
Apply HN: WiseGuy– Solving a problem of most Hacker News users: Too much to read - abhi3
https://medium.com/@ApplyHN/apply-hn-wiseguy-solving-the-problems-of-every-hacker-news-user-have-someone-read-your-articles-334278913c84#.1n15mt4tz
======
huac
One particular problem (or opportunity) with political summaries are
ideological leanings. I'd be interested in summaries from different
viewpoints, e.g. a social democratic reading of the WaPo Sanders article would
be significantly less favorable.

I guess that might look like a browser extensions where individual users give
their own short summaries of an article, you can see the various summaries of
a given article, and you can see what other people are reading and have
summarized. Sounds a lot like Twitter in my mind, but with the additional
cross-referencing by article URL.

~~~
abhi3
This is a great idea, thanks for sharing. Now that I think about it, most of
our early adopters (people who read a lot) would be present on desktop and for
such users a community driven browser extension would be a great MVP.

------
JesseAldridge
I like this idea a lot.

Seems like you don't even need to build a website to get started.

I installed the pocket chrome extension and it looks like I can share my list
publicly using this service:
[http://sharedli.st/jessealdrg9](http://sharedli.st/jessealdrg9)

Can you look at that list periodically and send summaries of any new items to
JesseAldridge@gmail.com?

I'd be willing to pay for this. Knowledge is power.

~~~
abhi3
Thanks for your support and interest. This is could one of pg's "do things
that don't scale" kind of oppurtunity.

The idea is that when you have concentration of users with somewhat similar
reading habits (like the HN community), economies of scale kick in where the
cost of analyzing each article drops to pretty much nothing/view and access to
summaries is near instantaneous in 99.9% of the cases.

As a personal assistant type service it would be limited to a very small niche
of very wealthy/no time users. I'm very excited by all the support this is
getting and am going to get started on a MVP soon. You'll be one of the first
people I'd reach out to :)

~~~
JesseAldridge
> "do things that don't scale"

Indeed.

What exactly do you need to build that isn't already available?

Somebody else is going to start emailing me summaries for $100 a month while
you're messing around with whatever it is you think you need to build first.
:)

~~~
abhi3
I will reach out to you shortly and we'll work something out. :)

 _What exactly do you need to build that isn 't already available?_

A couple I can think of:

1) A community of people with diverse interests who can analyze articles
across topics. (I can't summarize an article on a quantum physics theory for
example)

2) I reasonable number of consumers who can bring down the cost/consumer.

~~~
brudgers
How would a technical person get paid to summarize a technical article?

~~~
abhi3
I have had some feedback and time to evolve the idea and have come to realize
that there is a power law of online content consumption (something like 10% of
the content gets 90 percent of the eyeballs).

So the way to kickstart this idea would be to identify the most popular
content (ideally before it starts trending) and have it analyzed by a real
human who could be paid hourly. Niche topics like high tech should be left to
the community to summarize (wikipedia style).

------
daviddumon
Hello abhi3,

I've been thinking to the same (core) idea recently, but was not planning to
launch it on hackernews but on my friends. I'll be glad to talk with you about
that :)

If you want to, please reach out at dumon.david at gmail dot com.

David

~~~
abhi3
I'll mail you right away!

------
abhi3
For someone just coming here, TL;DR version of my idea was: Some people are
busy and have very little time for casual reading, having a fair idea of what
an article is about and what to expect will enable them to spend their
precious time reading quality pieces which will really enhance their knowledge
(Kind of like having an Amazon reviews and human written summary for every
popular article on the web).

------
nothrabannosir
Great service. I wish you all the best and I hope to see many more of your
summaries and corresponding analyses. Godspeed!

~~~
abhi3
Thanks!

------
soneca
Great idea, great strategy to promote it with the summary comments (even if
some people are complaining).

If you want a little help/advice on making this happen, email me (it's on my
profile). No equity, or any formality, just a peer wanting to help.

