yakhinvadim

I made News Minimalist — a news aggregator where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10.

The ranking lets readers select a "significance threshold" and ignore all news below it.

It's making close to $1000 MRR now with all money coming from premium subscriptions: users can personalize their feed with category/country filters, block topics and get access to news summaries.

https://www.newsminimalist.com/

Thanks for the callout! (I'm the founder)

I already have the "positivity" scores for each article, so I'll add a separate "positive and significant news" page in the coming weeks.

Thank you so much! Hope to fix it soon.

Author here. I plan to add a "how it works" section, but the basic idea is that each news story is rated on several parameters:

- scale is the number of people affected by the event described in the news story. - magnitude is the strength of the effect. - potential is the likeliness of the event to lead to other, more significant events. - source credibility considers how trustworthy is the source, and what is its track record.

Then these parameters are combined into a single score.

Also fair criticism re: repeats. I plan to solve this by clustering similar news, so one event is only given one title.

Hey, author here.

That was the initial idea. Significant events don't stop being significant once we get tired of hearing about them.

But there's definitely a problem of duplicates. When separate news sites post about a similar event it get rated relatively similar by ChatGPT, which creates clusters like we see today.

I want to solve this soon by combining similar stories into single block with one title.

Hey, author here.

Yeah, the initial idea was to uncover globally significant news, but a lot of people are asking for ways to find "locally important" or "industry important" news. So I'm shifting my direction a little bit.

It's currently possible to filter news by broad category in a paid version (health, science, tech). I plan to expand the list of categories, so it's possible to go deeper. I also plan to add news in other languages (translated) and add country filters, so it's possible to see only news related to individual country/region.

I'll just fix the link... https://www.newsminimalist.com/

Thanks for the great link, I included it in today's issue: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/friday-may-5-nothing...

Great idea, I already dim visited links, but it'd be nice to also mark items as done where just reading the title was enough.

Thanks!

Yeah RSS it not great currently. Replied about it here with more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820032

Oh, exactly the same problem. The straightforward implementation would make me broke in month :)

Had to make several optimizations to make the bill reasonable. Not all of them worked, some greatly reduced the quality of significance estimations.

Reducing number of tokens was super fun, forgot about it :D

Thanks for the feedback. All great points.

"RSS" that I have currently is generated by the email platform that I use for daily emails. It's not a proper RSS from website.

Making a proper RSS for website items is on my list, but I need to finish some other features first.

Agree about subtitles in older items, I guess I just got lazy writing them :) your message was just what I needed to get back to older better format.

It's a bit longer, but that's the gist of it.

I just realized, for that particular news article about Regenerative medicine it was my mistake all along. I asked ChatGPT to give unknown sources a score of 1 and completely forgot about. I think that's what it did.

For now it marked only 8 sources as unknown out of 1700.

You are spot on. I use temperature 0, but even with it, ChatGPT can be unpredictable.

Sometimes I'm very frustrated about the news that get to the top. When I try to debug it, it gives me a completely different score.

I considered using ranges over discrete score, but dropped the idea, as it makes it too hard to find 1-5 articles that should make it to newsletter (there are 71 articles in this range right now) and it's hard to clearly display that idea in UI.

I guess my position right now is — it's not perfect, there are obvious errors (like the one you found above), and improvements are definitely possible.

But I hope that some people would find it "good enough" even with these inconsistencies. I also hope that ChatGPT or another LLM will make a big progress soon that would solve this problem automatically.

Seems like someone bought it and set up a redirect to newsminimalist.com

Thank you kind stranger!

Thank you! I asked for GPT-4 access via form on OpenAI website, they gave me the one with 8k context window, which is enough for 99% of articles.

In the ChatGPT prompt I make emphasis on evaluating article from the perspective of humanity as a whole, not prioritizing any individual country. But still, it's not ideal.

I don't know ChatGPT's logic, but it might be it's giving higher scores to news about US economic difficulties because they tend to cause ripples all over the world. But I've never seen articles about US internal politics getting score over 6.5 (or maybe there were none in the last month).

I think it's because I only analyze news in English currently. I was thinking of adding other languages to the evaluation and ask GPT to translate them. It should at least partially fix the US bias.

Thank you!

All great suggestions — will try to add them soon (wasn't really ready for the unexpected launch on HN, but glad it went this way, got a much clearer vision for the future)

I score each article individually, so there's no need to put many news in one context window.

In 99% cases a single news article fits within the context.

I drop those that don't fit, since several examples I saw were announcement of lottery numbers (too many tokens) and articles with broken html.

Good point, filters are essential (category, source, maybe country). Will try to add them soon.

It's not open source. Dark mode is already there, but it follows the system settings, no manual toggle.

Thanks! It's Chart.js: https://www.chartjs.org/

Wasn't aware, thank you. Can't find anything in logs, is it still down for you?

Nice catch. Just checked that article — it actually got rating 2.8 just based on the news content, but the source credibility 1/10 brought it down to 0.3.

I don't think it's fair, I think ChatGPT hallucinated that it's a tabloid.

Not sure how to fix this. I don't want to adjust sources credibility manually, that will introduce too much bias. My hope is that OpenAI will update ChatGPT with newer data and I could rerun the credibility evaluation.

RSS: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml (some people had complaints about formatting there, will try to fix soon)

Just published today's issue: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/wednesday-may-3-3-si...

I bet spam algorithms didn't like that I sent email to 30 people yesterday and 900 people today. Good problem to have :) Please check your spam folder if you don't see today's issue in inbox.

Here's the one generated by email platform (will work on improving it, some people had complaints) https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml

True for today, many US-centric news made the cut. But that's not always the case. Here's recent issue with no US news: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...

Agree, as a Canadian, I also find that today too many US-centric news made the cut, but often it's not the case. Here's a recent issue covering different topics and not mentioning US at all: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...

Thank you, and great reality check. De-paywalling is on my todo list, was thinking of solving it either as you suggested, or through summaries on the website.