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TL;DR — Faster News

toolong-didntread.com

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Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#111

Post by goldfeld »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #36
tokenadult wrote: post #31

I browsed around a bit to check it out. tl;dr: I can get the same use out of Google News by customizing sections there and scanning headlines. Longer comparison with the main competition: Google News also allows me to group sources that are consistently reliable (which appear in an "Editors' Picks" section that I can customize). The Spotlight section of Google News seems to provide much of the same usability as the p…

"I sympathize with anyone who feels too busy making a living to have time to read." Yes, being too busy is one reason for wanting summarized news but it's not the only reason. Often, news stories are created for search engine consumption, not human consumption. You find long articles full of repetitive information and bloviating. A good summary can cut out everything but the basic facts of the story so you're up to d…

Not to mention books which are often stuffed with lots of filler rehashing points, to avoid being the below-hundred pages quick read it should have been.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#112

Post by antrix »

macrael wrote: post #46

If 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…

Agreed. After their UK & France editions, I am hoping they'll launch an Asian edition too.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#113

Post by MichaelApproved »

sixQuarks wrote: post #72
MichaelApproved wrote: post #25

Earlier 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 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.…

Thanks for your feedback. I see what you're saying about a shorter summary but I'd consider your sentence more of a tease than a summary.

Our goal is to give the reader a good understanding of the topic while leaving out the unnecessary details and redundant information. The original had 465 words. That means that the Skim That summary cut the story down by over 50% while still giving you a strong overview of the story.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#114

Post by mullr »

brnstz wrote: post #73
crusso wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

100% agreed - that's what I learned to do in high school journalism class as well. But there's lots of stuff on the web, even that's considered news, that doesn't follow this format. Here's some first sentences from other Times articles:

"The flesh is weak but the spirit of commerce is willing." (op-ed)

"Last weekend, my family and I packed our car full of supplies and drove to a fire station in New Jersey to deliver goods to an area that had been hit hard by Hurricane Sandy." (small business)

"Last April 28, a splendid spring Saturday that fairly begged you to be outdoors, I spent all afternoon in front of my living-room TV, anxiously watching the last day of the annual N.F.L. draft, live from Radio City Music Hall. " (NY Times Magazine)

"The relocation of Albert C. Barnes’s great polyglot art collection to central Philadelphia was opposed by many and dreaded by most." (A&E)

I guess my point is that journalism styles vary even within a publication. Therefore, any automated attempt to simply use the first paragraph as a summary is bound to be wrong a lot of the time. It would however be interesting to use a human-generated summary dataset as the training data for a "buries the lead" classifier. I'll bet you could do it with a bag-of-words feature pretty easily, and that the most important words would be personal pronouns.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#116

Post by genwin »

ErikGelderblom wrote: post #68

Compared to all the others, I really like this execution of the simple, eye friendly design and the color coding. Well done! A small source url after the headline like reddit and HN do, would be a welcome addition imo.

Would a small source url still have benefit when there are thousands of unique domains possible? I think it would be ignored by most people.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#117

Post by MichaelApproved »

rglover wrote: post #75
MichaelApproved wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I see your point but what I'm trying to do with my site Skim That[1] is actually convey nearly all the information in a source story. So, if you just read the summary and someone else reads the source, you should both be able to have a conversation on the same level.

[1] http://skimthat.com

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#118

Post by billirvine »

sixbit wrote: post #107
billirvine wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I see that -- not sure why I didn't notice sooner (@@) I wonder how many other users may have had a different takeaway of the product if the attribution and sources was more obvious?

We are definitely working on calling it out better in an update to the app. Thanks for the feedback!

Oh, you're associated with Circa.

As a digital publisher myself, I'm curious as to how you obtain the rights to the images you're using in the app.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#119

Post by billirvine »

MattSayar wrote: post #93
rglover wrote: post #48

Why don't people like to read anymore?

I'm actually a little worried about this trend to make things shorter and more dense. When does it stop? Twitter's character limit was ludicrous at first, but now people applaud its length. I even notice in myself how short of an attention span I have nowadays. If a comment is too long, I'll read half of it and skip the rest. I don't delve anymore, I just skim. I'm wondering how this is affecting us on a larger, long…

I think (or hope) we're learning to compartmentalize our information consumption. As someone who's been involved in "user generated digital content" since before the web, I've had a front row seat for the evolutionary process that, to me, is logical but to others feels accelerated if not sudden.

I see it as our brains adapting to the information overburden that we feel is being imposed on us. As a result, those learning to adapt are creating four categories of information: (1) Stuff I need to know (2) Stuff I should know (3) Stuff I'd like to know (4) Stuff I don't care about

Content shortening/summarization helps augment our ability to quantify what fits into 2, 3, and 4. If I read the first paragraph of a traditionally written journalistic piece, I know where it fits before the second paragraph. But a precious small percentage of online content is written in that manner -- first paragraph giving the reader enough information to know what to do next. (There's a whole rant on our lost ability to write, but that's for later.) So since a smaller and smaller percentage of potentially viable information is written traditionally, automated summaries (should) help us decide sooner where something fits.

Does that make sense or am I just spewing madness?

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#120

Post by MojoJolo »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #58
MojoJolo wrote: post #54

Earlier 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.

Mine work well with that link. Thank you for your suggestions but the website I created is just a preview. Will work on it though. I'll keep you posted when I made some changes.

They are out of context because they (we) are basically just doing extraction. In which we just extract the most important sentences, arrange them in order, and present it in a paragraph / list. I prefer presenting the top sentences in a list though. In my opinion, presenting it as a paragraph will make an effect that it's out of context rather than in a list.

If the summaries was done through abstraction, like how humans are doing it, it will obviously produce better summaries. But why we are not doing it? I believe abstraction summaries are holy grail of automatic summarization.

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