
Show HN: Positive News Reader based on sentiment analysis - Yeroniomus
http://www.sentinewsmob.ml/
======
SyneRyder
I thought this was interesting the first time I saw it... but you've submitted
this to Show HN 13 times now, including multiple domains that redirect to the
same site, and you're also using multiple HN accounts to keep resubmitting it.

Don't you think that's a bit much?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Yeroniomus](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Yeroniomus)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sentinewsteam](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sentinewsteam)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hacakton](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hacakton)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinewsmob.ml](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinewsmob.ml)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinews.ml](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinews.ml)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=intellexer.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=intellexer.com)

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pknight
Concept is great! The screenshots don't inspire a sense of it working
effectively though. I don't think raw sentiment analysis is enough. 'Good'
news to me has one or more of the following qualities:

\- It's actionable \- It's informative in a pragmatic sense \- It invokes a
positive emotion, such as curiosity, wonder, appreciation, hope, fascination,
delight, laughter \- It doesn't aimlessly invoke
apathy/fear/anger/disgust/disappointment/hopelessness \- It has substance and
is more than a mere report or thin and reflexive reaction \- It isn't tailored
to reinforce a specific political agenda \- It's within a domain of interest
\- It makes be better equipped to deal with the world

That rules out almost all news articles and virtually all of the examples in
the screenshots. I don't think that kind of selecting can be done purely with
a sentiment analysis.

~~~
vollmond
The political agenda one is important. "Good" news to me in some areas of
society are very much not good news to some other people (say, an abortion-
related court case being decided).

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Animats
If 3 of the 4 top "good news" stories mention Trump, as seen in the ad, there
may be a problem.

~~~
Yeroniomus
Yes, not very good screenshot for the landing page. But all of the predictions
were made by AI :-)

~~~
jwilliams
I think that's something really important to consider -- related the
tailoring/personalization question in this thread too.

I looked at the page and every article (picked by AI) was quite negative in
the sense that I believe it. They were articles about geopolitical
grandstanding, extrajudicial executions of drug dealers, etc. Even if you took
the pro-con Trump angle out (if possible), and put in <your favorite
politician> I'd still not consider them positive topics.

My immediate reaction was this was really incongruent. I imagine it'll be for
many others too.

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popey456963
Haven't there been several of these posted to Hacker News already? All of
which look almost identical.

EDIT: Ah, apparently they're all links to this page.

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aphextron
I'm far less interested in "positive" news than in news that is _relevant_ to
me. So much of online news has become clickbait political nonsense. I'd really
like a news reader that is human curated to filter out the fake nonsense that
makes it into Google News, while using ML to pick out the stories that matter
to me from publishers I trust.

~~~
NumberCruncher
Aaron Swartz made a good point about the relevance of news [1].

[1]
[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews)

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Yeroniomus
Hello, Hacker News users! It's my first Android app and first experience of
Android development :-). SentiNews is based on sentiment analysis which helps
to classify news as positive or negative. What do you think about general
concept of the app? Will be waiting for your feedback.

~~~
aplummer
Congratulation on shipping! Regardless of the feedback you've made it a lot
further than most. Good luck!

~~~
Yeroniomus
Thanks a lot for the suggestions and feedbacks to everyone. My nearest plans:
small interface redesign, improvement of sentiment analysis algorithm,
personalization of news feeds and the iOS launch. Keep on updates!

------
tbihl
Is there any reason you didn't include either the Atlantic or the National
Review? For US based news, they seem pretty hard to beat if you can bear to
give reporters a few hours to digest stories and provide meaningful insight.

------
jansho
Sorry I may have missed something.

So how is "sentiment analysis" done? I assume that this will be personalised,
rather than the binary good/bad news classification?

Congratulations though, I think the concept itself is good :) But, I think it
may work better if it focuses solely on the "uplifting" type of good news. (As
others have pointed out, a piece of news could be good for some people, bad to
others.) Most of us get upsetting news everyday, so imagine if your app is the
go-to place to rinse out all that $h!++y aftertaste with positive, inspiring
stories :)

Edit: word

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xiamx
Curious to know which algorithm and the sourcing of corpus you chose to train
your system on.

On a similar note, here a curation of great sentiment analysis methods and
implementations: [https://github.com/xiamx/awesome-sentiment-
analysis](https://github.com/xiamx/awesome-sentiment-analysis)

~~~
Yeroniomus
Thanks a lot for the link. I've used the technology called Paragraph Vectors
[https://cs.stanford.edu/~quocle/paragraph_vector.pdf](https://cs.stanford.edu/~quocle/paragraph_vector.pdf)
for sentiment features extraction. Training collections were created in a
semi-automatic mode and included news title+short description gathered from
popular RSS feeds.

~~~
minimaxir
Sentence vectors encode the data, but how do you determine if a story is
positive or negative?

~~~
Yeroniomus
After collection of possible positive/negative features with weights I used
logistic regression classifier with some modifications (e.g. position
algorithm) to classify the article. It determines the article polarity based
on features (words, phrases and etc.)

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MichaelMoser123
Great idea, I wonder of they took some inspiration from the sunglasses of
Zaphod Beeblebrox.

[http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Joo_Janta_200_Super-
Chroma...](http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Joo_Janta_200_Super-
Chromatic_Peril_Sensitive_Sunglasses)

~~~
MichaelMoser123
I wonder if the user will like it , some authors will use terms that are all
good for items considered bad by the customers - depending on the bias of the
author. Sentiment analysis will fail if an opposite political bias is
considered.

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owlmirror
Does the system learn about an users preference and classify news tailored to
your personal profile, or does it simply do a general prediction?

~~~
Yeroniomus
Not now. It does a general prediction. Maybe I will add this feature in future
releases.

------
hentrep
Love the concept!

I'd be interested when/if this launches on iOS. Perhaps add an email capture
to the landing page?

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wbronchart
> BUILT YOUR OWN NEWS BLOCK

I think you mean Build

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crdoconnor
Ironically, Perez winning the DNC chair was awful news.

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AlphaWeaver
Seems like an interesting idea.

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coolgeek
So, the software equivalent of soma?

~~~
rs86
Yes, I am surprised by the lack of criticism by the community. Only see what
is happy and awesome?

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sidep
Is not owning the copyright to the news displayed an issue? If so, how do you
plan to deal with it?

~~~
wonderous
If you look at this slide you can see it showing the content via the website
that posted the content:
[http://www.sentinewsmob.ml/img/slide_5.png](http://www.sentinewsmob.ml/img/slide_5.png)

So, no, this is not an issue, no different than Google, HN, etc. linking to a
story.

