News Minimalist – News ranked by significance
Hey HN! I'm the author of News Minimalist — a news aggregator where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10. The project was born out of personal pain — I wanted a way to read only significant news, like major humanity milestones, or historical political events, filtering out all the celebrity gossip and smartphone releases. But I couldn't find a way to do that — everywhere I looked, the news was ranked by popularity, coverage, or relevance, not significance. I first tried to solve the problem in the beginning of 2023 with GPT-3 (the top model at that time) by asking it to…
In plain words
News Minimalist is a news aggregator that ranks stories on a significance scale from 0 to 10, filtering out celebrity gossip and minor product announcements to surface major historical events and humanity milestones. It addresses the problem that most news platforms rank content by popularity or relevance rather than actual significance. The tool uses AI to assess and rank stories, allowing readers to focus on news that matters most.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN! I'm the author of News Minimalist — a news aggregator where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10. The project was born out of personal pain — I wanted a way to read only significant news, like major humanity milestones, or historical political events, filtering out all the celebrity gossip and smartphone releases. But I couldn't find a way to do that — everywhere I looked, the news was ranked by popularity, coverage, or relevance, not significance. I first tried to solve the problem in the beginning of 2023 with GPT-3 (the top model at that time) by asking it to estimate the significance of some news stories. The results were painfully bad — for some reason, the model preferred tragic, personal stories, completely missing the essence of what makes the news significant. No amount of prompt engineering could fix that. But it all changed in March 2023 when GPT-4 came out. The scores it gave made much more sense. After a month of work, the first version was ready. News Minimalist had its first successful Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388), and I realized that a lot of people had the same problem I had. I've been working on improving the project ever since. As probably most tech founders, I spent too much time on technical improvements, completely ignoring marketing. But I think that work paid off, and I'm finally satisfied with the scores it gives. The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/ Let me know what you think! Vadim
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