Ask HN: How do you keep up with news in a particular sector? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep up with news in a particular sector?

4 pointsdoruk10114 comments

I would like to keep up with news in a particular sector. I considered using an RSS reader, but with advances in LLMs, I am wondering whether anyone uses an LLM for this reliably.

Do you pull from and summarize a bunch of news sources? How have you set it up, and has it been reliable?

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Over the last ~2 years I cultivated a small list of newsletters. First I'd just find several regarding a particular niche and sign up to them - auto-sorting into a particular email folder for each topic. Then I'd filter them by seeing how many seem too generic (i.e. not at the level of depth I'm interested in, or by their format (content within the newsletter or linking out of it - though both are useful), and so on. Now I receive ~9 per day M-F with little repetition between them and I find it more than sufficient.

Depends on the niche. For your niche of choice (energy, power generation and energy markets), I'd look for industry publications (both magazines and news sites), corporate press releases and news, academic papers on related topics, discussions on any energy industry specific forums or discussion sites, etc. Honestly, that's how I'd keep up with more traditional industries.

But that's an industry I imagine has an older audience and probably relies on more traditional sources of information. For something like a video game series (or game development project), musician/band, film series/TV show, book series, etc, my method of keeping up with the news would be more heavily centred around social media posts, subreddits, Discord servers, etc.

Your better off using a news aggregator. newsnow.com is excellent at aggregating news. There are other news aggregators as well. Another trick is to set a major search engine in their news section to 24 hour search like Google News and then perform the search daily in the morning. A combination of Google News and Bing News will get a lot of the latest news with Newsnow. This will cover a lot of material. It will be more up to date than most LLMs with this pattern.

I curate Bluesky lists of accounts that I have found useful over the years, and read the list feeds. It's reasonably efficient if you prune the list regularly and only add trusted sources. I started making (but never quite finished!) a news aggregator app that would run once a day, the idea being I could catch up with the previous 24 hours' news over breakfast/coffee, much like the old days of reading the daily paper. Would it be worth sharing?

Indeed

Instead of "keeping up with the news", consider using your brainpower + LLMs to distinguish signal and noise in the sectors that interest you, and then accordingly wiring up identification of sources, searches, and reading to update yourself only as frequently as necessary.

> I considered using an RSS reader, but with advances in LLMs, I am wondering whether anyone uses an LLM for this reliably.

If RSS feeds are available then perhaps do that and get the LLM to read those if its too much info, rather than llm going to x number of websites.

I'm interested in this as well. Also what kind of news outlets? I find that traditional news media is often behind a community of insiders if you can find them on Twitter or something like it.

Yeah, I agree. I feel like the signal-to-noise ratio in traditional news can be quite low too. I would prefer a potential solution that is able to also pull opinionated commentary (blogs, and Twitter so on) from people close to the industry.

I don't believe simply asking a model to search through news sites and summarize occasionally would be helpful.

This may be the worst take, but is one of my main sources of news. I'll follow a ton of people and businesses/brands in a specific niche or sector and so my following feed will usually have the freshest news when I open it. Search page is pretty good too once it knows your preferences. I do things the old fashioned way; reading with my own eyes and scrolling to find what matters.

What’s the sector?

Energy, power generation, and wholesale energy markets. That's what I am looking into now. But I would like to diversify it as well if I find a reliable setup.

Industries often have industry publications (you can google for it). In addition, reading the financial news can give you a good pulse on the goings on.

Are you finding that you're not able to find good news sources?

What did you find so far?

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