Show HN: News Minimalist – News ranked by significance

44 comments

·January 15, 2025

Hey HN! I'm the author of News Minimalist — a news aggregator where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10.

The project was born out of personal pain — I wanted a way to read only significant news, like major humanity milestones, or historical political events, filtering out all the celebrity gossip and smartphone releases. But I couldn't find a way to do that — everywhere I looked, the news was ranked by popularity, coverage, or relevance, not significance.

I first tried to solve the problem in the beginning of 2023 with GPT-3 (the top model at that time) by asking it to estimate the significance of some news stories. The results were painfully bad — for some reason, the model preferred tragic, personal stories, completely missing the essence of what makes the news significant. No amount of prompt engineering could fix that.

But it all changed in March 2023 when GPT-4 came out. The scores it gave made much more sense. After a month of work, the first version was ready. News Minimalist had its first successful Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388), and I realized that a lot of people had the same problem I had.

I've been working on improving the project ever since. As probably most tech founders, I spent too much time on technical improvements, completely ignoring marketing. But I think that work paid off, and I'm finally satisfied with the scores it gives.

The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/

Let me know what you think!

Vadim

Visit

marc_abonce

Semi-related: Wikipedia's homepage also contains a very minimalist, manually curated news section with only major world events:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Although that's perhaps way too minimalist?

yakhinvadim

Wikipedia current events page was actually one of the reasons for creating this project!

I was disagreeing a lot with their selection of news, for example one of their recent entries is:

"Two people are killed and eleven others are injured when a bus flips on its side on a highway near Prenzlau, northeast of Berlin, Germany."

My system gave it a significance score of 1.8, so similar news should never get to the main page: https://www.newsminimalist.com/articles/two-dead-and-four-in...

jdthedisciple

Isn't significance heavily subjective though?

A lot of the most signficant stories are political, for example, which someone may have no interest in.

I have had this same idea in the past, tuning to my personal interests.

yakhinvadim

Good point! I actually have this exact question on about page [0], I'll copy my thoughts from there:

I separate significance from importance (or relevance).

Importance is subjective. News about the health of my family members is important to me, but it is not significant to the world.

Significance is objective. It's about how much the event affects humanity as a whole.

[0] https://www.newsminimalist.com/about

redeux

> Significance is objective. It's about how much the event affects humanity as a whole.

I don’t agree with that, at least not in the present. We only know what’s truly significant when we reflect on history. There are very few things we can be certain are significant in the present. Climate change is likely one, but the US debt ceiling and the war in Ukraine don’t seem as likely to me, at least not in the human scale. There are also events that happen that don’t appear significant in the present but will be hugely significant in the future.

yakhinvadim

I actually agree that "true" significance can only be estimated in hindsight.

My goal with this project is not to get "true" significance but to have a setup that gets you 90% of the way there: an automated system that finds events that are likely to affect large groups of people or major systems and filters out most of everyday noise.

There will always be false-positives and false-negatives, but I think it's a good starting point and it should slowly get better as models get smarter.

viciousvoxel

Significant Others just got downgraded to Important Others

jdthedisciple

Makes sense that way. I think you nailed the execution. Good job!

yaj54

Nice work. Subscribed.

I had a very similar idea a while back. I wanted to rank news by "impact" which might be more concrete than "significance."

For an LLM prompt, it would be something like:

"estimate the number of people who's lives that will be materially changed by this news." and "estimate the average degree of change for those impacted."

Then impact is roughly the product of those two.

Additionally, I want a version that is tailored to me specifically "estimate the degree of change this will have on my life." + context of my life.

Tangentially, I've found that getting ratings out LLMs works better when I can give all options and request relative ratings. If I ask for rankings individually I get different and less good results. Not enough context length to rate all news from all time in one go though. Any thoughts on that? Maybe providing some benchmark ratings with each request could help? Something I'm exploring.

yakhinvadim

What you're describing is super close to the first version I had!

