comment section with Karma system would also be nice. I like to discuss news and it enables knowledgeable people to add some additional insights. See the dutch tech news site for inspiration. they explain their karma system here: https://tweakers.net/info/faq/karma/#tab:1-2
I would love a simple mobile app, it's just easy to tap your news app on a phone, ideally with a way to customize the notification timing. I have certain moments each day when I want to consume this type of content (breakfast, lunch break)
A small community driven comment section with Karma system would also be nice. I like to discuss news and it enables knowledgeable people to add some additional insights. See the dutch tech news site for inspiration. they explain their karma system here: https://tweakers.net/info/faq/karma/#tab:1-2
Why not open it in the mobile browser? Or put a reference for the website on your home screen? You could use newsletterify.com (disclaimer: author here) to read them in the browser, not your inbox.
Amazing. Apart from the AI stuff, I think what really makes a difference is the very minimalist design which help reading and choosing more appropriately than a congested design with a lot of images.
Alternatively (or complementary), I would recommend https://ground.news/ which looks like a classic news outlet, but they pick only the relevant info and more importantly explains where the news fits in the political spectrum.
Alternatively (or complementary), I would recommend https://ground.news/ which looks like a classic news outlet, but they pick only the relevant info and more importantly explains where the news fits in the political spectrum.
The question is whether one should reduce one's news consumption to only "core" stories. In all likelihood that would show you only today's disasters but not the build-up of tomorrow's.
Personally, I highly recommend you to rely on more than one source of news, ideally with different country and political biases (for instance, I enjoy reading in The Guardian about Germany, and watching Al Jazeera to learn about what's new in the UK).
Personally, I highly recommend you to rely on more than one source of news, ideally with different country and political biases (for instance, I enjoy reading in The Guardian about Germany, and watching Al Jazeera to learn about what's new in the UK).
I feel like if you have to hear about it on "the news" to begin with, it probably isn't relevant to you.
How exactly does ChatGPT perform scoring of articles? I don’t understand this aspect.
Good question. I gave a small description of it on about page: https://www.newsminimalist.com/about
> For each article ChatGPT estimates:
> Magnitude: how big was the effect;
> Scale: how many people the event affected;
> Potential: how likely is it that the event will cause bigger events;
> Credibility: how credible is the source.
Then I do `Credibility * cbrt(Magnitude * Scale * Potential)`
cbrt = cubic root
Maybe the formula could be improved but I was satisfied with the result, so kept it that way.
> For each article ChatGPT estimates:
> Magnitude: how big was the effect;
> Scale: how many people the event affected;
> Potential: how likely is it that the event will cause bigger events;
> Credibility: how credible is the source.
Then I do `Credibility * cbrt(Magnitude * Scale * Potential)`
cbrt = cubic root
Maybe the formula could be improved but I was satisfied with the result, so kept it that way.
Yes, I understood the idea of the formula. Rather, my question is - how does chatGPT know how to value those variables? It doesn't have a real understanding AFAIK.
It doesn't. But by the magic of insanely large training corpus, it does anyway. Similar to how it can "roll a die" or "pick a card"[1], the weighted model can do some (to me) mind bending stuff, just by answering "which tokens are likely to come next, in this given context" (which, in some ways, is the same as me trying to guess what you are going to say next; "Thank you for explaining"? (Actually chatgpt is much better at that game than me...).
[1] I tried it with gpt4:
> Pick a card.
>> As an AI language model, I am unable to physically pick a card for you. However, if you're referring to a card from a standard 52-card deck, I can randomly select one for you.
>> Your randomly selected card is the 7 of Hearts.
> Again.
>> Alright, let's randomly select another card for you.
>> Your new randomly selected card is the Jack of Diamonds.
[1] I tried it with gpt4:
> Pick a card.
>> As an AI language model, I am unable to physically pick a card for you. However, if you're referring to a card from a standard 52-card deck, I can randomly select one for you.
>> Your randomly selected card is the 7 of Hearts.
> Again.
>> Alright, let's randomly select another card for you.
>> Your new randomly selected card is the Jack of Diamonds.
[deleted]
What a great way to see the bias play out in real time.
