That's an amusingly long URL, given the context of the name...
TL;DR — Faster News
71–80 of 142 posts
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#72I 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 really like your site, skimthat.com. However, I think the summaries should be condensed even more. For example, this summary is 203 words:
http://skimthat.com/4407/ind-home-explosion-now-homicide-inv...
It could have been summarized down to something like: Rumors are circulating that a suspicious white van was parked in front of the house that blew up.
I would rather it be super short with just the important fact. If it peaks my curiosity, then I'll click to the full article.
I don't know, that's just my opinion.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#73As 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.
No, the first paragraph of a news article is designed to give the reader just enough information to get the gist of the article, but tease the reader into continuing to read along. On web sites, the goal is to get the user to click the "more" or "details" link to get the whole article and thus display more ads. The reality is that most of the "good stuff" for a news article could be summarized in a paragraph that wou…
What you're saying may be true of new media sites and investigative / gonzo / entertainment journalism, but old school journalism 101 says the first paragraph should be a summary for hard news stories. In fact, hard news should be written such that you can chop off paragraphs in reverse order and still have a sensible article.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#74This tl;dr thing can be taken too far --
"War and Peace", Leo Tolstoy, 1,225 pages : it's about Russia.
"Hindenburg" : a really nice dirigible, until something bad happened in New Jersey.
"Adolf Hitler" : politician, didn't like Jews very much.
"Helen of Troy" : nice-looking woman.
"Calculus" : a province somewhere north of algebra.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#75Why don't people like to read anymore?
Reading news isnt necessarily recreational for everyone. Just because someone want to stay informed about current events in a concise manner, doesn't mean they don't like to read. You can consume the news quickly and take your time reading something else that you enjoy.
That's what I assumed, but what happens if I'm in a conversation and my knowledge is only as long as the little blurb I just read?
Ultimately it ends up devaluing my conversation and could make for an awkward experience. Better to be oblivious to something rather than semi-educated. So if I'm honest and say "no, I haven't read that," the person I'm speaking with can fill me in and we can have a great talk.
There's a little term I came across a few years ago that's brilliant: info snacking. Paralleled with a healthy diet (food), too much "snacking" can result in poor health. Same thing here: without substance you're but a balloon waiting to be popped.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#76[deleted]
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#77I will always maintain that "summary" is easier to type than "TL;DR"
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#78Earlier 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…
I'll add my baby to the pot: http://skimfeed.com .
I like it! Simple and I can actually see myself using this.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's mine, http://textteaser.com/ . It's basically an API that accepts the URL as an input and outputs a JSON result. It's only a preview so expect more to come.
I'm having trouble getting http://m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/blogs/clinton-white-h... to work. You should have a few links listed on that page that you know will work well as examples for people to try the service out with. Btw, how do you feel about my other comments in this thread about algorithms not working well? My basic point is that they will most likely produce paragraphs that are out of context.
>My basic point is that they will most likely produce paragraphs that are out of context.
Disagree - having written a bunch of these gist extractors I have found that the good ones do not produce out of context paragraphs. In fact, that's pretty much the point - to find the salient portion of the content.
Re: TL;DR — Faster News
#80I 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…
For anyone working on the summary problem: Chapter 8 of O'Reilly's Mining the Social Web has a great description of how you can use Python NLP libraries to accurately break text into individual sentences, then analyze those sentences to pull out the most important. I don't know how well it works in practice, but their example is amazing.