
Show HN: Newshound – a news aggregator for daily news from around the world - bruce_lipshitz
https://www.newshound.co/
======
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/](https://www.newshound.co/)

The U.S. edition of our daily news aggregator is here:
[https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-
us/](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...](https://www.newshound.co/blog/20181101/launching-web-based-news-
aggregator)

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...](https://www.newshound.co/blog/20181101/under-hood-newshounds-
news-aggregation-platform)

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

~~~
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?

------
masonic
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[0]. (Meanwhile, I don't understand why killing a tiny fraction of
their accounts is even "news".)

[0] [https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/#news-section-
politi...](https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/#news-section-politics-
read-more)

~~~
bruce_lipshitz
> _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](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.

------
MitchellCash
Nice work releasing!

There were two things I thought could use some improvement.

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.

The second point was that I initially couldn't figure out how to access the
service. I had to click on "Read the U.S. edition" which sounded like a sub-
section of the site, not the main news aggregator service. What threw me off
was the website slogan of "Daily news from around the world", I was trying to
find the rest the news, not just the U.S. edition. If this is the only option
right now, it could possibly just say "Read the News". Take this with a grain
of salt though as I am not a U.S. citizen, so I might not be your current
target audience right now.

~~~
bruce_lipshitz
Thank you for the feedback!

> _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._

Yes, I agree that we haven't made it very prominent that the U.S. edition news
is at [https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-
us/](https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/).

> _I was trying to find the rest the news, not just the U.S. edition._

The U.S. edition actually has a World news section that has a comprehensive
collection of global news stories. [https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-
us/#news-section-world](https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/#news-section-
world)

> _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.

------
julienreszka
Not responsive

~~~
bruce_lipshitz
> _Not responsive_

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?