I noticed some bias because I only analyze sources in English. It should be easy to make ChatGPT also read news in other languages, maybe that will help. Is that what you meant?
It also seems to be very US-centric and seems to put a strong focus on reporting on the economy. I personally found nothing particularly relevant to my existence featured on the site.
These two biases are probably indicative of a host of other, less obvious biases. To be clear: all media is biased, because it is created by biased humans and it has been well demonstrated that algorithms replicate the biases of their creators.
A good newspaper/website knows their audience and delivers reporting relevant to it in a language they appreciate and cognizant of its societal impact.
These two biases are probably indicative of a host of other, less obvious biases. To be clear: all media is biased, because it is created by biased humans and it has been well demonstrated that algorithms replicate the biases of their creators.
A good newspaper/website knows their audience and delivers reporting relevant to it in a language they appreciate and cognizant of its societal impact.
The recent one is economic focused, but if you look back it does focus on other stuff like Starship launch, climate, health, geopolitics, energy etc.
> It should be easy to make ChatGPT also read news in other languages
This should indeed be easy, and given how good it is at translation, very interesting - taking too news sources and national broadcast services; rate as you do now - filter the top, summarize in English, store and dedup on similarity vector - it would be great. For example i don't read any Chinese or African news sources - but it would be great to have them in the mix.
Might even index on similarity first then ask for a summary on all different reports on the same story?
This should indeed be easy, and given how good it is at translation, very interesting - taking too news sources and national broadcast services; rate as you do now - filter the top, summarize in English, store and dedup on similarity vector - it would be great. For example i don't read any Chinese or African news sources - but it would be great to have them in the mix.
Might even index on similarity first then ask for a summary on all different reports on the same story?
A sentiment analysis plot of all the sources could be insightful both for users as well as a way to tune the weight of sources in the future. Very cool
Could you please expand your thought? Not sure I fully understand the idea.
Now, if only I had this for Slack...
This is awesome. And it has an RSS feed!
Would be cool to publish multiple feeds corresponding to each integer significance threshold. Like 6+, 7+ etc
Update: turns out the RSS feed doesn’t work like I expected. I wanted it to publish each news item to the feed, but it’s actually just a feed of the newsletter.
Would be cool to publish multiple feeds corresponding to each integer significance threshold. Like 6+, 7+ etc
Update: turns out the RSS feed doesn’t work like I expected. I wanted it to publish each news item to the feed, but it’s actually just a feed of the newsletter.
The factors for assessing the news score are broken or misplaced.
For example this piece of news gets less than 5:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-may-run-short-cash-aft...
Yet it’s certainly important, affecting a large number of people, and matching other criteria.
As someone who works in media I agree with the premise this comes from, but the implementation is a typical examples of the complexities and nuances that LLMs do not get. Also you’re just under the illusion to escape an agenda, but you’re just swapping human agendas for a technobabble view of journalism that is arid as it can possibly get.
For example this piece of news gets less than 5:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-may-run-short-cash-aft...
Yet it’s certainly important, affecting a large number of people, and matching other criteria.
As someone who works in media I agree with the premise this comes from, but the implementation is a typical examples of the complexities and nuances that LLMs do not get. Also you’re just under the illusion to escape an agenda, but you’re just swapping human agendas for a technobabble view of journalism that is arid as it can possibly get.
Very cool idea! Since I‘m not checking news too often, for me a possibility to also define the time range would be a cool feature - or even better a cookie that remembers when I was on the site and gives me the best articles since I last visited (with a min and max range).
Just throwing out there a useless startup idea I had a couple months ago (useless because if you implemented it there would be no moat to anyone else): Show the same news story and have GPT generate left, right and center versions of it that you can diff side by side.
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This is a great idea, the only issue is that in many cases "news" or "what I want to read" can be very subjective.
If I want to know what's happening from an authoritative source I go straight to Reuters and that's it.
However, there is also objectively less interesting news out there that I might want to click and read, and reducing the score to 3,4,5... (?) will give me a ton of crappy news which I don't want to read, and then I am back to square 1: google news or similar.
You need to provide a better way to select or filter out, otherwise you'll only get proxies of Reuters and similar, which we probably already go to during the day.
