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Show HN: News Minimalist – News ranked by significance

(www.newsminimalist.com)
84 points yakhinvadim | 5 comments | 15 Jan 25 20:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | 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

1. marc_abonce ◴[17 Jan 25 00:57 UTC] No.42732871[source]▶
Semi-related: Wikipedia's homepage also contains a very minimalist, manually curated news section with only major world events:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Although that's perhaps way too minimalist?

replies(2): >>42732948 #>>42746186 #
2. yakhinvadim ◴[17 Jan 25 01:08 UTC] No.42732948[source]▶
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 their 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, so similar news should never get to the main page: https://www.newsminimalist.com/articles/two-dead-and-four-in...

replies(1): >>42746197 #
3. maeil ◴[18 Jan 25 05:50 UTC] No.42746186[source]▶
Wikipedia's current events selection has little to do with significance, being overly focused on events that cause multiple deaths and political events, regardless of their global significance.

Not trying to have an edgy take here, it comes from a genuine attempt to use it for this exact purpose, but it didn't work at all. A train crash killing 20, as unfortunate as it is, can't possibly be one of the 5 most significant things that happened over the last week, but Wikipedia current events considers it one.

4. maeil ◴[18 Jan 25 05:53 UTC] No.42746197[source]▶
I hadn't seen this comment and just wrote pretty much a mirror one - Wikipedia overly focuses on one-off accidents and events, rather than news with long-term implications.

Does your service do a good job at thinking longer term? Would you have an example of this?

replies(1): >>42750208 #
5. yakhinvadim ◴[18 Jan 25 18:20 UTC] No.42750208{3}[source]▶
It's hard to measure, but I see such stories sometimes, mostly in technology and science.

A couple recent examples:

[Significance 6.7] China outlines ambitious space strategy to surpass US by 2050 [1]

[Significance 5.9] Scientists explore ocean floor findings that could reveal oxygen on other planets [2]

[1] https://www.newsminimalist.com/articles/china-outlines-ambit...

[2] https://www.newsminimalist.com/articles/scientists-explore-o...