wow. I can't count the number of times I've thought about doing something similar. looks like I don't need to now.
TL;DR — Faster News
41–50 of 142 posts
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#42I always had thought it was TooLazy;Didn'tRead....I guess TooLong also works.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
adding http://tldr.it as a generic approach.
Another good example of an automated attempt to summarize the news that'll never work.
Here's why: Let's assume we have the perfect algorithm that knows exactly which sentences to pick for a good summary. You'll still end up with a summary that's horribly out of context and difficult to read.
Try it yourself. Assume your brain is the perfect algorithm and pick the most important sentences for a summary. Then try to read just the sentences that you picked without rewriting it into a coherent paragraph. More than likely, it'll be an out of context confusing block of text.
Algorithms will never solve the summarizing process unless they are teamed up with a rewriting engine that could build coherent paragraphs.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#44Caveat: Not speaking against you (the developers of this) or the work you put into it, but instead against the notion behind this trend of summarizing the news: Why? That's a curious "Why", not a crotchety "Why". Lots of people are talking about browser extensions that summarize the news or are linking to other sources that do this; is the state of journalism so that a summary is better than what media outlets produc…
People are short of time and want to feel they've skimmed enough news to feel up to date to catch cultural references, bluff their way through a discussion, or notice things 'on the radar' that might be directly relevant to them.
Reading full form journalism is great but if you had to do it for 100 news stories a day, your day is gone. And, right or wrong, many people want to get a breadth of information and then focus on a few parts of it, rather than solely consume a deep amount of information.
Newspapers used to fulfil this role quite well. You could "scan" a paper in 20 minutes and feel reasonably up to date. But "scanning" online is somewhat trickier because of the format. So these services seem to try and bridge that gap of offering you a ton of headlines and summaries all in one place.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#45I 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…
Once again, not to step on TL;DR, but since most commenting here are saying that curation is not scalable or sustainable, I wanted to present it in this way:
Phase 1: The MVP of a news aggregator should be a curated/editorial like traditional media/magazines, etc [1]
Phase 2: The second stage should be to have submissions from your readers (on content that interests them).
Phase 3: The next would be to have a voting mechanism, and then realizing that articles have different relevance in different communities - which is what prismatic and ypander were aiming to solve.
Full Disclosure: I am working on summarizing technology news, and the tagline so far has been "Hacker News on Steroids." Before it gets to that stage, I'm skimming my most favourite feeds from Google Reader. The best mobile wrapper I've found (since I'm targeting mobile as well) has been Feedly, which presents it as more like a magazine. Keep in mind Feedly didn't start out as this 4 years ago.
Another project aiming to solve this problem with a bookmarklet (and has a more appt domain name imo is tldr.io) though I personally haven't used it. Summly is another one, but after using it for a while, I found Feedly much better suited to my reading habits.
I'd love to team up with others who are working on this problem. My MVP is at http://dinopost.com. Drop me a line at aaron at dinopost.
[1] Phases based on Casey Accidental's blog post: Online News is Broken: http://caseyaccidental.com/online-news-is-broken/
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#46If you haven't seen http://evening-edition.com/ I highly reccomend it. It is bite sized world news published every weekday at 5 pm in a few different locales. The news is all written by a journalist, and they track some of the same stories day to day. It's not trying to solve the same problem as this site, and its not just summarizing articles you could read elsewhere. I've been reading it pretty much every day for a few months; it's great.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#47Would love to see a "top stories from last week" feature. Imagine I'm on vacation, or I've just been too busy to keep up with current events but would like to catch up. This is nicely done. I'll be giving it a shot as a tab that never closes.
http://hckrnews.com/ (for Hackernews posts)
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#48Why don't people like to read anymore?
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#49Why don't people like to read anymore?
It appears to be because everything written is believed to be... too long.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#50I 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…
I'll add my baby to the pot: http://skimfeed.com.