Show HN: A News Service That Almost Never Emails You (By Design) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A News Service That Almost Never Emails You (By Design)

notably.news

4 pointswodow5 comments

Hi HN,

I’ve been working on Notably News – a short-form news service that delivers micro updates by email. Instead of constant notifications or daily digests, you get just a few key updates per year on a subject, covering only the most important events.

I follow a lot of different topics but don’t want to rely on social media, Google Alerts, or traditional news sites that flood me with updates, clickbait, or opinions. I just want concise, neutral updates on the most significant events.

I first tried to build something similar ten years ago, leveraging my (very minimal!) academic experience in text summarization. But at the time, I couldn’t get it to work well. Now, modern LLMs make doing this feasible.

HOW IT WORKS:

1. Pick a public figure (or several) to follow

2. We use (mostly!) Wikipedia to watch for updates, then summarize them.

3. Receive short, neutral updates via email – just a couple of sentences when something big happens

WHAT NEXT?

Right now, I’m focusing on tracking famous people. When I first attempted this in 2014, I tried to cover everything at once (which was… a mistake). This time, I’m taking more of a step-by-step approach.

I’d love your feedback, inc what topics or categories should I add next?

Try it out: https://www.notably.news/

Minimal sign up: Just choose who you care about and enter an email address; no spam

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This is a nice idea, in line with the Slow Journalism movement [1].

I subscribe to Delayed Gratification [2] since I find the slower, more considered reflection and summarisation much more satisfying than the overwhelming deluge of up-to-the-minute news alerts that flood my phone.

This seems aligned with that philosophy, nice work. I look forward to not hearing much from you soon!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_journalism

[2] https://www.slow-journalism.com/

Thank you! I've heard of Slow Journalism, but not Delayed Gratification, which is really beautiful.

OP here. One thing I don't have a good answer for yet: this mostly uses Wikipedia as a source. How can I pay back to volunteer editors ("Wikipedians") if this is at all successful? I've seen other sites like newsasfacts.com suggest giving a proportion of profits to the Wikimedia foundation, but obviously they are ultimately separate from the volunteer base, and its fundraising appears increasingly controversial [1, 2].

I slightly balk at the idea, but is a cryptocurrency token possibly the answer? Generate, distribute to editors and have donations come inbound somehow? I see the dangers here!

[1] https://unherd.com/newsroom/the-next-time-wikipedia-asks-for... [2] https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...

This service isn't really for me (I have no interest in tracking any famous people), so my opinion is likely not useful. But regardless of the topic, just tracking wikipedia entries doesn't bring anything useful to the table (for me). More useful would be tracking more timely news sources.

Thanks for taking a look.

Wikipedia pages are really just the core, and they're a good signal for "notability" given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

I am definitely planning to expand to more sources, both timely and less so.

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