> As an aside, there are a bunch of other really cool Jaccard index fingerprinting methods out there that are asymptotically better even than HyperMinHash. But, they aren't as easy to work with and lack some of the other nice properties of MinHash.
Would you be willing to list out these better methods and detail their pros / cons versus MinHash? It would be super helpful for those of us who are students in this field.
> 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! :-)
> There's some redundancy; topics aren't being combined uniformly. For example, today has the story about Facebook killing 115 accounts in two separate batches
Yes, the topic aggregation algorithm is not completely fine tuned as of now. (See prion's comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18359975). It has false positives (combining news stories that really don't belong together) as well as false negatives (not combining news stories that belong together).
We are working on fine tuning the algorithm every day based on incoming news stories. If you stick around, you'll see a gradual improvement.
Thank you as always for your detailed feedback. It's not everyday that one has the privilege to interact with a greybeard.
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...
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. :-)
> * 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.
> First were the two images of a list of hyperlinks that look clickable. I tried clicking on the links to no avail thinking they were broken, only to realise I was clicking on an image. The two images in particular are the News Sections and Newsmakers images on the homepage.
We heard this privately from a couple of other people as well. We'll definitely look into making the Features section a lot less ambiguous.
> The second point was that I initially couldn't figure out how to access the service.
> I am not a U.S. citizen, so I might not be your current target audience right now.
We're looking for feedback from non-U.S. citizens on which other news editions they would like to see. For example, we've come up with Canada, UK, Europe, Africa, India and Japan as geographical areas that could have news editions but we'd rather work on what our readers want than what we think they want.
> 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?
Sorry to hear that the page's responsive design layout did not work out for your device. Would it be possible for you to link to a screenshot so we can fix the bug?
> 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.
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.
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.
Would you be willing to list out these better methods and detail their pros / cons versus MinHash? It would be super helpful for those of us who are students in this field.