[bruce_lipshitz]

Hi, Newshound developer here.

My friend Freida and I are excited to launch Newshound, a web-based news aggregator. About a year ago, we started talking about creating a news aggregator that would show multiple sides to the same story with no tracking and no ads. We scratched our itch and soon had a prototype going. We shared it with friends and family and got a positive response. We have released it publicly today in the hope that others would also find it useful.

Our home page has a short tour of the features: https://www.newshound.co/

The U.S. edition of our daily news aggregator is here: https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/. It has become an indispensable part of our daily lives, and I hope it becomes that for you too.

Our blog post has a more extensive description of the features along with a future roadmap: https://www.newshound.co/blog/20181101/launching-web-based-n...

We're hoping to publish a series of engineering blog posts that would reveal the technology under the hood. Here is a short summary of what's coming up: https://www.newshound.co/blog/20181101/under-hood-newshounds...

We'd love to hear back from you. Thanks for looking and I'll be glad to answer any questions.

[bradknowles]

The aggregation system you’re using is pretty good, but it still sometimes misses and groups stories together that are not related.

For myself, I’d actually like to see the ability to customize the news sources — maybe bring in some sources you’re not already using, and leave out some that you are. I like the way that partial.press does this, at least for the news sources they do use.

[bruce_lipshitz]

> * The aggregation system you’re using is pretty good, but it still sometimes misses and groups stories together that are not related.*

Yes, I agree. The aggregation system works fast at scale but needs fine-tuning for accuracy. This is very much something we are working on right now.

> For myself, I’d actually like to see the ability to customize the news sources — maybe bring in some sources you’re not already using, and leave out some that you are.

Personalization of news sources is definitely on our roadmap. Can you cite some examples of sources that we're not already using? We'd love to increase the diversity of new sources to bring in different perspectives on the same issue.

[prions]

I like the simple layout, but the topic aggregation algorithm could use some adjustment.

Frozen 2 is in both Top Stories and Business, but not in Entertainment. There's some objectivity at play here, but I'd rather see articles about movies only in Entertainment, with the ability to not see that topic.

[bruce_lipshitz]

> I like the simple layout, but the topic aggregation algorithm could use some adjustment. Frozen 2 is in both Top Stories and Business, but not in Entertainment.

I agree that in this case our algorithm that classifies news stories into sections has not done the best job possible. We'll definitely look into fine tuning it for better classification.

> There's some objectivity at play here, but I'd rather see articles about movies only in Entertainment, with the ability to not see that topic.

Do you mean you would like to be able to personalize the page to completely eliminate some sections like Entertainment? Or do you mean some topics within a section, for example "crypto" within Technology?

[leephillips]

This looks great, and comes at a perfect time for me, as I was looking for a replacement for the supremely annoying Google News on my phone. You've made all the right decisions, eliminating the misfeatures of Google and other news aggregators.

[bruce_lipshitz]

> You've made all the right decisions

Thank you, it means a lot to us to hear that because we've largely gone against the current trends.

> eliminating the misfeatures of Google and other news aggregators

Just curious, what misfeature do you think Google News and other news aggregators have that annoy you so supremely?

[leephillips]

Google is the one I’ve used recently, so I’ll talk about that.

There is no way to turn off images in the main display, that I can find. There is a “Ken Burns” pan-zoom effect added to the images. Some of them are in a carousel, with superimposed text: as you’re reading it it is replaced with the next item. All this combines to make the home display sandpaper to my corneas. Newshound uses the browser, so it already works the way I want it to. For example, I have images turned off while using mobile data.

If I click on an item in Google News, it opens in its own browser, regardless of the settings. I need to select a menu item to open the story in my default browser. Newshound’s approach of keeping everything in the browser makes sense, since we’re just using the web after all.

Google tries to figure out what I want to see, and does a bad job, despite allowing me to vote on news items. One good feature they have is to hide all stories from particular sources - you may think about adding this. But using algorithms to divine my interests is unlikely to work for me, although it might be useful for other people. My writing work causes me to frequently change the topics that I’m tracking.

Those are the main things I can think of right now. Thanks for developing this and making it available. I will certainly make a donation.

[bruce_lipshitz]

That's a very comprehensive review of your experience with Google News. Thanks for taking the time to write it.

> One good feature they have is to hide all stories from particular sources - you may think about adding this.

Do you have any particular news source that find you have to hide all the time? With Newshound, we've been thoughtful about which news organizations we source the stories from, so just curious if we've made a bad choice somewhere.

> My writing work causes me to frequently change the topics that I’m tracking.

We're planning a feature that will allow a user to keep track of a topic over the course of time. We still don't know if people will find it useful enough to pay for it.

> Thanks for developing this and making it available. I will certainly make a donation.

