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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

Looks like there are a few of us on HN trying to solve the news consumption problem. My site[1] tries to crowdsource the summaries by encouraging the readers to summarize a story themselves. In the meantime, we create most of the summaries in-house.

Newser[2] tried to do the same thing but gave up and just focused on in-house created summaries.

Regarding the summary process, it's good to see another group manually summarizing posts as opposed to Summly[3] which tries automate the process. For many reasons already stated in another comment[4], I don't think automation will ever work.

Good luck to the guys over at http://toolong-didntread.com and http://newspaper23.com. I hope one of us gets some real traction!

[1] http://skimthat.com [2] http://www.newser.com/ [3] http://summly.com/ [4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4741855

Edit: Another product that tries to summarize news http://cir.ca/

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I'll add my baby to the pot: http://skimfeed.com.

I like it! Simple and I can actually see myself using this.

popurls on courier new?

Awesome site man. I'm learning PHP so that I can make my own personalized news site like that. Can you give a short summary of how you built it? Or what technologies I'd need to use to create my own news aggregator?

This is actually really nice, well done. Hard to drop the frills for thrills so to speak. This is a much more functional site than most of the similar bootstrappy approaches, despite it looking like it came out of the 90s. It's actually useful, I like.

Inspired by AffBuzz?

Made me think of Jimmyr that I used several years ago... http://www.jimmyr.com/ I really like yours. Time to upgrade, thanks!

That looks really good. I am not familiar with many of the sites on there, but I noticed no way of getting to HN discussions from your site. Do you think some way of reaching the discussion or comments section of some of the feeds would be helpful to others?

I really like your site, skimthat.com. However, I think the summaries should be condensed even more. For example, this summary is 203 words:

http://skimthat.com/4407/ind-home-explosion-now-homicide-inv...

It could have been summarized down to something like: Rumors are circulating that a suspicious white van was parked in front of the house that blew up.

I would rather it be super short with just the important fact. If it peaks my curiosity, then I'll click to the full article.

I don't know, that's just my opinion.

Thanks for your feedback. I see what you're saying about a shorter summary but I'd consider your sentence more of a tease than a summary.

Our goal is to give the reader a good understanding of the topic while leaving out the unnecessary details and redundant information. The original had 465 words. That means that the Skim That summary cut the story down by over 50% while still giving you a strong overview of the story.

I see. If that's the case, then I think there is room for a "teaser" news site that gives you just a bit more than the headline. If you want more details, you can click on a more detailed summary, or if you want to read the whole thing, then you can click to the full article.

adding http://tldr.it as a generic approach.

Another good example of an automated attempt to summarize the news that'll never work.

Here's why: Let's assume we have the perfect algorithm that knows exactly which sentences to pick for a good summary. You'll still end up with a summary that's horribly out of context and difficult to read.

Try it yourself. Assume your brain is the perfect algorithm and pick the most important sentences for a summary. Then try to read just the sentences that you picked without rewriting it into a coherent paragraph. More than likely, it'll be an out of context confusing block of text.

Algorithms will never solve the summarizing process unless they are teamed up with a rewriting engine that could build coherent paragraphs.

> Another good example of an automated attempt to summarize the news that'll never work.

> Algorithms will never solve the summarizing process unless they are teamed up with a rewriting engine that could build coherent paragraphs.

That doesn't sound like never. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if such AI would created within 50-100 years, ie in my lifetime. I think this comment exposes the common false thought-pattern that if something is not viable in the next quarter, then it'll never happen.

No, you are misreading my statement. Please go back and look for the word "unless". Sentence picking algorithms alone will never solve the problem unless a rewriting engine is added.

Sorry, you are right; I misread the first sentence. I didn't realize that you referred to tldr.io specifically with it.

Probable mistype, you mean tldr.it right ? Just saying that as a cofounder of tldr.io, whose goal is similar to that of SkimThat: provide human written summaries ;)

What steps are you taking to mitigate spam and bias in summaries created by people?

I know if I wrote a summary of a Microsoft Surface article (I have one), it'd be very different from someone who loves it -- or is even an MS employee.

And spam... big issue there.

(disclaimer - I have your plugin and have tried it, summaries seem way too short.)

For anyone working on the summary problem: Chapter 8 of O'Reilly's Mining the Social Web has a great description of how you can use Python NLP libraries to accurately break text into individual sentences, then analyze those sentences to pull out the most important. I don't know how well it works in practice, but their example is amazing.

The Sentence segmenter doesn't work that well, and rooting words doesn't work as advertised. Try Children, Families, Family, and complies.

Here's mine, http://textteaser.com/. It's basically an API that accepts the URL as an input and outputs a JSON result. It's only a preview so expect more to come.

I'm having trouble getting http://m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/blogs/clinton-white-h... to work.

You should have a few links listed on that page that you know will work well as examples for people to try the service out with.

Btw, how do you feel about my other comments in this thread about algorithms not working well? My basic point is that they will most likely produce paragraphs that are out of context.

>My basic point is that they will most likely produce paragraphs that are out of context.

Disagree - having written a bunch of these gist extractors I have found that the good ones do not produce out of context paragraphs. In fact, that's pretty much the point - to find the salient portion of the content.

My argument is that many times the salient portion is written in such a way that it's continuing a point from a previous part of the article. So, when you remove it from the complete context of the article, the sentence seems like it's out of place even if it has an important detail.

Mine work well with that link. Thank you for your suggestions but the website I created is just a preview. Will work on it though. I'll keep you posted when I made some changes.

They are out of context because they (we) are basically just doing extraction. In which we just extract the most important sentences, arrange them in order, and present it in a paragraph / list. I prefer presenting the top sentences in a list though. In my opinion, presenting it as a paragraph will make an effect that it's out of context rather than in a list.

If the summaries was done through abstraction, like how humans are doing it, it will obviously produce better summaries. But why we are not doing it? I believe abstraction summaries are holy grail of automatic summarization.

you forgot http://tldr.io

Thanks! I didn't know about that site before and it looks like they have many contributors. I considered doing a bookmarklet like they do but I figured that I would need a critical number of people before it could be realistic to use.

In the meantime, I created a list[1] of popular stories from Reddit news sources. Each story links to a special hybrid page that allows you to write a summary on top while you read the story below.

[1] http://skimthat.com/unsummarized

edit: clarification

I read the tldr.io of this TL;DR service first.

Do you mean that you tried the tl;dr bookmarket on Skim That? I just added a summary for Skim That using the bookmarket so you should see it now.

I really like how it uses line by line bullet point fields to help write the summary. I experimented with something like that in the past. It kind of works but it isn't as smooth a read as a paragraph of text but it does make the writing process easier.

You confused me there, but I see now that it was actually me who confused you as I meant to reply to czzarr instead...

It seems that I helped inspire you nonetheless, which is great of course!

As for what makes tldr.io great; it's mostly the Chrome plugin which adds TL;DR icons next to the links on Hacker News.

They still need to work on enticing more users to contribute back though.

When did Hacker News become "Spam my Stuff" news?

Isn't it possible to discuss the merits of the product provided in the opening post without one-line nonsense posts spamming your own thing?

JEEZUZ.

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