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TL;DR — Faster News
11–20 of 142 posts
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#12Nice clear tablet-friendly design. Bold to go with text-only too. How is this news chosen and paraphrased though?
The info page[0] says a little more, though not much. The news seems simply selected by the small handful of guys behind it, rewritten and posted manually. This being HN and all I must admit I had my hopes up for something more .. technical. Some kind of text summariser perhaps.. Nice site never the less. [0] http://toolong-didntread.com/info
agreed. the current "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable in the long term.
it's already showing some quite old news as a result. the new jersey earthquake was several weeks ago, positioned as the third "world news" story.
great concept and design, though.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#13I like the idea. I really do. But doesn't twitter do a lot of this already?
Good luck to you.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
The info page[0] says a little more, though not much. The news seems simply selected by the small handful of guys behind it, rewritten and posted manually. This being HN and all I must admit I had my hopes up for something more .. technical. Some kind of text summariser perhaps.. Nice site never the less. [0] http://toolong-didntread.com/info
agreed. the current "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable in the long term. it's already showing some quite old news as a result. the new jersey earthquake was several weeks ago, positioned as the third "world news" story. great concept and design, though.
> "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable
Seriously, you want to take people out of journalism? Even if it's an excerpt from the story, I wouldn't trust an algorithm to do it for me.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#15I don't want to step on these guys' PR, but I do have a similar personal project for anybody who is interested, http://newspaper23.com
Initially it's just an aggregator that presents commentary in plain text. I plan on adding a summarizer one day. For a personal project, I've been using it daily for over a year, so I know I find a lot of value in this type of thing.
As sites try to get more sticky, the signal-to-noise ratio decreases. You spend more time reading a lot of trivial articles that a Facebook friend recommended instead of a few articles that you've scanned yourself. I know Google and FB say social search is the cool thing, but in my experience the only thing it does is increase consumption of mediocre shiny stuff. Much better to pre-qualify sources and then control the depth of your dive. For newspaper23, one of the original ideas was a timer for each day. 30 minutes of scanning and the site would refuse to load until the next day.
I'd like to see more of this type of thing -- gearing content consumption to humans instead of site creators and advertisers.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
The info page[0] says a little more, though not much. The news seems simply selected by the small handful of guys behind it, rewritten and posted manually. This being HN and all I must admit I had my hopes up for something more .. technical. Some kind of text summariser perhaps.. Nice site never the less. [0] http://toolong-didntread.com/info
agreed. the current "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable in the long term. it's already showing some quite old news as a result. the new jersey earthquake was several weeks ago, positioned as the third "world news" story. great concept and design, though.
>the current "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable in the long term
I disagree. I had the same idea for a news site and I'm disappointed they beat me to it. I think it would only take me maybe 30-minutes to and hour to summarize the news of the moment. Do it three times a day. How hard is that? You could easily hire extremely smart people to do this. What English major at a top college wouldn't love to put this on his/her resume for some extra beer money?
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#17I don't want to step on these guys' PR, but I do have a similar personal project for anybody who is interested, http://newspaper23.com Initially it's just an aggregator that presents commentary in plain text. I plan on adding a summarizer one day. For a personal project, I've been using it daily for over a year, so I know I find a lot of value in this type of thing. As sites try to get more sticky, the signal-to-nois…
Very nice too. But some advice: the titles are way too big and look unprofessional, and the front page needs summaries. Other than that I like it.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#18Seems like there are a lot of people trying to tackle this problem at the moment.
We are using a different route with our tl;dr Chrome extension for Hacker News: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/ohmamcbkcmfal...
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#19Nice. My curmudgeonly response, though, is: "Now all we have to do is put another TL;DR on top of that: a monthly or yearly summary of 'items that actually mattered.'"
It's always interesting to pick up a newspaper from a year ago and see how few items are worth reading anymore, and imagine how many stories I've read and forgotten.
The same might be said for HN, for that matter... what am I doing here again? ;)
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#20I don't want to step on these guys' PR, but I do have a similar personal project for anybody who is interested, http://newspaper23.com Initially it's just an aggregator that presents commentary in plain text. I plan on adding a summarizer one day. For a personal project, I've been using it daily for over a year, so I know I find a lot of value in this type of thing. As sites try to get more sticky, the signal-to-nois…
Very nice too. But some advice: the titles are way too big and look unprofessional, and the front page needs summaries. Other than that I like it.
Thanks. I threw it together using the first version of Bootstrap if I recall. I think the titles are actually buttons. Also the UI is buggy. I have to use the back buttons to get back to the main page. Many times it's easier just to reload the site to get to the first page.
But it scales nicely out to a tablet. And a phone. Part of the initial appeal for my writing it was to download all of the daily commentary as json to my tablet. Then I could walk around town and such without having to worry about an internet connection. The idea was -- how much real static text do you consume in a day? Can't be more than 100 or so articles. So why not just download the plain text and consume it at your leisure?
Another feature I wanted was the ability for people peering over my shoulder to NOT be able to tell what I was consuming. Many times at work or on the train I'd have some time to read commentary, and the last thing I wanted to do was load up a page with a branded look and feel. I wanted the plainest amount of pure text possible.
I appreciate the feedback. Although I use it daily, it's not high on my list of priorities. Next up I think I'll double the amount and type of content. Maybe after that I'll go back to the UI for some rework. For me this is more of a personal thing than a business feeler. So even if nobody else in the world likes it, I'm good. :)