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stkbachon Show HN: Pass a URL, get summarized content

It's a bit buggy still. To get a sense of it, stick to BBC articles.

stkbachon Ask HN: Does such a programming language exist?

stkbachon Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

The real purpose of gist is to help you decide what not to read. It's a better form of skimming.

stkbachon Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

:) it's grammatically correct because @gist uses an extraction based strategy. (ie, an existing representative sentence). If you want an abstract summary (ie, a new representative sentence), best to ask a human for now.

stkbachon Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

@telephoto...

goto one of the following sites: www.bbc.com/news, washingtonpost.com, huffintonpost.com, reuters.com, theglobeandmail.com

On those sites, find any text article that's medium+ size in length, and submit the article (not the home page of the news site) to gist.

You should see that it's not just reiterating the title.

On many sites it's quite buggy, and what you're seeing is likely the result of gist either a.) attempting to gist something when it shouldn't (like say bbc news home page), or b.) attempting to gist when the scrape/parse failed and there was too few or poorly parsed sentences.

We do extract the html title and stick it in at the top of the page as a reference, but that title, like each gist, is editable by the community, and serves only to act as a jumping off point.

stkbachon Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

In the distant future, but as of right now we're focused more on text and getting humans to start participating. The machine learning approaches we're using are getting better every day, and the latest deep learning techniques are showing promise with pictures, so that is certainly a possibility down the road.

stkbachon Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

Ya, it returns about 1/6 of the sentences in the documents as gists. For an item with 12 sentences, 2 is too few, but for something with 100 sentences, 17 is too many.

We'll probably change the ratio to scale in a smarter way rather than a constant fraction.

stkbachon Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

Thanks! There is a browser plugin planned that will show you the gists of any url you navigate to, and additionally could show the gists of links on a page before you click on them...

stkbachon Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

It does automatically summarize any text heavy articles.

For example:

bbc.com/news thewashingtonpost.com huffingtonpost.com reuters.com cnn.com theglobeandmail.com theguardian.com en.wikipedia.org

Go to any of those as a start and submit one of the articles you find and everything suggested by @gist was generated by an algorithm.

Our hope is that will help get the ball rolling. We are certainly very subject to network effects, so focusing on a niche and providing tremendous value to that one vertical is a good strategy.

stkbachon Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

+1 on the list!

stkbachon Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

Ya, the website shown here doesn't have privileged access to the api. So, short of some basic rate limiting, we can release the same api the website uses to the public as a start.

stkbachon Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

Yup. We'll release a chrome plugin shortly that provides the quick gist of whatever page you happen to be on, so as to avoid having to actually go to the site and submit a url. More convenient for the regular user.

In addition, we'll release the api so that people can build their own tools if they wish.