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
As in every other engineering endeavor, the raw data you start off with has a lot to do with what you end up with, no matter what transforms happen. :)
Wikipedia current events page was actually one of the reasons for creating this project! I was disagreeing a lot with their selection of news, for example one of the recent entries is:
"Two people are killed and eleven others are injured when a bus flips on its side on a highway near Prenzlau, northeast of Berlin, Germany."
My system gave it a significance score of 1.8: https://www.newsminimalist.com/articles/two-dead-and-four-in...