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Show HN: News Minimalist – News ranked by significance

(www.newsminimalist.com)
84 points yakhinvadim | 4 comments | 15 Jan 25 20:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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HelloUsername ◴[16 Jan 25 22:41 UTC] No.42731823[source]▶
Nice. Similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35905437 (which summarizes for free)
replies(1): >>42731938 #
1. yakhinvadim ◴[16 Jan 25 22:53 UTC] No.42731938[source]▶
I think the main differentiator for my project is news selection.

Most other aggregators show news based on 1) relevance, 2) upvotes or 3) coverage.

Relevance-based algorithms tend to put reader into a bubble, where the more they read on a certain topic, the more news they see on that topic.

Upvotes-based algorithms usually bring up a lot of clickbait and drama.

Sorting by coverage doesn't really work either, media often just follows people's interests and churns articles on what is "hot".

For example, last summer, a fight between Zuckerberg and Musk was at the top of most feeds based both on upvotes and coverage. Significance-based algorithm didn't even put it in the top 50.

replies(1): >>42732036 #
2. HelloUsername ◴[16 Jan 25 23:03 UTC] No.42732036[source]▶
I understand (also by reading your other responses here). Very nice, I like it. Is the summary feature based on one article (the top one mentioned), or does it combine all articles on that topic? And any roadplan for a native iOS app?
replies(1): >>42732163 #
3. yakhinvadim ◴[16 Jan 25 23:15 UTC] No.42732163[source]▶
Summaries are done for a single article. I think it's better this way — a summary is a clear reflection of an underlying article, where all statements can be easily tracked to a single original source. That makes LLM hallucinations extremely rare.

No plans for an iOS app, but my site is a PWA so can be installed and look like an app both on Android and iOS.

replies(1): >>42742084 #
4. HelloUsername ◴[17 Jan 25 19:10 UTC] No.42742084{3}[source]▶
I kinda like the approach of Boring Report, where it does combine multiple sources into one summary. Still, I like your https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/archive page. What about using other models instead of GPT-4o mini, like Claude 3 Haiku, Llama 3.1, or Mixtral (which now started a partnership with AFP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42732960).