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84 points yakhinvadim | 12 comments | | HN request time: 2.21s | source | bottom

Hey HN! I'm the author of News Minimalist — a news aggregator where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10.

The project was born out of personal pain — I wanted a way to read only significant news, like major humanity milestones, or historical political events, filtering out all the celebrity gossip and smartphone releases. But I couldn't find a way to do that — everywhere I looked, the news was ranked by popularity, coverage, or relevance, not significance.

I first tried to solve the problem in the beginning of 2023 with GPT-3 (the top model at that time) by asking it to estimate the significance of some news stories. The results were painfully bad — for some reason, the model preferred tragic, personal stories, completely missing the essence of what makes the news significant. No amount of prompt engineering could fix that.

But it all changed in March 2023 when GPT-4 came out. The scores it gave made much more sense. After a month of work, the first version was ready. News Minimalist had its first successful Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388), and I realized that a lot of people had the same problem I had.

I've been working on improving the project ever since. As probably most tech founders, I spent too much time on technical improvements, completely ignoring marketing. But I think that work paid off, and I'm finally satisfied with the scores it gives.

The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/

Let me know what you think!

Vadim

1. dvh ◴[] No.42731211[source]
I've been using rss feed for few months but recently it became borderline useless. For example here is grep of pubDate:

    $ wget -qO - https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml | grep pubDate
    <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:56:47 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:56:47 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2025 17:22:34 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sat, 11 Jan 2025 16:42:01 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Thu, 09 Jan 2025 17:52:38 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2025 16:19:25 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sat, 28 Dec 2024 17:44:35 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2024 16:44:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:01:56 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:00:55 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 06 Dec 2024 17:43:37 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Wed, 04 Dec 2024 16:38:38 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sun, 01 Dec 2024 18:57:43 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 29 Nov 2024 18:07:14 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sun, 24 Nov 2024 15:26:59 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Thu, 21 Nov 2024 17:25:22 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:47:19 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2024 17:28:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Tue, 12 Nov 2024 17:44:08 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 08 Nov 2024 17:22:01 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Wed, 06 Nov 2024 16:43:10 +0000</pubDate>
So since 6th november there were only 21 articles. Longest streak was 10 days and common is 3 days without any news whatsoever.
replies(1): >>42731239 #
2. yakhinvadim ◴[] No.42731239[source]
This rss is not exactly an rss with articles from the main page, but a newsletter I send manually every few days once enough significant stories happen to warrant an email. Each newsletter issue includes 2-5 main articles and 3-7 trending articles.

https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/

replies(2): >>42731299 #>>42731374 #
3. dvh ◴[] No.42731299[source]
So where is the rss feed of most important news per day?
replies(1): >>42731581 #
4. jamie_ca ◴[] No.42731374[source]
As an RSS user, I would love an RSS of the main page content, one entry per story over 5.5 is a perfectly reasonable baseline.

Also: It'd be great if you had a feed tag in your HTML head, so RSS readers could pick it up straight out of your homepage URL instead of needing to manually hunt for the right RSS link.

replies(3): >>42731452 #>>42732722 #>>42740978 #
5. yakhinvadim ◴[] No.42731452{3}[source]
Ah, I didn't know it was a thing! I'll add it to HTML head.
6. yakhinvadim ◴[] No.42731581{3}[source]
I know it's not going to be popular, but to cover the cost of running ChatGPT on that many articles, I made it a part of a premium subscription: https://www.newsminimalist.com/premium#rss
replies(1): >>42732627 #
7. DrPhish ◴[] No.42732627{4}[source]
Do you need realtime results, or is an ongoing queue of article analysis good enough? Have you considered running your own hardware with a frontier MoE model like deepseek v3? It can be done for relatively low cost on CPU depending on your inference speed needs. Maybe a hybrid approach could at least reduce your API spend?

source: I run inference locally and built the server for around $6k. I get upwards of 10t/s on deepseek v3

PS: thank you for running this service. I've been using it casually since launch and find it much better for my mental health than any other source of news I've tried in the past.

replies(1): >>42732747 #
8. voisin ◴[] No.42732722{3}[source]
I second this. This would be a great feature
9. yakhinvadim ◴[] No.42732747{5}[source]
Thank you so much! Always glad to see long-time readers.

There was a period when I considered switching to an open-source model, but every time I was ready for a switch, OpenAI released a smarter and often cheaper model that was just too good to pass up.

Eventually I decided that the potential savings are not worth it in the long term - it looks like LLMs will only get cheaper over time and the cost of inference should become negligible.

replies(1): >>42732899 #
10. DrPhish ◴[] No.42732899{6}[source]
Thanks for the reply! This is perhaps not so much a Hacker News type question since this place is very VC focused, but have you considered publishing any papers on your system? I think it would make a fascinating and valuable bit of research.

Or, even farther off the deep-end: have you considered open-sourcing any old versions of your prompts or pipeline? Say one year after they are superseded in your production system?

replies(1): >>42733197 #
11. yakhinvadim ◴[] No.42733197{7}[source]
I don't oppose these ideas, but it's a matter of priorities. There's just many other features and improvements to implement that seem more valuable.
12. kevincox ◴[] No.42740978{3}[source]
100% the current implementation is "RSS as would be desired by newsletter lovers", but there is already the newsletter for that. If I want batching or similar my reader will handle that, I think it would be best just to have items as they happen appear on the feed.