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Show HN: News Minimalist – News ranked by significance

by yakhinvadim on 1/15/25, 8:35 PM with 60 comments

Hey HN! I'm the author of News Minimalist — a news aggregator where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10.

The project was born out of personal pain — I wanted a way to read only significant news, like major humanity milestones, or historical political events, filtering out all the celebrity gossip and smartphone releases. But I couldn't find a way to do that — everywhere I looked, the news was ranked by popularity, coverage, or relevance, not significance.

I first tried to solve the problem in the beginning of 2023 with GPT-3 (the top model at that time) by asking it to estimate the significance of some news stories. The results were painfully bad — for some reason, the model preferred tragic, personal stories, completely missing the essence of what makes the news significant. No amount of prompt engineering could fix that.

But it all changed in March 2023 when GPT-4 came out. The scores it gave made much more sense. After a month of work, the first version was ready. News Minimalist had its first successful Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388), and I realized that a lot of people had the same problem I had.

I've been working on improving the project ever since. As probably most tech founders, I spent too much time on technical improvements, completely ignoring marketing. But I think that work paid off, and I'm finally satisfied with the scores it gives.

The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/

Let me know what you think!

Vadim

  • by marc_abonce on 1/17/25, 12:57 AM

    Semi-related: Wikipedia's homepage also contains a very minimalist, manually curated news section with only major world events:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

    Although that's perhaps way too minimalist?

  • by jdthedisciple on 1/16/25, 10:38 PM

    Isn't significance heavily subjective though?

    A lot of the most signficant stories are political, for example, which someone may have no interest in.

    I have had this same idea in the past, tuning to my personal interests.

  • by yellowapple on 1/18/25, 7:19 PM

    The "insignificant" feed has some interesting results, like this news story about a homeless man being arrested on felony burglary charges and $150k bail for breaking into a rapper's house simply to eat and use the restroom amid the LA fires: https://uproxx.com/music/kid-cudi-los-angeles-home-break-in/

    Or this tip about how storing milk in the fridge door makes it go bad sooner: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/warning-anyone-storing...

    Or this Dear Abby piece responding to a woman whose husband might have undiagnosed depression: https://www.mlive.com/advice/2025/01/dear-abby-trying-to-fig...

  • by dvh on 1/16/25, 9:36 PM

    I've been using rss feed for few months but recently it became borderline useless. For example here is grep of pubDate:

        $ wget -qO - https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml | grep pubDate
    <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:56:47 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:56:47 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2025 17:22:34 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sat, 11 Jan 2025 16:42:01 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Thu, 09 Jan 2025 17:52:38 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2025 16:19:25 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sat, 28 Dec 2024 17:44:35 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2024 16:44:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:01:56 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:00:55 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 06 Dec 2024 17:43:37 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Wed, 04 Dec 2024 16:38:38 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sun, 01 Dec 2024 18:57:43 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 29 Nov 2024 18:07:14 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sun, 24 Nov 2024 15:26:59 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Thu, 21 Nov 2024 17:25:22 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:47:19 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2024 17:28:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Tue, 12 Nov 2024 17:44:08 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 08 Nov 2024 17:22:01 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Wed, 06 Nov 2024 16:43:10 +0000</pubDate>
    So since 6th november there were only 21 articles. Longest streak was 10 days and common is 3 days without any news whatsoever.

  • by yaj54 on 1/17/25, 12:37 AM

    Nice work. Subscribed.

    I had a very similar idea a while back. I wanted to rank news by "impact" which might be more concrete than "significance."

    For an LLM prompt, it would be something like:

    "estimate the number of people who's lives that will be materially changed by this news." and "estimate the average degree of change for those impacted."

    Then impact is roughly the product of those two.

    Additionally, I want a version that is tailored to me specifically "estimate the degree of change this will have on my life." + context of my life.

    Tangentially, I've found that getting ratings out LLMs works better when I can give all options and request relative ratings. If I ask for rankings individually I get different and less good results. Not enough context length to rate all news from all time in one go though. Any thoughts on that? Maybe providing some benchmark ratings with each request could help? Something I'm exploring.

