Show HN: Bit of News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bit of News

bitofnews.com

108 pointssinzone47 comments

Awesome!

Hi guys, I'm the creator of TextTeaser API that was used by Bit of News. :) I first thought that bitofnews is just a bot in Reddit. I'm really surprised that this is now a full blown website/app.

Thanks for Bit of News for using the TextTeaser API.

Hi, congrats on quality results. Will you open source the algorithm and the implementation, as you were mentioning on HN few months ago? What are your startup plans?

Yes, I will open source it soon. Here's a teaser: https://github.com/MojoJolo/textteaser

Good work.

Have you developed your own technology for this? Care to share how it works in a nutshell?

Yep. :) Well, like any other summarization algorithms, I consider the title, sentence position, sentence length, and keyword frequency. The difference is that I improved the keyword frequency in which I used a special algorithm for it. I have plans to open source it, you'll see the whole algorithm soon.

Awesome that you're planning to open source it. Looking forward.

Hi MojoJolo! Creator of the bot / site here.

Sorry for being late to the thread, I didn't even know someone posted this!

Great API :) There were few hours of outage last night, but overall I'm loving it.

Link to the API: https://www.mashape.com/mojojolo/textteaser

Really impressive automatically generated summaries.

Of course, there are some funny parts as well. One of the bullet points for "Russia halts adoptions to Sweden over gay nuptials" is just

    • "It's terrible.

Very frank :D.

I certainly agree, but I imagine a person summarizing the article would not have used this phrasing.

Hey creator of bitofnews here. Thanks for the compliments. If you liked the summary, please checkout TextTeaser on Mashape, the supporting API.

As of right now, u/bitofnewsbot is banned from r/worldnews :( I'm getting in touch with the mods to see what's up.

auto-generated? if so, that's pretty impressive. [edit] huh, so that's TextTeaser? https://www.mashape.com/mojojolo/textteaser#!documentation - i had no idea that summaries of that quality were now commodity apis.

Well, why not try the TextTeaser API yourself (http://www.textteaser.com/)?

I'm the creator of the said API and thanks if you think it's impressive. Also thanks for bitofnews for using the API.

Great API, and thank you!

Very cool!

Minor nitpick, though: "news" is most commonly singular, so your tagline should probably read "news that matters."

Yes, I noticed that right away. The good thing is that it's an easy edit.

Creator here. I can't believe I overlooked that. Fixed :)

Sorry for being late, I didn't know this was posted here.

Cool, and btw, I really love your service! It's so simple and useful. I have been telling people about it and wish you the best of luck with it.

Nice. I kind of like "news that matters" better than "news that matter," though.

This is great. I'm trying to make http://thetechblock.com a destination for tech articles and news that matter. Would love any feedback.

I'd love to see a site like this specifically focused on business news. Keeping up with the latest news in business is important, but I've found most business papers are so full of useless fluff stories that it drowns out the ones that are most important.

I've tried to attack that problem with http://www.trejdify.com/ which is similar to HN

Hey creator of bitofnews here. I plan on adding different news sections (business, technology) soon. In the mean while, check out Wall Street Breakfast. It gives summary of today's market performance: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1728342-wall-street-breakfas...

And sorry for being late to the thread! I didn't know this was posted here.

It sucks that that first article right now is about that woman who got shot at the capital building. Will this news ultimately matter? Probably not. The other articles seem to be about more impactful things so other wise good job

It's funny that what we see as not eventful is usually seeds for something big. I remember this with egypt both times and syria. I am not saying that this is going to lead to something big but you never know, there could be an uprising over the police moving towards kill at any cost vs kill only if necessary. If you look at the video, at one point there was six cops surrounding the vehicle, one cop had his forehead on the front passenger window yet they could not see a little kid in there, also they could have shot out the tires, someone that has no gun training could have done that as it was at point blank range. In the 80s polics had better judgement and less police injuries, today a guy can have a knife be 10 metres away and a group of cops will go for the kill shot, amazing.

I like the simplicity, but how can it deliver it every morning without asking for your time zone? The confirmation says it'll deliver at 9am. UTC?

Maybe it uses your IP to guess at a location?

What does this have to do with Ivy League schools? Is that just total fluff or is there any sort of meat behind those words?

Does the author attend an Ivy league school? If so, why does he/she feel that he/she can or should speak for all the other Ivies? What am I missing?

This is exactly what I thought when I looked at it... Is there any relationship to the schools?

Very well done!

Now trying to get over the horrifying news that someone poured gasoline on themselves and tried to burn themselves to death in self-immolation near the white house. What the heck is going on in DC

This is pretty cool, but does it have some feature to select the sources? or at least what type of news you are interested in? That would make things so much better!

Bit of feedback: It seems quite US centric. I'm not sure how the selection is done, but maybe you could add a 'Rest of the world' section?

Nicely presented application of textteaser. A little put off by the focus on the "ivy experience" though. Is that some sort of marketing play?

The stories at http://evening-edition.com/ are much more meaningful.

Nice but I was wondering why would you develop anything on top of a deprecated (Google news) API ?

Awesome but did you need to blatantly rip the Medium design?

Exactly what I was thinking, it's pretty much a direct clone.

The typefaces are completely different as is the whitespace.

Wasn't there recently an open-sourced Medium clone? This probably used that.

This is great. Could there be an RSS or Atom feed?

Is it legal?

Most useful and relevant new summary I've never read. Sold.

The first story of the woman driver shot to death is the rotten apple in the barrel. The rest of the stories are better, and with broader appeal.

Just so you know, I'll probably never visit this site again because of that godawful story. It didn't enhance my life or my understanding of the world. It did the opposite.

I don't understand why you seem to have to much anger about this story.

No, it's only economics. Back to my analogy, if I buy a bag of apples from you and I find a few rotten ones inside, I'll never buy from you again. It's simple, really.

Nevertheless, if this site is just collecting general news into a feed, you can't call the story 'rotten' because you don't like it and don't find it edifying. It is news, it did happen, it was relevant to someone. I think your expectation of the purpose that news is supposed to serve might be somewhat skewed.

>female driver

Fixed that for you. Also I'm not sure why you're so mad over that story. Most news doesn't enhance your life or your understanding of the world, it's just news. You have to put it in context to extract any meaning from it.

Light attracts light, darkness attracts darkness. If you can think metaphorically, you'll understand what this means.

Oh hey, I like this. Users++

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