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84 points yakhinvadim | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.213s | source

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

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jdthedisciple ◴[] No.42731795[source]
Isn't significance heavily subjective though?

A lot of the most signficant stories are political, for example, which someone may have no interest in.

I have had this same idea in the past, tuning to my personal interests.

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1. yakhinvadim ◴[] No.42731815[source]
Good point! I actually have this exact question on about page [0], I'll copy my thoughts from there:

I separate significance from importance (or relevance).

Importance is subjective. News about the health of my family members is important to me, but it is not significant to the world.

Significance is objective. It's about how much the event affects humanity as a whole.

[0] https://www.newsminimalist.com/about

replies(3): >>42731878 #>>42732447 #>>42732556 #
2. jdthedisciple ◴[] No.42731878[source]
Makes sense that way. I think you nailed the execution. Good job!
3. viciousvoxel ◴[] No.42732447[source]
Significant Others just got downgraded to Important Others
4. redeux ◴[] No.42732556[source]
> Significance is objective. It's about how much the event affects humanity as a whole.

I don’t agree with that, at least not in the present. We only know what’s truly significant when we reflect on history. There are very few things we can be certain are significant in the present. Climate change is likely one, but the US debt ceiling and the war in Ukraine don’t seem as likely to me, at least not in the human scale. There are also events that happen that don’t appear significant in the present but will be hugely significant in the future.

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5. yakhinvadim ◴[] No.42732696[source]
I actually agree that "true" significance can only be estimated in hindsight.

My goal with this project is not to get "true" significance but to have a setup that gets you 90% of the way there: an automated system that finds events that are likely to affect large groups of people or major systems and filters out most of everyday noise.

There will always be false-positives and false-negatives, but I think it's a good starting point and it should slowly get better as models get smarter.