If I want to know what's happening from an authoritative source I go straight to Reuters and that's it.
However, there is also objectively less interesting news out there that I might want to click and read, and reducing the score to 3,4,5... (?) will give me a ton of crappy news which I don't want to read, and then I am back to square 1: google news or similar.
You need to provide a better way to select or filter out, otherwise you'll only get proxies of Reuters and similar, which we probably already go to during the day.
Good point, filters are essential (category, source, maybe country). Will try to add them soon.
Seems like this is just another algorithmic feed? They're great at trimming down large amounts of data, but I always feel like algorithmic feeds always miss something, that a human never would, as I do just now reading the front page.
Excellent work! Keep the minimalism of the home page, but add a way for users to customise what is significant for them.
It reminds me of The Economist's daily The World in Brief, which I currently subscribe to and is quite expensive...
It reminds me of The Economist's daily The World in Brief, which I currently subscribe to and is quite expensive...
Really happy to pay for journalism like the economist. But not sure what a solution could be for people unable to afford it.
News isn't significant, only relevant, as the significance is relative. Who's reading it, where they are, what their interests are, what impacts them, and so on. There's no way to generalize it because even some people who it directly impacts may simply not care; it's not significant for them. So the best way to deliver significant news is to personalize, not generalize.
You could also just read the Financial Times.
Yeah, today there were many economy articles that ChatGPT found significant. But in the past issues there were more articles about health, science and environment.
Recent example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...
This is awesome. It actually works out that when you reduce the "importance" you get more pop culture, tech, etc news which is just amazing.
Would easily pay 10$ a month for this in its current state.
Would easily pay 10$ a month for this in its current state.
Really? I can't sustain this website for long without some income, and I don't want to put ads, so this is great to hear.
Just remember that unless you’re selling an open hardware e-ink RISC computer with a serial interface running Doom, hacker news isn’t representative of your customer base. This goes both for the cheers and the boos.
(Great product/PoC btw, this seems like an awesome application of LLMs!)
(Great product/PoC btw, this seems like an awesome application of LLMs!)
It would be amazing if an archive.ph or similar link could be included.
I'll look into that. For now, I thought of adding a ChatGPT summary of an article, but being able to also read the source is important.
Would be great to make the significance threshold an adjustable parameter. Personally I think a site like this should have way less than 1-3 articles/day - probably closer to 0.1.
It is possible currently! There's a slider under the chart that let's you adjust that. For now it doesn't save the position though.
FYI On Firefox Mobile, the slider touch area seems small, it's pretty difficult to get a gesture recognized.
I really like the simplicity all the way around. Really great job!
I love that there are no news over 7.0 significant. FOMO cured.
Also recently added an OAI-driven trending cluster view on BizToc (https://biztoc.com/hot)
I understand the idea of only wanting to read important news, but I’m not sure I agree about what counts as important. Maybe no individual bit of celebrity gossip is important, but would this site have picked up any of the #metoo stories? They certainly indicate an important cultural shift, but it feels like the site would only count it as significant when they had a financial impact on a film studio or something.
Your ranking isnt very good, and I see repeated articles; google auth and drone on kremlin, which is really not significant news at all. The google auth thing is given a ranking of 6.8 (highest currently) and "debt limit could send US economy into recession is lower at 6.5", which seems like a much much bigger issue
New effective Alzheimer drug is even lower
New effective Alzheimer drug is even lower
I love this idea. For a while this has been the filtering function that HN provided for me (in addition to higher quality discourse) but this does it for general news.
Kudos!
Kudos!
I feel silly for asking but does ChatGPT have subscriptions to all the things? I wonder how the initial reads are getting done.
Very nice concept - thanks for sharing!
Very nice concept - thanks for sharing!
[deleted]
I think I’d like a more comprehensive via location version also. Might also help to include English summaries of news from other languages or from English sources in other countries. For example, I had to scroll to number 32 to see news about the Sudan, which is very significant news that seems marginalized compared to the news about Europe and the US that shows up on the earlier entries.
The difficulty here is figuring out a definition of "significant news" enough people agree on.
For example, you've missed my definition for the same reason many mainstream outlets do: I don't care about the Russian/Ukrainian conflict. That alone is 4 out of 14 of your front page stories.
