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News Minimalist – Only significant news

newsminimalist.com

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Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#191

Post by pavon »

pftburger wrote: post #92
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…

The absolute best feature is selecting the LEAST significant articles. Way more whimsey! +1

I get the most random articles by selecting around the mode (peak) of the distribution. The lowest of the low is all Daily Mail gossip all the time :puke:.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#192

Post by ninkendo »

lawn wrote: post #155
ninkendo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, .com isn't implicitly USA centric, it's just the internet default. You mention .us yourself but then dismiss it because reasons. Your American bias is just shining through, where of course you're not surprised.

    $ whois com.
    % IANA WHOIS server
    % for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
    % This query returned 1 object

    domain:       COM

    organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
    address:      12061 Bluemont Way
    address:      Reston VA 20190
    address:      United States of America (the)
It absolutely is a US tld, run by a US corporation.

DNS was originally a DARPA project, and was implicitly US focused from the very beginning of the internet, because it was a US project. ".com" carries that legacy because it predates the concept of country-specific TLD's.

A similar idea exists in reddit: /r/news is very US-focused, even though it's not called "US news". Since Reddit is an American site with an (at least initially) predominantly American audience, it's not surprising at all that things are American-biased by default unless explicitly named accordingly.

If we were all using Minitel instead of The Internet, we would have similar bias where services would be biased towards France unless shown otherwise, because Minitel was a French technology.

The point is, it's not explicitly a problem that somebody puts up a website and it's US-centric. Nobody owes the world an international version of whatever project they want to make, and you don't need to get upset that they only bother to cater to a US audience.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#193

Post by gnulinux »

laputan_machine wrote: post #161

This is a good idea but I already disagree with the output. Of the top stories, the majority of them are "could" and "probably" -- that isn't news. News is something that either has happened or is going to happen. If it might not happen, then it's speculation, that isn't news (imo). e.g. - "US Braces for potential recession" -- no, the REAL story is the interest rate is going up - "US Debt default could happen by 202…

> - "US Debt default could happen by 2023" -- pure speculation, not news

It seems like this will happen unless something significant changes. It also seems likely something significant will change, such as GOP and Dems agreeing. But until that happens, Federal Government seems to be on track to default.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#194

Post by starkparker »

yakhinvadim wrote: post #174
MichaelZuo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough in the 'least significant section', with scores Also, the second to last least significant article seems to be incorrectly categorized: "Regenerative medicine has come a long way, baby" Which is actually a serious look back at the advancements over the last quarter century, hardly deserving the second to last position. It seems like ChatGPT is ranking them not based on actual content significance but pre…

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…

So how exactly is the credibility score determined? Is it just asking "On a scale of 0 to 10, how credible is this source?"

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#195

Post by ninkendo »

wohfab wrote: post #149
ninkendo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Obviously it doesn't strike you as odd as an American. I'd say, .com is just the default. If you go location/topic specific, you go with another TLD. To the 130 million (domainnamestat.com) domains, registered in the US, there are like 500 million domains, registered somewhere else. I couldn't find any numbers for how many of those are .com and how many aren't, but you cannot just ignore those. Just because most doma…

.com is a US domain though. It's run by a US corporation (Verisign). Check whois.

That said corporation lets non-US entities buy domain names doesn't change this fact.

Similarly, if a site with a .tv address published articles explicitly about Tuvalu, in the Tuvaluan language, you probably wouldn't complain about a Tuvaluan bias, right? After all, it's a Tuvaluan TLD. The fact that lots of companies around the world use .tv addresses for other reasons that have nothing to do with Tuvalu, doesn't change the fact that it's a Tuvaluan TLD.

If you want more information on this, the intro in the Wikipedia article on .com is quite informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com ... particularly:

> The domain was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law.[2][3][4] Additionally, as the Internet was invented in the United States, most American businesses and enterprises have used the .com domain instead of a more U.S.-specific .us.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#196

Post by detaro »

ninkendo wrote: post #195
wohfab wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously it doesn't strike you as odd as an American. I'd say, .com is just the default. If you go location/topic specific, you go with another TLD. To the 130 million (domainnamestat.com) domains, registered in the US, there are like 500 million domains, registered somewhere else. I couldn't find any numbers for how many of those are .com and how many aren't, but you cannot just ignore those. Just because most doma…

.com is a US domain though. It's run by a US corporation (Verisign). Check whois. That said corporation lets non-US entities buy domain names doesn't change this fact. Similarly, if a site with a .tv address published articles explicitly about Tuvalu, in the Tuvaluan language, you probably wouldn't complain about a Tuvaluan bias, right? After all, it's a Tuvaluan TLD. The fact that lots of companies around the world…

Verisign is contracted to run .com

.tv addresses are different, because ccTLDs are explicitly tied to countries (hence "ccTLD"). generic TLDs (gTLDs) like .com are not.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#197

Post by kdamica »

This is awesome. And it has an RSS feed!

Would be cool to publish multiple feeds corresponding to each integer significance threshold. Like 6+, 7+ etc

Update: turns out the RSS feed doesn’t work like I expected. I wanted it to publish each news item to the feed, but it’s actually just a feed of the newsletter.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#198

Post by ninkendo »

detaro wrote: post #196
ninkendo wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.com is a US domain though. It's run by a US corporation (Verisign). Check whois. That said corporation lets non-US entities buy domain names doesn't change this fact. Similarly, if a site with a .tv address published articles explicitly about Tuvalu, in the Tuvaluan language, you probably wouldn't complain about a Tuvaluan bias, right? After all, it's a Tuvaluan TLD. The fact that lots of companies around the world…

Verisign is contracted to run .com .tv addresses are different, because ccTLDs are explicitly tied to countries (hence "ccTLD"). generic TLDs (gTLDs) like .com are not.

Huh? Contracted by who? DARPA originally invented the internet and DNS in the first place (it was originally an American project) and gave over control over .com to Network Solutions which was eventually bought by Verisign. What do you mean "contracted to run"?

.com registrations are ultimately under US jurisdiction. It's what happens when you have a name system that was originally intended for one country's project (The Internet) and said project ended up becoming internationally used. The original TLD's are grandfathered in even after we got country-specific ones.

Nobody complains that .mil is US-centric either. .mil isn't a ccTLD but of course it means US military.

.com is a very popular TLD used all over the world. It doesn't make it non-American. Just as .tv is also very popular outside of Tuvalu, it doesn't make it non-Tuvaluan.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#199

Post by ksala_ »

kkukshtel wrote: post #173

For people looking for something similar and actually minimalist, I highly recommend http://68k.news I don't know what algo it uses, but it basically grabs top headlines, aggregates similar stories with their headlines (so you can see how other news sites headlined the same news), and then most importantly presents a plaintext version of the article that is accessible without visiting the news site directly. It's hon…

It seems to be just parsing Google News, and displaying the articles in publication order instead of whatever smart order Google News is doing. I do like the design (or lack of) quite a bit.

Re: News Minimalist – Only significant news

#200

Post by MichaelZuo »

yakhinvadim wrote: post #182
MichaelZuo wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The score has to be in relation to other articles. Or else it's too random to have meaning. ChatGPT doesn't even given consistent scores from session-to-session for the same article.

And the context length limit prevents that relation from extending to more then a few articles, if that's your method.

i.e. Your method doesn't actually produce a meaningful score that can be ranked in some linear order with the 1200 other articles.

At most it would make sense to rank a discrete score in relation to the few other articles it remembers.

Anything beyond that should be placed in 'score ranges' from 5 to 7 for example, not given a discrete score.

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