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TL;DR — Faster News

toolong-didntread.com

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Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#21

Post by louischatriot »

logn wrote: post #16
jimsilverman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pu…

It is in fact pretty hard :) We are working on content summarization too, with a Chrome extension that lets you read a human written summary of Hacker News frontpage links. Writing the summaries and making sure you're up to date takes time. You need to make sure you stick to the author's point of view, that you really understand the article in depth and groked the key points. Of course it depends on the article you summarize but I can spend a good 30 minutes on one article by Paul Graham or Mark Suster.

PS: the chrome extension I'm talking about is here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/ohmamcbkcmfal... (same one czzarr is referring to)

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#22

Post by slashcom »

As an NLP researcher, this is interesting as a sort of summarization data set.

The thing is though, summarizing news articles is best done by just reading the first paragraph of the article. News articles are intentionally written this way, and it's a very difficult baseline to beat in automatic summarization.

Still nice site though.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#23

Post by mbesto »

fwr wrote: post #14
jimsilverman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is why I believe we are still a long way away from solving that "problem": http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-sol...

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#25

Post by MichaelApproved »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #15

I 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…

Looks like there are a few of us on HN trying to solve the news consumption problem. My site[1] tries to crowdsource the summaries by encouraging the readers to summarize a story themselves. In the meantime, we create most of the summaries in-house.

Newser[2] tried to do the same thing but gave up and just focused on in-house created summaries.

Regarding the summary process, it's good to see another group manually summarizing posts as opposed to Summly[3] which tries automate the process. For many reasons already stated in another comment[4], I don't think automation will ever work.

Good luck to the guys over at http://toolong-didntread.com and http://newspaper23.com. I hope one of us gets some real traction!

[1] http://skimthat.com [2] http://www.newser.com/ [3] http://summly.com/ [4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4741855

Edit: Another product that tries to summarize news http://cir.ca/

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#28

Post by jimsilverman »

fwr wrote: post #14
jimsilverman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this site isn't about journalism, it's about aggregation.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#30

Post by czzarr »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #25
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #15

I 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…

Looks like there are a few of us on HN trying to solve the news consumption problem. My site[1] tries to crowdsource the summaries by encouraging the readers to summarize a story themselves. In the meantime, we create most of the summaries in-house. Newser[2] tried to do the same thing but gave up and just focused on in-house created summaries. Regarding the summary process, it's good to see another group manually su…

you forgot http://tldr.io
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