Put a email on your profile too so you are more open to opportunities.

~~~
abhi3
Thanks for the support, I'll email you right away :)

------
athenot
The Summarize service on OS X does a decent job at summarizing content, and it
integrates will any app that uses Text Services. On the article about Apple's
recycling[1], the summary it produced was similar to the one you produced.[2]
One advantage with the OS X Summary is if something looks interesting, the
slider can be moved to reduce the aggressivity of the summary, thus yielding
more details.

From WiseGuy:

 _Various media sites claimed apple recycled $40 million worth of gold from
iphones, they were dead wrong. What actually happened is that Apple is under
statutury obligation to recycle a certain weight of e-waste depending on it
market share or weight of electronics sold (depending on state laws). The
e-waste doesn 't have to be of the manufacturers own products._

 _Apple paid third party recyclers to recycle mostly CRT 's and PC's (iphone
have hardly any gold and are much more valuable refurbished, In fact, phones
and tablets often don’t count toward the overall recycling requirements in
many state laws.) and probably incured a loss rather than a 40 million
windfall as claimed in news articles._

From OS X Summary:

 _The most egregious and inaccurate storyline goes something like this: Apple,
out of the goodness of its heart or perhaps fueled by monetary incentives,
took old iPhones and iPads that were brought back into its stores, took them
apart, melted down the roughly 30 milligrams of gold in each phone, and ended
up with 2,204 total pounds of gold._

 _...More commonly, however, it was reported that Apple recycled “90 million
pounds of e-waste through its recycling programs,” with much of this e-waste
being iPhones and other old Apple products._

 _...Linnell told me that, generally, Apple is considered to be a good faith
participant in many states’ recycling programs, and said that the company has
also set up recycling programs and contracted with e-waste recyclers in states
where there are no e-waste laws._

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536543)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11537017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11537017)

Edit: I should add that anything that helps people get more out of their day
is somthing that can be inserted in the time vs. money equation, so your idea
is definitely on the right track.

~~~
abhi3
I have tried several summarizing services but none does as good a job as a
real human. Try to take some article that you haven't read and run it through
an algorithmic summarizer, most of the time it wil be a very poor experience,
specially so when compared to say a friend explaining it to you in short.
Thats what wise guy is. I don't believe in the forseeable future AI will be
able to beat humans at this but if it gets close it'll only further improve
our unit economics.

Currently our unit economics on staff analysers look something like this
WITHOUT any tech assistance:

Median wage in low-income english speaking country: $2/hour

Analysis time for a average length 1000 word article: 6 minutes

Actual cost/article: 20 cents

Average Views per summarry at scale: 20 (Extremply conservative estimate, the
Apple summary got 1000 views in an less than an hour)

As you can see the average cost of Human summarizing/view is less than a cent.
Such a service at such a low price point should be seen as valuable by a large
number of people; or at the very least sustained by advertisment (though I
would very much prefer a subscription or micropayment based business model)

~~~
heartbreak
How do you determine how many views your HN comment received?

~~~
abhi3
I estimated from the number of people who clicked through the link in the post
and further to the medium post on the headline links to. The number would be
very close to 1000 at the very least, but most likely several thousand.

------
abhi3
Is your Pocket reading list too long for you to keep up with?

You find articles/news to read from multiple sources (twitter, facebook, rss,
media outlets, Hacker News, Reddit etc etc.) but can't find time to read them
all?

Are you irritated by all the clickbait headlines and manipulative snippets and
wish you had a fair idea of what you are getting into before reading a piece?

WiseGuy (placeholder) aims to solve your problems.

There is a small (maybe large?) consumer segment that loves to read stuff and
is hungry to absorb as much knowledge as possible. I have a morning and before
bed ritual of going through my favourite news/article sources (which includes
HN) and just reading stuff, but of late I have started feeling overwhelmed by
my "addiction". Clickbaits and manipulative snippets designed to make me visit
the site only to later find the piece pointless are the most irritating. I'm
sure many on HN would relate.

