Show HN: Newshound – a news aggregator for daily news from around the world
newshound.co
newshound.co
My friend Freida and I are excited to launch Newshound, a web-based news aggregator. About a year ago, we started talking about creating a news aggregator that would show multiple sides to the same story with no tracking and no ads. We scratched our itch and soon had a prototype going. We shared it with friends and family and got a positive response. We have released it publicly today in the hope that others would also find it useful.
Our home page has a short tour of the features: https://www.newshound.co/
The U.S. edition of our daily news aggregator is here: https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/. It has become an indispensable part of our daily lives, and I hope it becomes that for you too.
Our blog post has a more extensive description of the features along with a future roadmap: https://www.newshound.co/blog/20181101/launching-web-based-n...
We're hoping to publish a series of engineering blog posts that would reveal the technology under the hood. Here is a short summary of what's coming up: https://www.newshound.co/blog/20181101/under-hood-newshounds...
We'd love to hear back from you. Thanks for looking and I'll be glad to answer any questions.
Unfortunately, my opinion is probably irrelevant, because I'm not a potential user. I'm simply not that interested in news (yes, I realize the irony of saying that on Hacker News) and looking at your headlines confirmed to me that I'm not really missing anything.
I do have an suggestion for your "In the News" sidebar: some entries (e.g. "U.S" and "President Trump") are likely to be there constantly. Maybe it would be more informative if you adjust for topics that are mentioned unusually frequently compared to their base rate. Additionally, that list begs for each item to link to a list of relevant stories.
Oh, and the link to your engineering blog's RSS feed in the announcement post needs an initial / to make it root-relative.
We use a mix of approaches but we don't scrape web pages, we're quite scrupulous about that.
> May be you want to add personalization based on persons interests/needs etc.
We've been thinking about personalization. Can you tell us in more detail what you're thinking?
> Unfortunately, my opinion is probably irrelevant, because I'm not a potential user. I'm simply not that interested in news (yes, I realize the irony of saying that on Hacker News) and looking at your headlines confirmed to me that I'm not really missing anything. You're not alone. Many people have had this reaction.
> I do have an suggestion for your "In the News" sidebar: some entries (e.g. "U.S" and "President Trump") are likely to be there constantly. Yes, President Trump does stay have a tendency to stay in the headlines constantly. Last week's issue of The Economist concluded that his disruptive approach is working well abroad and that "unpredictability has some advantages". https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/10/27/trump-is-... The New York Times concluded 2 days ago that "the president has sought to seize the national stage in the last stretch of the [mid-terms] campaign". https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/us/politics/midterm-elect...
> Maybe it would be more informative if you adjust for topics that are mentioned unusually frequently compared to their base rate. That's a really good idea. Let me chew over it and see how it pans out.
> Additionally, that list begs for each item to link to a list of relevant stories. Ah, you've guessed at what we're working on right now! That's right, we're working on search results for news archives, with stories ranked by relevance and displayed in a reverse chronological timeline. We're aiming to make search fast and scalable using the free text search capabilities of Postgres 11 but if anyone wants to point us towards a better approach, we would welcome it.
> Oh, and the link to your engineering blog's RSS feed in the announcement post needs an initial / to make it root-relative. Thank you for pointing that out. It's fixed now https://www.newshound.co/blog/20181101/under-hood-newshounds... and the feed URL is the correct one: https://www.newshound.co/blog/engineering/feed. We hope you subscribe!
Frozen 2 is in both Top Stories and Business, but not in Entertainment. There's some objectivity at play here, but I'd rather see articles about movies only in Entertainment, with the ability to not see that topic.
I agree that in this case our algorithm that classifies news stories into sections has not done the best job possible. We'll definitely look into fine tuning it for better classification.
> There's some objectivity at play here, but I'd rather see articles about movies only in Entertainment, with the ability to not see that topic.
Do you mean you would like to be able to personalize the page to completely eliminate some sections like Entertainment? Or do you mean some topics within a section, for example "crypto" within Technology?
Thank you, it means a lot to us to hear that because we've largely gone against the current trends.
> eliminating the misfeatures of Google and other news aggregators
Just curious, what misfeature do you think Google News and other news aggregators have that annoy you so supremely?
There is no way to turn off images in the main display, that I can find. There is a “Ken Burns” pan-zoom effect added to the images. Some of them are in a carousel, with superimposed text: as you’re reading it it is replaced with the next item. All this combines to make the home display sandpaper to my corneas. Newshound uses the browser, so it already works the way I want it to. For example, I have images turned off while using mobile data.