In the beginning I had 3 parameters: scale (number of people), magnitude (degree of change for those impacted) and additionally potential (how likely is this event to trigger downstream significant events).

The point behind including potential was to separate these two events:

1) A 80 year old dies from cancer 2) An 80 year old dies from a new virus called COVID

This worked roughly well but I kept adding parameters to improve the system: novelty, credibility, etc... The current system works on 7 parameters.

---

I never attempted to give LLM all options and rank them against each other.

1) as you said, for me 20k articles is just too much to fit into context window. Maybe some modern LLMs can handle it, but it wasn't the case for a long time, and I settled on current approach.

2) I don't want the "neighbors" to affect individual article ratings. With the current system I am able to compare news spread over months, because they were all rated using the same prompt.

3) I intentionally avoided giving AI examples, like "evaluate event X given that event Y is 7/10". I want it to give scores with a "clear mind" and not be "primed" to my arbitrary examples.

id00

I'd really like to see Top significant news for the past week/month. I'd rather try to read weekly/monthly digest than consume the feed every hour/day. Is that possible?

yakhinvadim

I think the closest thing to what you want is the newsletter I send 2-3 times a week: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/

It's available via RSS too: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml

I attempted to make a weekly version, but quickly dropped the idea. Over the course of the week articles often became outdated (not just old, but plain wrong).

I found that an optimal newsletter schedule is sending it about every 48-72 hours, depending on how eventful that period was. With this frequency, the articles rarely become outdated, and at the same time it's not too frequent to get tired of.

richardw

I like it! How have you thought about news sources getting snippy when you summarise them and don’t send traffic? Not accusatory at all, I’m still unpacking my own opinion on it and wondering how much pushback services will get.

dvh

I've been using rss feed for few months but recently it became borderline useless. For example here is grep of pubDate:

    $ wget -qO - https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml | grep pubDate
    <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:56:47 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:56:47 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2025 17:22:34 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sat, 11 Jan 2025 16:42:01 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Thu, 09 Jan 2025 17:52:38 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2025 16:19:25 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sat, 28 Dec 2024 17:44:35 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2024 16:44:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:01:56 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:00:55 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 06 Dec 2024 17:43:37 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Wed, 04 Dec 2024 16:38:38 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sun, 01 Dec 2024 18:57:43 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 29 Nov 2024 18:07:14 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Sun, 24 Nov 2024 15:26:59 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Thu, 21 Nov 2024 17:25:22 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:47:19 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2024 17:28:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Tue, 12 Nov 2024 17:44:08 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Fri, 08 Nov 2024 17:22:01 +0000</pubDate>
    <pubDate>Wed, 06 Nov 2024 16:43:10 +0000</pubDate>

So since 6th november there were only 21 articles. Longest streak was 10 days and common is 3 days without any news whatsoever.

yakhinvadim

This rss is not exactly an rss with articles from the main page, but a newsletter I send manually every few days once enough significant stories happen to warrant an email. Each newsletter issue includes 2-5 main articles and 3-7 trending articles.

https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/

jamie_ca

As an RSS user, I would love an RSS of the main page content, one entry per story over 5.5 is a perfectly reasonable baseline.

Also: It'd be great if you had a feed tag in your HTML head, so RSS readers could pick it up straight out of your homepage URL instead of needing to manually hunt for the right RSS link.

voisin

I second this. This would be a great feature

yakhinvadim

Ah, I didn't know it was a thing! I'll add it to HTML head.

dvh

So where is the rss feed of most important news per day?

yakhinvadim

I know it's not going to be popular, but to cover the cost of running ChatGPT on that many articles, I made it a part of a premium subscription: https://www.newsminimalist.com/premium#rss

jackphilson

This is so cool. I love this application of LLMs

yakhinvadim

Thank you!

I think LLMs are really underutilized as a "judgement tool". A couple similar ideas people reached out to me with were: evaluating which pull requests are more significant in a big repo, or which grant applications have more merit.