WiseGuy will be an app that I wish someone made for me, but no one has yet so
I will solve my own problem + maybe millions of other people.

How it works is simple:

1\. You find a piece that you would normally read.

2\. Share it to the app just like you would "Save to Pocket".

3\. A real human will read and craft a summary of the piece for you and tell
you if you should invest time to read it yourself. Some articles will be
insightful, include deep analysis that should be read in detail to be properly
absorbed, while others could be summarised in 2 sentences to tell you what you
need to know. WiseGuy will do it for you.

\----------------------------

Examples:

1) This piece was on HN front page for quite a while yesterday: "How cheap
does solar power need to get before it takes over the world?"
([http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11415510/solar-power-costs-
inno...](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11415510/solar-power-costs-innovation))

WiseGuy Summary:

Article is based on a study by researchers on what is termed "value deflation"
of solar energy. In a free market where the marginal cost of producing solar
electricity is zero, the value of solar energy during the day (the panels most
productive time) will deflate as more and more panels come online. This will
happen because there will be a LOT more electricity available at say, noon,
than there is demand for, leading to a huge drop in wholesale prices.
Batteries can help but not completely solve this problem. Researchers
calculate that the price needs to come down to $0.25 per watt by 2050 — down
from around $3 per watt today. We are not on track for that given current pace
of incremental improvements. Value deflation could be the difference between
solar staying as niche technology in the grand scheme of things or it taking
over the world.

Original Article: 2700 words (~20 minute reading time) WiseGuy Summary: 148
Words (less than a minute)

WiseGuy Analysis: The article is very well researched and goes into deep
details. It references to several other studies and analyses the situation,
solutions and future in detail. It includes useful graphical data. Reading of
the full article is highly recommended if the summary and the subject
intrigues you. Rating: 4.5 Stars (maybe crowd sourced?)

Another example:

2) Original headline: "How is it that Bernie Sanders still averages $27 per
donation?” ([https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2016/04/18/be...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2016/04/18/bernie-sanders-keeps-saying-his-average-donation-is-27-but-
it-really-isnt/))

WiseGuy Summary:

Piece questions how is it that over months and months the average donation has
stayed at 27 dollar. It gives out a few possible reasons and then proceeds to
calculate what the latest average is. First, averages involving millions of
numbers change slowly. Second, the campaign encourages a $27 donation
explicitly (with a button on its fundraising page) and implicitly (by making
it a point of pride). And, third, it actually does waver from that point. It
finally concludes based on public data that the actual average should be
27.88, 88 cents more than claimed.

Original Article: 800 words (~5 minute reading time) WiseGuy Summary: 96 Words
(less than a 30 seconds)

WiseGuy Analysis: Clickbait headline, not much new information. WiseGuy
summary is sufficient to explain the piece, feel free to skip it. Rating 2/5

\----------------------------------------------

How is WiseGuy better than alternatives? Well for one it is powered by real
humans. It is much better than NLP based summarizers which are not even close
in quality, they are actually terrible. Also while there are sources where one
can get curated human summarized content, they actually only summarize news
and not any random article/blog that you want right now. WiseGuy is for
whatever you want summarized, whenever you want it! You can send your entire
Pocket Reading list with a 100 saved articles to Wiseguy and have all of them
analysed on demand.

Business Model- It will work as an ad supported community where the analysis
will be provided by members of the community who have actually read the piece.
If possible ad revenue will be shared with top contributors based on quality.

There will also be a subscription based plan which will remove ads and will
guarantee an analysis from our staff summarizers in case no one from the
community take it up within a reasonable time. I have run numbers and the
economics work.

Does this have the potential to be a unicorn? I would assume not but so did
the founders of AirBnB think of their company.

