Show HN: Needle – An Explorable Map of the News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Needle – An Explorable Map of the News

needle.news

8 pointsryry8 comments

Hey HN! I wanted to know what was going on in cities/towns where my friends live, so I built Needle.

It uses an LLM + Open Street map to best estimate general locations of stories posted in the past day, and pin them on the map. For stories involving multiple places, I also wanted to show the relation between them.

It's still a little janky, and is limited to mostly Canadian sources of news at the moment, but I'm planning on expanding it shortly, as I'm keen to see what international sources are writing about my home city.

Let me know if you have any questions/feedback!

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It sure is an interesting idea! Gives a new way to explore the news, honing in on places you've been or know people in. Nice work

Thanks! One of my favourite accidental things to come out of it was the "highlighting" of rural news. Stuff in a city like Toronto, which usually dominates my feed, gets kind of lost in all the other stories, while things in rural areas (which I never see) stand out.

That's amazing - yeah it really is a fun way to interact with and learn about other areas. Even just zooming into some random location can be fun :)

Zoomed in on NY (where I live) and oof... to be expected but quite bleak. Nice visualization

I got New Jersey news written by Toronto Star pinned in the center of Philadelphia :)

Ah yes! So this is something I'm struggling with from a UX perspective (could use some feedback from anyone here).

News tied to a specific place gets pinned there (like an article about the Blue Jays being pinned at the Toronto Skydome). For stuff in cities, or larger areas like states, it tries to place it within the bounds of the state randomly, and if that fails, a random radius (which I think is what's gone wrong here).

The problem though is with the Toronto Star reporting on news in Jersey. The way I'm going about this right now is a filter I'm calling "Lens" which is just the country. Right now the only lens is Canada, but I want these to be filterable so you can easily see what other places are writing, or just get home grown news (but again, something I'm struggling with how to represent it).

The state boundaries, at least for NJ, seems wrong... so the pin is also in the wrong location.

I honestly find it hard to read the news when they are all stacked on top of each other. For instance, how is this useful? (screenshot: https://ibb.co/DDZ0txJ5)

It's hard to click on the items, and the constant zooming in/out is annoying. The linking of the news to other locations is interesting, but it doesn't really provide any new information to the user - what happens when you need to link something across the globe? How many linking locations can you have per article?

I also noticed that some news show up twice (same title / same source / same state).

It would be more interesting to me to see a sidebar with news titles/desc within a radius/city/state and as I click on the news the locations are displayed in the map. But I would still need to leave the website to go read the news, and then have to switch back and forth to get the "geographic context"... at that point as might as well just search google maps.

Super helpful points - thank you!

Definitely gonna implement some more clustering. The zooming in/out being annoying bit I hadn't thought of, but now that it's mentioned I kind of see it myself too.

I actually started with a sidebar that would then highlight the element on the map, but got rid of it to focus more on the exploration aspect.

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