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Comment by adelevie | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it always going to be more efficient for the producer of said text to produce the summary him/herself? Couldn't resources be better spent trying to influence the production process of various news outlets to provide summaries?

In the legal community (and I'm sure many others), there is tremendous benefit to writing concise introductory and concluding paragraphs, as well as tables of contents that act as excellent skeletons for much longer documents. In policy-land, the one-pager is king...but I digress.

I guess I'm just kind of lost as to how or when the cost of accurately summarizing text by computer is cheaper than basically "asking" the author to provide one. Will the quality of a computer-generated summary ever be >= the quality of an author-generated summary?

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Well I guess it depends on how you look at it. My goal with this version of my project is not to produce a summary that includes everything.

When I approached this project I looked at it with this problem: I currently read 10-15 news sites. I spend too much time reading the news. How do I get to the stories that really matter to me?

Producing text-extraction summaries solve this problem well in my opinion.

>> Isn't it always going to be more efficient for the producer of said text to produce the summary him/herself? Couldn't resources be better spent trying to influence the production process of various news outlets to provide summaries?

The quality of summaries would be SO much better if news outlets did this themselves. Again, I think it would be really cool to be able to have the influence to change the production process.

I really appreciate your insight here!

Interesting. Of I course, I'm not trying to discourage this at all. I really dig this stuff. Just writing my thoughts on another, complimentary approach. I guess this makes sense from the perspective of a hacker who wants to build a cool thing for his/her own use.

The questions of efficiency really come into play when you see Yahoo! spending $30 million for Summly. For that, you could hire 60 people to work for $50,000/yr for one year. I wonder how 60 happily-employed English majors might stack up to something produced by Summly et al.

I bet you could set up a mechanical turk job to summarise news for a lot less than 60 people @ $50k a year and get similar results.

“For [$30 million], you could hire 60 people to work for $50,000/yr for one year.”

$30 million / $50,000 = 600

You wouldn’t be able to hire 600 people, but you’d definitely get more than 60 English majors. Even after taxes, insurance, benefits, HR, management, accounting, rent, equipment, travel expenses, etc, you could probably afford at least 200 English majors at $50,000 a year.

Yea, I was off by a pesky decimal place.

I know you aren't. In fact, you taking time out of your day to post here with your opinion about my site really does quite the opposite of discouraging me.

Summly getting bought for that much really confuses me as well.

“I currently read 10-15 news sites. I spend too much time reading the news. How do I get to the stories that really matter to me?”

I don’t know about you, but for me, this problem is solved by using RSS (Reeder) and receiving email digests from Percolate, The Brief, and Hackernewsletter.

http://www.percolate.com

http://www.thebrief.io

http://www.hackernewsletter.com

Bonus: http://www.thefeature.net/

I tried to do email digests. I really did. I am signed up for a few of those. My problem is they get lost in my inbox. Personally I like to check into news sites several times a day. The feature is really interesting to me however. I personally don't use tumblr, but the inherent "repost" feature about it seems really attractive. Maybe I should look into automatic posting to tumblr. Thanks for the feedback! I've never heard of the brief!

“My problem is [email digests] get lost in my inbox”

I have a Smart Mailbox set up in Mail.app that all those digests land in, that way they’re not mixed in with all the email that I need to act on.

“The feature is really interesting to me however. I personally don't use tumblr, but the inherent "repost" feature about it seems really attractive. Maybe I should look into automatic posting to tumblr.”

The Feature is a selection of articles that people save to read later using Instapaper. The Tumblr connection is Marco Arment, who worked at Tumblr and created Instapaper and The Feature.

You can set up Instapaper in such a way that whenever you mark something ‘Read later’ (from the web or a RSS client like Reeder), it’s automatically added to your tumblelog. You can then peruse your tumblelog whenever you feel like it.

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