I can't say how big the market for this service will be but I do know that it
will solve the problems of a large number of people. A future where all
consumers of online content will first run it by WiseGuy, or make it the
primary source of discovering useful community rated content is not
unimaginable at which point this could be a 10 billion dollar business. One
study I came across that made me realize this _might_ be more than just a
niche problem: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2014/03/19/am...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2014/03/19/americans-read-headlines-and-not-much-else/)

Besides I have some ideas of how such a basic service might evolve into
something that solves other related problems as well.

How will I use 20,000 dollars? Firstly where I am from adjusted for Purchasing
Power Parity, $20,000 dollars will be worth $200,000 so I will be able to do
much more with it than a founder in Bay Area.

I plan to use it to pay my living expenses while I take a semester off at grad
school, build an initial team, site expenses and paying staff summarizers to
solve the chicken and egg problem of building a community. I'd work out of my
apartment so there will be no office expenses.

Best Case WiseGuy would be able to save millions of man hours, help hundreds
of thousands read quality stuff and avoid the rest, absorb more knowledge from
the limited time they can spend on casual reading and pay thousands of people
to basically.....read.

 _BTW if HN is going to help us get into Ycombinator Fellowship then it seems
proper that it also helps us come up with a name (or keep the current one), so
PLEASE suggest away!_

Also I will be analysing some posts on HN front page every day to demonstrate
how WiseGuy might work. Look out for them. Feel free to share articles you
want analysed in this thread too, I am just one guy but I’ll do my best!

Don’t worry too much about being nice. I am going to give this a shot even if
I don’t get through YCF so I appreciate any suggestions/criticism, especially
from HN community as most of you would be the ideal target market and early
adopters.

~~~
detaro
_Are you irritated by all the clickbait headlines and manipulative snippets
and wish you had a fair idea of what you are getting into before reading a
piece?_

Might I suggest using your product to come up with a better headline for your
submission? :P

~~~
abhi3
I did try to make it better within the 80 character limit :)

~~~
minimaxir
You did not need to add the "most Hacker News users" part of you were trying
to avoid linkbaiting.

~~~
abhi3
Its in most content publishers interest to have headlines which give out
enough information to make one curious but not so much that it make clicking
through unneccesary.

As a reader with limited time it is in your interest to get as much info in as
few sentnces as possible (best case, just from the headline).

Headline: "Trump Calls megan kelly bimbo" okay so now I know enough and don't
need to actually readd a 800 word article. No need to click through; as a
reader this is what I want.

Headline: "You won't believe what donald trump just called megan kelly": now
I'm just the right amount of curious, i'll click through, read the artcile and
then wonder why couldn't I just get it in one line. But the publishers gets
the adviews. Thats what he wants.

This is a situatuion where inerests of the consumer and business are mis-
aligned that's what WiseGuy is trying to fix :)

It was in my interest to have a headline that'll make HN users clickthrough
(but not an inaccurate one) and read, so I did exactly that.Hope you get me
now and understand how WiseGuy is solving a real problem. :)

~~~
minimaxir
"The person reading it will like it!" is an age-old justification for spammy
advertisements for products that cannot market on intrinsic merit. It does not
automatically make it not-spammy or non-baity.

~~~
abhi3
I never said that.

~~~
minimaxir
"It was in my interest to have a headline that'll make HN users clickthrough
(but not an inaccurate one) and read, so I did exactly that."

------
abhi3
_My experience as a solo founder applying to YC Fellowship with just an idea
on Hacker News and making it to top 5_ :
[https://goo.gl/bRUfi7](https://goo.gl/bRUfi7)

~~~
abhi3
For someone just coming here, TL;DR version of my idea was: Some people are
busy and have very little time for casual reading, having a fair idea of what
an article is about and what to expect will enable them to spend their
precious time reading quality pieces which will really enhance their knowledge
(Kind of like having an Amazon reviews and human written summary for every
popular article on the web).

