
Show HN: News from Reddit - salmaanp
http://fastnews.me
======
johnloeber
I guess I'll be the first to deliver negative feedback.

Technically, it's well-designed. It's a fine-looking product that is easy and
compelling to use. The key-point summary is a good feature. That's all
granted.

However, I think this is a bad product to build. The past weeks and months
have shown us that we probably need more long-form content and less short-form
content, where the loss of details robs us of important nuances. Just reading
the headlines -- and that is what this product allows you to do very
efficiently -- does not necessarily make the user better-informed, but it
dangerously gives the user the probably-false impression that they are now
actually informed.

I would encourage you to think not just about the problems you would like your
product to _solve_ , but also the problems that your product might _contribute
to_.

~~~
salmaanp
Thanks for your insight. I have actually given this a thought.

The first point is that the site is not posting super new content, but stuff
that is already popular and has a fair bit of discussion around it.

Another thing is that I ran
[https://www.reddit.com/user/samacharbot2](https://www.reddit.com/user/samacharbot2)
for quite some time and what would happen was many people never actually read
the article but just made assumptions from the headline. The summary actually
helped a lot and even became a starting point of discussion.

I agree that half baked information can be sometimes harmful than no
information at all. Ideally how I'd like the website to be used is that people
who find a summary interesting go and click the actual article.

Hope you understand my perspective.

~~~
lintiness
Irish leader doesn’t regret calling Trump “racist and dangerous”

that's not news.

~~~
Eldt
Go into the reddit comments and you'll see how the article itself is a bit
misleading as well

~~~
lintiness
r/news comments i avoid like the plague. i have that sub blocked on my front
page (along with r/politics and "popular" candidate subs including but not
limited to the bern, hillary, and trump). life's too short for any of that
shit.

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simonpure
For anyone else interested in the code, I believe these are the repos -

Backend
[https://github.com/SalmaanP/news_backend](https://github.com/SalmaanP/news_backend)

Frontend
[https://github.com/SalmaanP/news_website](https://github.com/SalmaanP/news_website)

~~~
JayeshSidhwani
you should read
[https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/08/19/fork/](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/08/19/fork/)
to take care of
[https://github.com/SalmaanP/news_backend/blob/master/daemon....](https://github.com/SalmaanP/news_backend/blob/master/daemon.py#L25)

~~~
djsumdog
Woah! I did not know that about killing PID -1. That is not behaviour I'd
expect.

This developer uses Python though, which seems like it does the correct thing
in raising an error instead of just returning a -1. I'd have to look through
the Python code to be sure through:

[https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/os.html#os.fork](https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/os.html#os.fork)

------
divbit
Very nice looking - I wonder if the India link could be changeable to a
geographical region more interesting to the reader (with maybe India as the
default).

~~~
salmaanp
Thank you! Yes i was planning to do all major countries which have active
subreddits. Just started with india since it has lots of news articles posted
everyday.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
It would be good if this was user-configurable, e.g., via the URL (or, heck, a
cookie), not only for countries, but topics, e.g., privacy.

I like the idea of some customization.

(While on the subject of customization: Am I crazy or does the theme choice
not "stick"?)

------
vayarajesh
how was the summary points done? is it through processing the text through ML
or Reddit does provide with key summary points or some 3rd party service?

How accurate is the summary points?

~~~
davidelstone
There's a comment above that links to the repos for the source code, but it
looks like it uses the python package Sumy to do the summaries.

[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sumy](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sumy)

~~~
vayarajesh
cool, I will check it out.

------
chomp
If this pulls news stories from reddit, it's going to be very biased, US
centric, and left leaning. Great concept, just questioning using reddit as a
source.

------
djsumdog
Very clean web app. I like the layout.

I personally don't use Reddit very much after their warrant canary issue ..
and the CEO that edited comments. Kinda lame since the only similar
alternative is kinda a cespool for racism _cough_ cough _Goats_ cough _.

Thanks for opening up the source too. I can see a lot of potential uses for
this. You might want to add vim swap and _.log to your .gitignore though. :-P

------
cstrat
Looks pretty neat! I will take a look at the site over the coming days and
report back with feedback :)

Side comment, I am wondering why you've bothered with putting your email as:
salmaanpehlari[at]gmail[dot]com considering you've got the raw email address
in the source code of that anchor.