  • by richardw on 1/17/25, 12:19 AM

    I like it! How have you thought about news sources getting snippy when you summarise them and don’t send traffic? Not accusatory at all, I’m still unpacking my own opinion on it and wondering how much pushback services will get.

  • by id00 on 1/17/25, 1:30 AM

    I'd really like to see Top significant news for the past week/month. I'd rather try to read weekly/monthly digest than consume the feed every hour/day. Is that possible?

  • by medusaML on 1/20/25, 2:01 PM

    Vadim! I love this project. I saw it a while ago, paid for it for a while, then instantly copied it (and open sourced it), I put my own curation spin on it and translated the news into 19 languages >>> https://translatetribune.com/

    Thank you for the inspiration!

  • by jackphilson on 1/16/25, 10:09 PM

    This is so cool. I love this application of LLMs

  • by alternativusow on 1/17/25, 7:52 PM

    You don't have to use AI for this. Significance has already been figured out by how many news websites a news story has been published on. Which you can infer via RSS feed collection and looking at the title of the news story. The more platforms published the same title, the higher the significance.

  • by rcarmo on 1/17/25, 8:56 AM

    I generate summaries and custom digests for my feeds— https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/01/12/1730#daily-news-d...

    Might take a stab at ranking them as well.

  • by loxias on 1/16/25, 10:12 PM

    neato! Curious where you're sourcing the raw feed from. Wire service (AP, Reuters, AFP)? Google news? "the wikipedia current events page"? Something else?

    As in every other engineering endeavor, the raw data you start off with has a lot to do with what you end up with, no matter what transforms happen. :)

  • by yakhinvadim on 1/16/25, 9:35 PM

    The default sorting is "new first", but perhaps a better first impression would come from selecting "more significant first":

    https://www.newsminimalist.com/?sort=significance

  • by 2024user on 1/17/25, 9:27 AM

    I use this sometimes and it's a nice source of news. But, and this is an honest question, will this get eaten by something like this?:

    "ChatGPT, set a daily/weekly task to give me the most significant news. Use this ranking criteria: <input criteria>"

  • by jakemanger on 1/18/25, 6:58 AM

    Wow, I really have wanted something like this. Have you spent a bit of work on prompting gpt-4 to get good results? Am curious what you found worked the best for your app

  • by HelloUsername on 1/16/25, 10:41 PM

    Nice. Similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35905437 (which summarizes for free)

  • by remram on 1/17/25, 5:41 AM

    The results seem really bad, multiple entries are for the same thing and others are for very minor events. It looks like the frontpage of any random news site.

  • by decide1000 on 1/16/25, 11:04 PM

    Most people live outside the US. So maybe change "World" and "Nation". Unless you are focusing on US only.

    How can I filter out (block) subjects/words?

  • by alanlammiman on 1/17/25, 12:44 AM

    this is really cool. some thoughts - a free trial would make a lot of sense for the subscription. Having the AI break things down into more variables than just significance might be helpful. For example - events vs trends. "Trump shot" vs "Shootings up X% YoY". Forward looking statements vs concrete events "Trump lays out agenda" vs "Trump signs executive order". All of those are significant in different ways. Also newness of the information is important. Top article right now is about Gazan families looking to return home post ceasefire. But that doesn't add much to the genuinely significant news yesterday of the ceasefire itself. As is, I don't get news that seems particularly different from browsing the headlines at 2-3 top newspapers.

  • by culopatin on 1/18/25, 4:04 PM

    What’s the cost of running something like this?

  • by elicash on 1/16/25, 9:39 PM

    How would this compare "significance" of news about the ceasefire in Israel/Palestine vs, say, a genocide that's large in numbers but smaller in world attention? (edited for clarity, given your reply)

  • by randcraw on 1/16/25, 10:24 PM

    Yeah, this is a great idea. Filtering the ranked output would be even better, especially if you could also exclude content by class (or keyword), as in...

    rank by significance:

        NOT politics; NOT Trump; NOT republican; NOT democrat