News Minimalist – Only significant news
newsminimalist.com
News Minimalist – Only significant news
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Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#2Very cool!
>“Today ChatGPT read 1289 top news and gave 13 of them a significance score over 6/10.”
Is an excellent hook.
I wish there was more of a basis on the score it chose. For example:
>“Russia suffers 100,000 casualties in Ukraine conflict, US estimates.” is #2 and ranked 6.8
>“White House estimates Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties in Ukraine since December.” is #237 and ranked 3.8.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#3Hey HN, author of the site here!
Happy to answer any questions.
(below is the project description I used when posted about it on Reddit)
The problem I have with most news sites is that I can't read only important news: an article about a virus outbreak is followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release.
But even on sites that focus on important events articles are posted every day and there are always "top headlines" — even on days when nothing important happened.
I am forced to make a choice: waste time going through unimportant updates or ignore the news and miss important events.
So I built a web app that I think solves this.
It uses AI (ChatGPT-4) to read the top 1000 news every day and rank them by significance on a scale from 0 to 10 based on event magnitude, scale, potential, and source credibility.
The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/
I also run a newsletter where I post summaries of all the news with a score over 6.5. On average that's 1-3 articles per day, but sometimes it is 5, and sometimes — none at all. In that case, I just send an email saying that nothing important happened that day.
You can read previous issues here: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/
Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas. I'm considering adding new features and looking for direction.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#4Very cool! > “Today ChatGPT read 1289 top news and gave 13 of them a significance score over 6/10.” Is an excellent hook. I wish there was more of a basis on the score it chose. For example: > “Russia suffers 100,000 casualties in Ukraine conflict, US estimates.” is #2 and ranked 6.8 > “White House estimates Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties in Ukraine since December.” is #237 and ranked 3.8.
Yeah, I'm still thinking about the scoring.
Initially I asked ChatGPT to estimate three things: event scale, event magnitude and event potential. That often resulted in clickbait articles going to the top.
To fix this I started to also ask it to estimate source credibility, so tabloids would get much lower score than, say New York Times.
Now you noticed another problem, similar articles get very different scores. I think ideally I could do some sort of deduplication, but I don't know how to implement it yet.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#5What a great way to see the bias play out in real time.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#6This is awesome! I've used thefactual and ground news briefly in the past to try to stay informed without becoming a news-junkie-zombie or exposing myself to propaganda unnecessarily, but ultimately gave up on even "staying informed" because the political nonsense always leaked in and required manual filtering on my part. These headlines are the tiny little tidbits of information that I actually care about, and nothing else. Love that there's no commentary, no extra context, nothing. Just some headlines.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#7Very cool! > “Today ChatGPT read 1289 top news and gave 13 of them a significance score over 6/10.” Is an excellent hook. I wish there was more of a basis on the score it chose. For example: > “Russia suffers 100,000 casualties in Ukraine conflict, US estimates.” is #2 and ranked 6.8 > “White House estimates Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties in Ukraine since December.” is #237 and ranked 3.8.
Yeah, I'm still thinking about the scoring. Initially I asked ChatGPT to estimate three things: event scale, event magnitude and event potential. That often resulted in clickbait articles going to the top. To fix this I started to also ask it to estimate source credibility, so tabloids would get much lower score than, say New York Times. Now you noticed another problem, similar articles get very different scores. I t…
How hard would it be to let users tinker with this? Like could I have a set of sliders to go play with (customize) my scoring?
Any chance AI could be used to dedup the stories (like these are identical - only show higher source)?
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I'm still thinking about the scoring. Initially I asked ChatGPT to estimate three things: event scale, event magnitude and event potential. That often resulted in clickbait articles going to the top. To fix this I started to also ask it to estimate source credibility, so tabloids would get much lower score than, say New York Times. Now you noticed another problem, similar articles get very different scores. I t…
How hard would it be to let users tinker with this? Like could I have a set of sliders to go play with (customize) my scoring? Any chance AI could be used to dedup the stories (like these are identical - only show higher source)?
Oh, sliders for custom scoring is an amazing idea. And should be easy to add — I already have all the ChatGPT estimations for different parts of the score. Added to the TODO list.
The problem with deduping is that some news get posted and reposted by different sources for several days (sometimes even weeks) in a row. That's a huge context I'd have to put in AI.
1000 news titles * 3 days * 70 symbols per title = 210,000 symbols = 40000 words = 53000 tokens. My current context window is 8000 tokens and I think 32000 tokens is max that GPT-4 allows.
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Add: now that I think about it should be possible to do in several runs. Will keep thinking about it, thanks for the suggestion.
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#9What a great way to see the bias play out in real time.
I noticed some bias because I only analyze sources in English. It should be easy to make ChatGPT also read news in other languages, maybe that will help. Is that what you meant?
Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news
#10Hey HN, author of the site here! Happy to answer any questions. (below is the project description I used when posted about it on Reddit) The problem I have with most news sites is that I can't read only important news: an article about a virus outbreak is followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release. But even on sites that focus on important events articles are posted every day and there are always…
I’d love for there to be sections, such as science, business, politics, etc.