If I click on an item in Google News, it opens in its own browser, regardless of the settings. I need to select a menu item to open the story in my default browser. Newshound’s approach of keeping everything in the browser makes sense, since we’re just using the web after all.
Google tries to figure out what I want to see, and does a bad job, despite allowing me to vote on news items. One good feature they have is to hide all stories from particular sources - you may think about adding this. But using algorithms to divine my interests is unlikely to work for me, although it might be useful for other people. My writing work causes me to frequently change the topics that I’m tracking.
Those are the main things I can think of right now. Thanks for developing this and making it available. I will certainly make a donation.
> One good feature they have is to hide all stories from particular sources - you may think about adding this.
Do you have any particular news source that find you have to hide all the time? With Newshound, we've been thoughtful about which news organizations we source the stories from, so just curious if we've made a bad choice somewhere.
> My writing work causes me to frequently change the topics that I’m tracking.
We're planning a feature that will allow a user to keep track of a topic over the course of time. We still don't know if people will find it useful enough to pay for it.
> Thanks for developing this and making it available. I will certainly make a donation.
Thank you as well, not just for your detailed and positive feedback, but also for the encouragement and faith in our work. :-)
For myself, I’d actually like to see the ability to customize the news sources — maybe bring in some sources you’re not already using, and leave out some that you are. I like the way that partial.press does this, at least for the news sources they do use.
Yes, I agree. The aggregation system works fast at scale but needs fine-tuning for accuracy. This is very much something we are working on right now.
> For myself, I’d actually like to see the ability to customize the news sources — maybe bring in some sources you’re not already using, and leave out some that you are.
Personalization of news sources is definitely on our roadmap. Can you cite some examples of sources that we're not already using? We'd love to increase the diversity of new sources to bring in different perspectives on the same issue.
This is an odd definition of "diverse".
Yes, articles in the Opinion section are partisan. That's why they are in a section labeled "Opinion" all by themselves somewhere at the bottom of the page, separate from news reports.
> nine of the ten are from one source.
The section shows the latest 10 articles. If a news source publishes articles on the web in a batch at one go, that section shows them all. We don't control what gets published when and we have stated that at the bottom of the page.
> This is an odd definition of "diverse".
We're still pulling articles from diverse news sources. If you would like to suggest some more, please feel free to do so because we are definitely open to all suggestions.
As always, thank you for your feedback. Please keep it coming! :-)
I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that a trademark must be in active, continuous use after registration to be valid. https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-maintaining-trademark-regis...
under the direction of its new owner, Knight-Ridder
[0] https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/#news-section-politi...
Yes, the topic aggregation algorithm is not completely fine tuned as of now. (See prion's comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18359975). It has false positives (combining news stories that really don't belong together) as well as false negatives (not combining news stories that belong together).
We are working on fine tuning the algorithm every day based on incoming news stories. If you stick around, you'll see a gradual improvement.
Thank you as always for your detailed feedback. It's not everyday that one has the privilege to interact with a greybeard.
There were two things I thought could use some improvement.
First were the two images of a list of hyperlinks that look clickable. I tried clicking on the links to no avail thinking they were broken, only to realise I was clicking on an image. The two images in particular are the News Sections and Newsmakers images on the homepage.
The second point was that I initially couldn't figure out how to access the service. I had to click on "Read the U.S. edition" which sounded like a sub-section of the site, not the main news aggregator service. What threw me off was the website slogan of "Daily news from around the world", I was trying to find the rest the news, not just the U.S. edition. If this is the only option right now, it could possibly just say "Read the News". Take this with a grain of salt though as I am not a U.S. citizen, so I might not be your current target audience right now.
> First were the two images of a list of hyperlinks that look clickable. I tried clicking on the links to no avail thinking they were broken, only to realise I was clicking on an image. The two images in particular are the News Sections and Newsmakers images on the homepage.
We heard this privately from a couple of other people as well. We'll definitely look into making the Features section a lot less ambiguous.
> The second point was that I initially couldn't figure out how to access the service.
Yes, I agree that we haven't made it very prominent that the U.S. edition news is at https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/.
> I was trying to find the rest the news, not just the U.S. edition.
The U.S. edition actually has a World news section that has a comprehensive collection of global news stories. https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/#news-section-world
> I am not a U.S. citizen, so I might not be your current target audience right now.
We're looking for feedback from non-U.S. citizens on which other news editions they would like to see. For example, we've come up with Canada, UK, Europe, Africa, India and Japan as geographical areas that could have news editions but we'd rather work on what our readers want than what we think they want.
Sorry to hear that the page's responsive design layout did not work out for your device. Would it be possible for you to link to a screenshot so we can fix the bug?