Hacker News Reader

jaredwieneron Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

Half of a team here of former journalists building a platform for news -- its a news feed, where all posts come from pre-vetted journalists:

https://www.forth.news

jaredwieneron Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

Really cool -- and congrats!

FYI there's a typo in the link in the README -- points to casci.app instead of cascii.app.

jaredwieneron Washington Post editor resigns after accusing CEO of killing column

Thats kind of my point. The people who have figured out that value, i.e. Bloomberg, WSJ, Politico Pro, etc -- charge for the value. The ones that haven't are the ones figuring out other monetization strategies.

jaredwieneron Washington Post editor resigns after accusing CEO of killing column

Advertising is a monetization strategy.

I'm asking how do you quantify the underlying value. As a consumer of news, how am I richer now than I was before reading? And is it possible to put a number on it?

jaredwieneron Washington Post editor resigns after accusing CEO of killing column

Is that true, though?

CBS urges FCC to reject complaint over '60 Minutes' Harris interview https://www.forth.news/threads/CM14g5qJY2k92yLkDHSHT

jaredwieneron Washington Post editor resigns after accusing CEO of killing column

I think you just hit on the the biggest threat to journalism right now -- how to you quantify the value of the reporting to the reader.

Financial news outlets have long been successful at this -- Bloomberg, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, etc. They are able to build strong businesses with a relatively small audience often because that audience is willing to pay large sums of money for access. (Bloomberg Terminals reportedly cost up to $25k/yr! https://www.bluegamma.io/post/bloomberg-terminal-pricing#:~:...

Still -- how much value do you get from the Washington Post? How much value do you get from knowing about the inner workings of your government? Federal, state, municipal, any of them? Does being a better citizen have a financial incentive? Can you put a price on knowing about the situation in Ukraine, or Gaza, or even the dangerous intersection downtown?

And without that, how do you justify payment for journalism, which itself is expensive? Or is the answer that the payment comes from people who want to push a narrative, or control the conversation? Is there a monetary value to preventing that?

jaredwieneron Lynx: Open Source Native Cross Platform framework used in TikTok

Try running NextJS on your NeXT

jaredwieneron AI now 'analyzes' LA Times articles for bias

or accuracy?

jaredwieneron America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

What is "low stakes"? This is quite literally life-or-death.

Also, just FYI -- airports don't hire their own ATC; it's all FAA (or the equivalent wherever you are located.)

jaredwieneron The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

https://www.uscp.gov/the-department/oversight

The Capitol Police Board oversees and supports the United States Capitol Police in its mission and helps to advance coordination between the Department and the Sergeant at Arms of the House of Representatives and the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the Senate, in their law enforcement capacities, and the Congress. Consistent with this purpose, the Capitol Police Board establishes general goals and objectives covering its major functions and operations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its operations.

The Capitol Police Board consists of the Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the U.S. Senate, and the Architect of the Capitol. The Chief of the United States Capitol Police serves in an ex-officio non-voting capacity. The Chairmanship alternates annually between the House and Senate Sergeants at Arms.

jaredwieneron Californians Say X Blocked Them from Viewing Amber Alert

> Some users reported they didn’t need to log in to see the California Highway Patrol’s X post, which was sent via a URL created using the Bitly link shortener service. It’s currently unclear what percentage of people who received the push notification were able to view the information about the missing girl and what percentage hit X’s log-in gate. Overall, only 21 percent of US adults say they ever use X, according to the Pew Research Center, not all of whom may have the app installed on their phones.

jaredwieneron Introducing S2

Disco Stu don't advertise

jaredwieneron AI slop is already invading Oregon's local journalism

There are always two sides to news -- there's the consumer-facing text/video/whatever, which AI can create. But there's also newsgathering -- the reporting, which requires shoeleather, phone calls, building relationships, etc. AI cannot do that.

(Disclaimer - building a news platform featuring human journalists' reporting - https://www.forth.news)

jaredwieneron Anti-scale: a response to AI in journalism

That's what we've been working on at www.forth.news

Some explanation: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...

jaredwieneron Anti-scale: a response to AI in journalism

There is a constant conflation of the two sides of journalism - the news gathering and the writing/distribution.

AI can only do the second half. They need information to write about.

If the money goes away to support the whole enterprise, who actually makes the phone calls?

jaredwieneron Ask HN: What Is Wrong with the News?

Curious -- what is wrong with Reuters?

jaredwieneron Ask HN: What Is Wrong with the News?

What would be actionable? Local news? CNBC?

jaredwieneron Ask HN: What Is Wrong with the News?

why did they lose your trust?

jaredwieneron How long til we're all on Ozempic?

FWIW, I was prescribed a GLP-1, but my insurance will not cover it. It's incredibly expensive out of pocket.

jaredwieneron If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?

My guess would be that the hurdle in creating better products isn't in code completion.

User research, UX improvements, feature ideation and creation, etc, are all the same as they have always been. Getting the code out faster doesn't help if its in service of a bad feature.

jaredwieneron Why do BIC pens have a hole in the lid? (2016)

"People" can include toddlers, etc.

jaredwieneron Boxed – Things I learned after lying in an MRI machine for 30 hours

Curious -- why do you want to avoid the HN referer?

jaredwieneron AnandTech Farewell

If you look at my link above, you'd see that it was a micropayment service with lots of major US publications.

They've since pivoted because they couldn't make it work.

jaredwieneron AnandTech Farewell

"Dutch startup Blendle's early success in Europe has already attracted 550,000 users, the majority millennials, to read and pay for individual articles from publications like The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post." https://www.businessinsider.com/blendle-to-launch-in-the-us-...

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/post-the-latest-twitter-al...

jaredwieneron AnandTech Farewell

Which sites/newspapers are you talking about? Many have metered paywalls, where you get a few articles for free before the paywall hits.

Beyond that, others (Blendle, post.news, etc) have tried micropayments and they don't work -- people don't actually want them.

jaredwieneron AnandTech Farewell

Thank you for trying it out -- "top stories" is a generic feed; I'd encourage you to sign up for a free account and follow authors and topics you're interested in.

That said, this point --

> Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.

is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.

jaredwieneron AnandTech Farewell

Because the product isn't the newsprint, it's what's written on it.

By your own math, a subscription is 65% cheaper than it once was -- but the reporting is still expensive. Try outfitting a team to go into a war zone, or maintain bureaus, etc.

The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.

jaredwieneron AnandTech Farewell

> I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money

NYT adds 210,000 digital subscribers in Q1.

"The company said it had about 10.5 million subscribers overall for its print and digital products at the end of the first quarter, up roughly 8 percent from a year earlier. About 640,000 of those were print subscribers, down about 10 percent from the same period last year. "

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/business/media/new-york-t...

jaredwieneron AnandTech Farewell

Exactly!

The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there.

Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process.

Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.

jaredwieneron AnandTech Farewell

Because there's a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want.

Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.

FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...