It's a good idea, but it will be difficult to execute in a way useful to a significant number of people.
For example, you've missed my definition for the same reason many mainstream outlets do: I don't care about the Russian/Ukrainian conflict. That alone is 4 out of 14 of your front page stories.
It's a good idea, but it will be difficult to execute in a way useful to a significant number of people.
Congrats on the idea and execution. I was thinking about launching similar product, but I thought it'd be too costly to parse all these articles. I was thinking more of first summarizing these articles (avg article has like 1000 words) and then implementing a recommendation module. Without a successful paid plan,I think I'd fail hardly with cost :(
Any chance of RSS? I get all my news through Feedly
Oh, good point, just created it: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml
I have no control over it, but let me know if there are any problems with it — I'll see what I can do.
I have no control over it, but let me know if there are any problems with it — I'll see what I can do.
Added it into Feedly, the news appear not as expected: https://postimg.cc/KKNps2xk
I see, newlines are missing, will try to fix soon.
Could you make a feed that posts one news article per post, rather than one day per post?
That is, for a day with 5 news, post 5 times on the feed, one for each.
I'm using a RSS reader that only shows the title of each day (and not the body of the post), and right now it's showing only
> Tuesday, May 2 — 4 significant news
> Only significant news. All signal, no noise.
But I would like to be able to skim all headlines in the RSS reader itself
(I know I could probably make a custom RSS feed out of this though)
That is, for a day with 5 news, post 5 times on the feed, one for each.
I'm using a RSS reader that only shows the title of each day (and not the body of the post), and right now it's showing only
> Tuesday, May 2 — 4 significant news
> Only significant news. All signal, no noise.
But I would like to be able to skim all headlines in the RSS reader itself
(I know I could probably make a custom RSS feed out of this though)
Thanks!
This is really cool, and I can see myself using it over the long term.
I can't help but wonder that with the rise of tools like this, news agencies might start publishing exploding news to make it seem more important. It'll be interesting to see how the model works with that kind of data and if it's able to figure that out.
I can't help but wonder that with the rise of tools like this, news agencies might start publishing exploding news to make it seem more important. It'll be interesting to see how the model works with that kind of data and if it's able to figure that out.
I like your minimalist, clean approach. Great work! Could you describe how you extract the texts from the news websites?
I built a news app in the past that just read the headline news from a news source of every country on the planet (well, ones we could find English news sources for anyway), and then presented this in a single page where news from every country was equally represented.
You’d get super interesting contrasts, and when western media would be going wild over the latest Trump gaffe, right next to it there’d be news from some island in the middle of pacific saying their antelope conservation efforts were finally paying off.
In hindsight it was super cool, and I’m really sad I didn’t keep up with it.
You’d get super interesting contrasts, and when western media would be going wild over the latest Trump gaffe, right next to it there’d be news from some island in the middle of pacific saying their antelope conservation efforts were finally paying off.
In hindsight it was super cool, and I’m really sad I didn’t keep up with it.
> we use AI (ChatGPT-4) [...] Credibility: how credible is the source.
Mirror mirror on the wall, who is credible at all?
Mirror mirror on the wall, who is credible at all?
what the world needs is news maximalist. where someone with minimal brains read the article before reposting it. critical thinking like chatgpt can't.
for example your minimalist list shows "ibm to layoff thousands to replace them with ai". that's not minimizing the news, because now i I'm less informed. someone with knowledge of ibm know they are dead and would layoff with our without the magic ai excuse. so your site kept the non news part of a headline.
same about US default. everyone know there will be no default. the headline with minimal critical thinking should be "legislative keep pushing executive for concessions to raise the bureaucratic debt limit"
see, thinking is not that hard. but there's zero of it in news and your site minimize it even more.
for example your minimalist list shows "ibm to layoff thousands to replace them with ai". that's not minimizing the news, because now i I'm less informed. someone with knowledge of ibm know they are dead and would layoff with our without the magic ai excuse. so your site kept the non news part of a headline.
same about US default. everyone know there will be no default. the headline with minimal critical thinking should be "legislative keep pushing executive for concessions to raise the bureaucratic debt limit"
see, thinking is not that hard. but there's zero of it in news and your site minimize it even more.
