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News Minimalist – Only significant news

newsminimalist.com

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Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#181

Post by noveltyaccount »

yakhinvadim wrote: post #172
yakhinvadim wrote: post #3

Hey HN, author of the site here! Happy to answer any questions. (below is the project description I used when posted about it on Reddit) The problem I have with most news sites is that I can't read only important news: an article about a virus outbreak is followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release. But even on sites that focus on important events articles are posted every day and there are always…

RSS: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml (some people had complaints about formatting there, will try to fix soon)

Amazing project. Would be cool if the RSS feed could accept a parameter for either top x stories, or all stories with score greater than y.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#182

Post by yakhinvadim »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #177
yakhinvadim wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice catch. Just checked that article — it actually got rating 2.8 just based on the news content, but the source credibility 1/10 brought it down to 0.3. I don't think it's fair, I think ChatGPT hallucinated that it's a tabloid. Not sure how to fix this. I don't want to adjust sources credibility manually, that will introduce too much bias. My hope is that OpenAI will update ChatGPT with newer data and I could rerun…

Assuming an average of 20 tokens per headline (~10-14 words), 1200 headlines would be 24000 tokens, which is already near the limit of the API-exclusive GPT-4's window of 32,768 tokens, and way beyond the 8,192 token length of the ChatGPT version. So it's exceedingly unlikely the actual content, beyond the headline, is processed if your using the ChatGPT version.

I score each article individually, so there's no need to put many news in one context window.

In 99% cases a single news article fits within the context.

I drop those that don't fit, since several examples I saw were announcement of lottery numbers (too many tokens) and articles with broken html.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#183

Post by yakhinvadim »

malgorithms wrote: post #152

I'd been waiting/hoping for someone to make something like this. Well done. A few ideas that will not clutter the UI but you might consider: - when a user changes the score slider, encode that in the URL with a hash tag, so they can bookmark the page with their preferred settings - a left button allowing me to step back to yesterday's news - to simplify newsletter signups, just accept an e-mail address right on that…

Thank you!

All great suggestions — will try to add them soon (wasn't really ready for the unexpected launch on HN, but glad it went this way, got a much clearer vision for the future)

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#184

Post by pavon »

yakhinvadim wrote: post #3

Hey HN, author of the site here! Happy to answer any questions. (below is the project description I used when posted about it on Reddit) The problem I have with most news sites is that I can't read only important news: an article about a virus outbreak is followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release. But even on sites that focus on important events articles are posted every day and there are always…

Some changes that I would find useful are:

* Make it easier to browse back in time. My biggest annoyance with news sites I've subscribed to is that they have no way to find articles after they have moved off the front page so I feel compelled to visit every day, and when I don't I feel like I'm wasting money, so I unsubscribe. I did eventually find that you have previous days available in the newsletter section, but a more discoverable interface like "previous/next day" link on the bottom of the page would be great.

* Add some less frequent newsletters, such as weekly and monthly which dedupe any stories that come up multiple times in that period, and include the top N stories, rather than everything over a threshold.

* Sections would be great for advanced users. My ideal would be to let the user set a different threshold for each section, but then still display them all together on the front page.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#185

Post by yakhinvadim »

ninkendo wrote: post #146
finnjohnsen2 wrote: post #119

I am European and see another US news oriented site which ironically is not "minimalist" from my perspective. It is (to me) littered with US domestic concerns. My point is that _minimalist_ is highly subjective and a pretty huge promise from a site. But kudos to the effort and the idea of keeping news small is a most noble cause

The problem is that .com is a de facto US TLD… as an American it doesn’t strike me as odd that a .com site is implicitly USA centric any more than a US news channel or US newspaper. (Yes I know .us exists but it’s not as common as .com) If it was newsminimalist.co.uk I don’t think anyone would really complain that it’s UK-specific news, right?

I think it's because I only analyze news in English currently. I was thinking of adding other languages to the evaluation and ask GPT to translate them. It should at least partially fix the US bias.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#186

Post by yakhinvadim »

finnjohnsen2 wrote: post #119

I am European and see another US news oriented site which ironically is not "minimalist" from my perspective. It is (to me) littered with US domestic concerns. My point is that _minimalist_ is highly subjective and a pretty huge promise from a site. But kudos to the effort and the idea of keeping news small is a most noble cause

In the ChatGPT prompt I make emphasis on evaluating article from the perspective of humanity as a whole, not prioritizing any individual country. But still, it's not ideal.

I don't know ChatGPT's logic, but it might be it's giving higher scores to news about US economic difficulties because they tend to cause ripples all over the world. But I've never seen articles about US internal politics getting score over 6.5 (or maybe there were none in the last month).

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#187

Post by detaro »

krapp wrote: post #140
jll29 wrote: post #139

The question is whether one should reduce one's news consumption to only "core" stories. In all likelihood that would show you only today's disasters but not the build-up of tomorrow's. Personally, I highly recommend you to rely on more than one source of news, ideally with different country and political biases (for instance, I enjoy reading in The Guardian about Germany, and watching Al Jazeera to learn about what'…

I feel like if you have to hear about it on "the news" to begin with, it probably isn't relevant to you.

What do you consider "not-news" where one might hear about important things in the (near) future?

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#188

Post by Zanovis »

yakhinvadim wrote: post #82
lordgrenville wrote: post #81

Would be great to make the significance threshold an adjustable parameter. Personally I think a site like this should have way less than 1-3 articles/day - probably closer to 0.1.

It is possible currently! There's a slider under the chart that let's you adjust that. For now it doesn't save the position though.

FYI On Firefox Mobile, the slider touch area seems small, it's pretty difficult to get a gesture recognized.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#189

Post by yakhinvadim »

shshahshsusus wrote: post #145
yakhinvadim wrote: post #3

Hey HN, author of the site here! Happy to answer any questions. (below is the project description I used when posted about it on Reddit) The problem I have with most news sites is that I can't read only important news: an article about a virus outbreak is followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release. But even on sites that focus on important events articles are posted every day and there are always…

great work! How did you gain access to GPT-4 API? or are you manually inserting the article text into chat-gpt 4's web interface?

Thank you! I asked for GPT-4 access via form on OpenAI website, they gave me the one with 8k context window, which is enough for 99% of articles.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#190

Post by yakhinvadim »

alberth wrote: post #20
yakhinvadim wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the best solution, will do it soon.

Also, is you’re looking for a simpler domain name - http://BigNews.today is available. ( I used ChatGPT to help me find it, via https://smartynames.com/ )

Seems like someone bought it and set up a redirect to newsminimalist.com

Thank you kind stranger!

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