~~~
sallurocks
Haha, I put it there before adding the about page. Forgot about that...going
to fix it right away.

Really glad you liked the first impressions!

------
guillegette
great idea! I personally love the keypoints part, I like to stay updated with
news but not so much read every single article, so this is great for me. My
feedback:

\- Work a bit more on the design, specially on mobile. On my iPhone 6s Plus,
when I open the page I can only see 1 article, what I like about HN or Reddit
is that you can quickly scan with your eyes what you are interested on, as a
list. If that is your target audience then you should probably give a similar
experience.

\- Not a bit fan of the whole "popup" to see the bullet points, I would hide
and show them under the title

\- I would add an icon to click directly to the reddit comments next to the
button

\- I think this is a great site to be turn into an mobile app

Keep up the good work!

------
btgeekboy
Impressive! I like the clean layout, and with KeyPoints, the page isn't nearly
as ad-infested as it could be.

One suggestion: Have you considered adding the Reddit thumbnail to each
article? May help break up the page a bit.

------
TheArcane
Aren't you the author of samacharbot2? Good stuff mate.

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dx034
Looks very nice, may I ask why you don't use https? Setting up the certificate
should be easy and free with letsencrypt.

------
SippinLean
Cool. Lose the giant headlines, lose the columns, move the reddit button to
where the green button is now, lose the modal.

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chanandler_bong
With the demise of Breaking News (breakingnews.com) I have been looking for a
simple, clean global headline aggregator.

News! isn't a drop-in replacement (I liked the 'curated' aspects of BN), but
News! is going on my short list of replacements.

------
salmaanp
Any feedback is appreciated!

~~~
zarriak
I think the keypoint generator is well made, but the presentation has some
serious problems.

The next and previous buttons should not drift so far apart, they should be
next to each other, close to where the next button is at the start.

It would also be nice if when you went to fastnews.me/subject it would search
for the subject. You could also add a recently searched items to the right of
the search for the last 3 or 5 items.

Using the website would flow better if you were to have the bullet points
display on hovering over the descriptive text.

The summary algorithm seems to work pretty well, so you might want to add the
functionality to use it on individual subreddits, in which you could utilize
the fastnews.me/r/ to access. Although this would generate some problems since
most of these would probably have to be generated by a user request I think it
would be really useful.

~~~
salmaanp
Thanks for the feedback!

search with /subject sounds like a good idea, i will certainly do that.

Right now I'll add more subreddits and put /r/subreddit for later as that will
require bit more resources.

I'll keep tweaking the UI and keep your points in mind. Thanks again!

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TheSmoke
nice work, good job. whenever something happens in turkey, i visit
/r/worldnews to see how it is reflected in the world media and perceived by
other people. with your tool, it's going to be a lot easier for me to do so.

with that said, there's a bug with the next button. /r/world is selected, i
search turkey, i go down and press next, it brings back the home of /r/world.
same happens without a search keyword as well. (or maybe there's just no data)

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cariaso
Loving it. The bullet summaries are very well done.

~~~
sallurocks
Thank you!

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JayeshSidhwani
Love the whole experience! Key point summary is nifty; would appreciate a
technical blog post :)

~~~
salmaanp
Thanks! There's some information in the about page for now. I'll write a bit
more in detail soon.

------
nickbail3y
This is great. Really clean and easy to use. Awesome work.

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bencollier49
This was exactly what I was looking for. Excellent.

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TheHeadMaster
Nice work , fellow spartan.

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nkkollaw
This is great. Awesome job.

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ComodoHacker
What's the point of reading this and not Reddit itself?

~~~
nkkollaw
It doesn't look nor function like Reddit at all.

What's the point of drinking from a straw instead of directly from the cup?

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nunez
Nice work!

~~~
salmaanp
Thanks!