Run another instance of it on a different tld only for positive news, and I will sign up!
"Positive news" filter is a very requested feature, will try to prioritize soon!
Thanks!
This is great!
You’re going to get a lot of ‘I want weekly’, ‘I want categories’, ‘I want settings for this and that’ here, obviously up to you to decide if it’s a good fit but I’d assume that a simple feed without much settings is good enough for most people.
From my side the only thing I wished to have once I clicked on the first link is if there were links to de-paywalled websites (I guess Pocket works for that, or webarchive).
From my side the only thing I wished to have once I clicked on the first link is if there were links to de-paywalled websites (I guess Pocket works for that, or webarchive).
Thank you, and great reality check.
De-paywalling is on my todo list, was thinking of solving it either as you suggested, or through summaries on the website.
What would be even cooler would be to let GPT4 summarize everything, not just rank it.
Agree.
I did it at first, but quickly realized that it's too expensive. GPT-4 is 15 times more expensive for prompt and 30 times more expensive for completion than GPT-3.5-turbo. But I think GPT-3.5-turbo gives 90% as good summaries as GPT-4.
I did it at first, but quickly realized that it's too expensive. GPT-4 is 15 times more expensive for prompt and 30 times more expensive for completion than GPT-3.5-turbo. But I think GPT-3.5-turbo gives 90% as good summaries as GPT-4.
RSS feed would be nice for those who prefer that over email. Otherwise looks great!
Here's the default one from the newsletter platform, but some people had complaints about it: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml Will try to improve it.
Love the minimalistic approach. May I ask what library have you used for chart?
Thanks! It's Chart.js: https://www.chartjs.org/
Seems us/eu-centric? I’ll definitely keep an eye on it to see if the composition changes with important events elsewhere in the world.
Even if only English language sources are considered, there are available ones for non-English-speaking countries, example from Spain https://english.elpais.com/
Even if only English language sources are considered, there are available ones for non-English-speaking countries, example from Spain https://english.elpais.com/
Good point, I noticed this as well.
As you said analyzing news in other languages should help with bringing up different perspectives. I'll work on that.
But I'm still not sure what to do about chatgpt's bias. For now I just accept it.
As you said analyzing news in other languages should help with bringing up different perspectives. I'll work on that.
But I'm still not sure what to do about chatgpt's bias. For now I just accept it.
This would make sense, since the world is 'us/eu-centric' and has been for all of modern history.
It might not be for much longer though...
It might not be for much longer though...
I think it's too US-centric, but maybe that's due to sources like Reuters giving a bigger preference and airtime to US stories rather than the implementation.
It'd be great to filter out keywords
It'd be great to filter out keywords
Love the idea! It already outdo most of news aggregators. I also agree on comments say: minimalist is subjective, but this might be covered with filters.
How are you scraping all this content?
A filter by country would be great!
Just one suggestion:
- Mark as read
Dim already read headlines, be able to mark each one as read or "done"
- Mark as read
Dim already read headlines, be able to mark each one as read or "done"
Great idea, I already dim visited links, but it'd be nice to also mark items as done where just reading the title was enough.
Cool!
Bug or some fine tuning: Saw news repeated about 4 times today, about the European Central Bank/ECB. Some different wording but it was essentially the same.
Bug or some fine tuning: Saw news repeated about 4 times today, about the European Central Bank/ECB. Some different wording but it was essentially the same.
Great idea, going to try it out.
The RSS feed combined with the source filtering idea would be great.
The RSS feed combined with the source filtering idea would be great.
Nice job! The high-rates articles all seem weighty.
0.5/10 might be the sweet spot for best of the worst.
- WWE Draft 2021: Triple H announces draft picks and new brand exclusivity.
- Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson reunite at 2023 Met Gala.
- Vladimir Putin's lover Alina Kabaeva makes rare appearance at gymnastics event in Siberia.
I’d love to see some dials to find even worse news in the future. :)
0.5/10 might be the sweet spot for best of the worst.
- WWE Draft 2021: Triple H announces draft picks and new brand exclusivity.
- Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson reunite at 2023 Met Gala.
- Vladimir Putin's lover Alina Kabaeva makes rare appearance at gymnastics event in Siberia.
I’d love to see some dials to find even worse news in the future. :)
Strangely i enjoyed it more like that also but it's probably not the goal :)
That's a neat idea OP - I usually give https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief give a quick scroll, but I quite like sourcing from several news sites, and the summaries are good.
Where and how are you getting the ~1000 news articles you feed to GPT4? I think it would go a long way for transparency to list that somewhere on the website. Also, are you using international news agencies? Quite a lot of them publish an English feed too.
I would also love to see the difference it would make given a different geographical prompt ("in the context of China/India/Asia/Europe... How would you are this article") and political ideology prompt ("how would you rate this article for a Republican/Democrat/Libertarian/Socialist...")
Where and how are you getting the ~1000 news articles you feed to GPT4? I think it would go a long way for transparency to list that somewhere on the website. Also, are you using international news agencies? Quite a lot of them publish an English feed too.
I would also love to see the difference it would make given a different geographical prompt ("in the context of China/India/Asia/Europe... How would you are this article") and political ideology prompt ("how would you rate this article for a Republican/Democrat/Libertarian/Socialist...")
when all the news sources are from the same owner's and only to manipulate the masses, it doesn't matter which news you pick, better not to read any news at all
Is the web opensource?
Do you plan to add dark mode?
It's not open source.
Dark mode is already there, but it follows the system settings, no manual toggle.
What about positive news?
Is “news” supposed to be about worrying/negative signals incentivizing doom scrolling? Out of the first 20 headlines only one is truly positive(HPV vaccine). The rest show how broken and dreadful our world is. This does not (exclusively) apply to this particular website. It is a common trait across all media platforms - all about politics, war and economic and social problems.
It is like, yeah, we have many problems but just pointing out those is an imbalanced way to feed the idol of misery. Where are the news about solutions?
One guy even wrote a book called “Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life”.
Is “news” supposed to be about worrying/negative signals incentivizing doom scrolling? Out of the first 20 headlines only one is truly positive(HPV vaccine). The rest show how broken and dreadful our world is. This does not (exclusively) apply to this particular website. It is a common trait across all media platforms - all about politics, war and economic and social problems.
It is like, yeah, we have many problems but just pointing out those is an imbalanced way to feed the idol of misery. Where are the news about solutions?
One guy even wrote a book called “Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life”.
This is great! Would be nice if it didn’t include sites with paywalls as an option.
yeah, thought the same thing... Nothing more dissappointing :(
One of the first things journalism students learn is that news, by its nature, is significant or it isn't news. The "significance score" is deeply subjective and clearly defaults to an american worldview.
So if I were a subeditor tasked with writing a standfiest for this, my headline would be: "american tech people miss point of journalism"
More seriously, it takes a human's judgement to do this well. Editors will often read all the other daily papers, weeklies, magazines, and other periodicals. They're highly attuned to "relevance". ChatGPT is clearly editorially very naive
So if I were a subeditor tasked with writing a standfiest for this, my headline would be: "american tech people miss point of journalism"
More seriously, it takes a human's judgement to do this well. Editors will often read all the other daily papers, weeklies, magazines, and other periodicals. They're highly attuned to "relevance". ChatGPT is clearly editorially very naive
Happy to answer any questions.
(below is the project description I used when posted about it on Reddit)
The problem I have with most news sites is that I can't read only important news: an article about a virus outbreak is followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release.
But even on sites that focus on important events articles are posted every day and there are always "top headlines" — even on days when nothing important happened.
I am forced to make a choice: waste time going through unimportant updates or ignore the news and miss important events.
So I built a web app that I think solves this.
It uses AI (ChatGPT-4) to read the top 1000 news every day and rank them by significance on a scale from 0 to 10 based on event magnitude, scale, potential, and source credibility.
The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/
I also run a newsletter where I post summaries of all the news with a score over 6.5. On average that's 1-3 articles per day, but sometimes it is 5, and sometimes — none at all. In that case, I just send an email saying that nothing important happened that day.
You can read previous issues here: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/
Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas. I'm considering adding new features and looking for direction.