The LLMs will always make mistakes, but they could work great as the first filter.

jackphilson

you may like @JungleSilicon on twitter.

loxias

neato! Curious where you're sourcing the raw feed from. Wire service (AP, Reuters, AFP)? Google news? "the wikipedia current events page"? Something else?

As in every other engineering endeavor, the raw data you start off with has a lot to do with what you end up with, no matter what transforms happen. :)

yakhinvadim

Thanks! I mainly rely on Paid APIs, but additionally go over some RSS feeds for prominent sources that they don't cover.

Wikipedia current events page was actually one of the reasons for creating this project! I was disagreeing a lot with their selection of news, for example one of the recent entries is:

"Two people are killed and eleven others are injured when a bus flips on its side on a highway near Prenzlau, northeast of Berlin, Germany."

My system gave it a significance score of 1.8: https://www.newsminimalist.com/articles/two-dead-and-four-in...

yakhinvadim

To your point about raw data - I wasn't expecting there to be so much junk in news. I think I automatically filter out like a third of articles that I get: historic recaps (something cool happened 50 years ago), round-ups (Here's what happened last week), a ton of opinion articles, and AI-slop.

yakhinvadim

The default sorting is "new first", but perhaps a better first impression would come from selecting "more significant first":

https://www.newsminimalist.com/?sort=significance

decide1000

Most people live outside the US. So maybe change "World" and "Nation". Unless you are focusing on US only.

How can I filter out (block) subjects/words?

yakhinvadim

Yeah, the category names don't convey the meaning behind them very well. There's no intentional focus on US.

"World" includes everything that talks about two or more countries.

"Nation" is a category with news that touch only a single country, not necessarily US. The current feed is very US-heavy because practically everyone (even non-US sources) is talking about Trump.

Keyword blocking is available on premium: https://www.newsminimalist.com/premium#block-topics

HelloUsername

Nice. Similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35905437 (which summarizes for free)

yakhinvadim

I think the main differentiator for my project is news selection.

Most other aggregators show news based on 1) relevance, 2) upvotes or 3) coverage.

Relevance-based algorithms tend to put reader into a bubble, where the more they read on a certain topic, the more news they see on that topic.

Upvotes-based algorithms usually bring up a lot of clickbait and drama.

Sorting by coverage doesn't really work either, media often just follows people's interests and churns articles on what is "hot".

For example, last summer, a fight between Zuckerberg and Musk was at the top of most feeds based both on upvotes and coverage. Significance-based algorithm didn't even put it in the top 50.

HelloUsername

I understand (also by reading your other responses here). Very nice, I like it. Is the summary feature based on one article (the top one mentioned), or does it combine all articles on that topic? And any roadplan for a native iOS app?

yakhinvadim

Summaries are done for a single article. I think it's better this way — a summary is a clear reflection of an underlying article, where all statements can be easily tracked to a single original source. That makes LLM hallucinations extremely rare.

No plans for an iOS app, but my site is a PWA so can be installed and look like an app both on Android and iOS.

alanlammiman

this is really cool. some thoughts - a free trial would make a lot of sense for the subscription. Having the AI break things down into more variables than just significance might be helpful. For example - events vs trends. "Trump shot" vs "Shootings up X% YoY". Forward looking statements vs concrete events "Trump lays out agenda" vs "Trump signs executive order". All of those are significant in different ways. Also newness of the information is important. Top article right now is about Gazan families looking to return home post ceasefire. But that doesn't add much to the genuinely significant news yesterday of the ceasefire itself. As is, I don't get news that seems particularly different from browsing the headlines at 2-3 top newspapers.

yakhinvadim

Thanks for the deep feedback!

The default feed sorting is done for regular visitors (new first), for evaluating the output you might like the "significant first" more: https://www.newsminimalist.com/?sort=significance

On that list, the ceasefire article is on the second place out of the ~40k articles analyzed.

---

Having more variables is an good idea. I don't have an immediate vision on how to use it in the UI (I want to keep it minimal), but will think more about it.

---

I've been really torn on free trial. I currently offer a refund guarantee, but will add a trial as well soon.