Thank you as well, not just for your detailed and positive feedback, but also for the encouragement and faith in our work. :-)

[leephillips]

I didn't mean to suggest that you have any news sources that I would want to hide, just that it was a generally useful feature. But maybe it was useful with Google News because they presented stories about celebrity gossip from TMZ, or whatever it is.

[yorwba]

I like your site. It's not busy with distractions and works flawlessly without JS.

Unfortunately, my opinion is probably irrelevant, because I'm not a potential user. I'm simply not that interested in news (yes, I realize the irony of saying that on Hacker News) and looking at your headlines confirmed to me that I'm not really missing anything.

I do have an suggestion for your "In the News" sidebar: some entries (e.g. "U.S" and "President Trump") are likely to be there constantly. Maybe it would be more informative if you adjust for topics that are mentioned unusually frequently compared to their base rate. Additionally, that list begs for each item to link to a list of relevant stories.

Oh, and the link to your engineering blog's RSS feed in the announcement post needs an initial / to make it root-relative.

[3into10power5]

Can you tell what you use to source the news articles? Any API or just scraping? Cool site otherwise. May be you want to add personalization based on persons interests/needs etc.

[bruce_lipshitz]

> Can you tell what you use to source the news articles? Any API or just scraping?

We use a mix of approaches but we don't scrape web pages, we're quite scrupulous about that.

> May be you want to add personalization based on persons interests/needs etc.

We've been thinking about personalization. Can you tell us in more detail what you're thinking?

[bruce_lipshitz]

> I like your site. It's not busy with distractions and works flawlessly without JS. Thank you! We've been watching recent website design trends with something approaching horror. (See this excellent discussion last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18284910) We decided that our website would reflect our belief that HTML should be rendered on the server side and CSS should be used to make it look pretty; JS strictly for

> Unfortunately, my opinion is probably irrelevant, because I'm not a potential user. I'm simply not that interested in news (yes, I realize the irony of saying that on Hacker News) and looking at your headlines confirmed to me that I'm not really missing anything. You're not alone. Many people have had this reaction.

> I do have an suggestion for your "In the News" sidebar: some entries (e.g. "U.S" and "President Trump") are likely to be there constantly. Yes, President Trump does stay have a tendency to stay in the headlines constantly. Last week's issue of The Economist concluded that his disruptive approach is working well abroad and that "unpredictability has some advantages". https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/10/27/trump-is-... The New York Times concluded 2 days ago that "the president has sought to seize the national stage in the last stretch of the [mid-terms] campaign". https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/us/politics/midterm-elect...

> Maybe it would be more informative if you adjust for topics that are mentioned unusually frequently compared to their base rate. That's a really good idea. Let me chew over it and see how it pans out.

> Additionally, that list begs for each item to link to a list of relevant stories. Ah, you've guessed at what we're working on right now! That's right, we're working on search results for news archives, with stories ranked by relevance and displayed in a reverse chronological timeline. We're aiming to make search fast and scalable using the free text search capabilities of Postgres 11 but if anyone wants to point us towards a better approach, we would welcome it.

> Oh, and the link to your engineering blog's RSS feed in the announcement post needs an initial / to make it root-relative. Thank you for pointing that out. It's fixed now https://www.newshound.co/blog/20181101/under-hood-newshounds... and the feed URL is the correct one: https://www.newshound.co/blog/engineering/feed. We hope you subscribe!

[masonic]

Have you checked trademark issues? The Mercury-News had an article retrieval service called Newshound.

[bruce_lipshitz]

The San Jose Mercury News launched its Newshound service in late 1994 and closed it down about 5 years later under the direction of its new owner, Knight-Ridder, who wanted to be a pure print play versus embracing news online. https://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_s...

I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that a trademark must be in active, continuous use after registration to be valid. https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-maintaining-trademark-regis...

[masonic]

  under the direction of its new owner, Knight-Ridder

This much is incorrect. K-R owned the Mercury-News from 1952[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Ridder

[Fjolsvith]

Looks like the site has a liberal slant.

[bruce_lipshitz]

We are aiming to have a diverse set of news sources. Would you like to name some that you feel should be included?

[masonic]

Right now, ten of ten articles in your Opinion section are all partisan sources... and nine of the ten are from one source.

This is an odd definition of "diverse".

[bruce_lipshitz]

> articles in your Opinion section are all partisan sources

Yes, articles in the Opinion section are partisan. That's why they are in a section labeled "Opinion" all by themselves somewhere at the bottom of the page, separate from news reports.

> nine of the ten are from one source.

The section shows the latest 10 articles. If a news source publishes articles on the web in a batch at one go, that section shows them all. We don't control what gets published when and we have stated that at the bottom of the page.

> This is an odd definition of "diverse".

We're still pulling articles from diverse news sources. If you would like to suggest some more, please feel free to do so because we are definitely open to all suggestions.

As always, thank you for your feedback. Please keep it coming! :-)