Old News – News that gets better the *less* you read it
I’ve always wanted a news app designed for people who don’t stay up-to-date daily. That pays attention to when I check-in and what stories I’m aware of and adapts to me. You see, I’m not a good “follower” of the news, and I “catch-up” fairly infrequently. When I do, I want to see the most important things I’ve missed in the meantime, not today’s top stories. I’d like to emerge from my metaphorical cave after a week, a month, or longer, and quickly see what I missed. That’s Old News. I built it for myself, but if you’re like me (statistically, you probably aren’t!) you may like it too. It is…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
I’ve always wanted a news app designed for people who don’t stay up-to-date daily. That pays attention to when I check-in and what stories I’m aware of and adapts to me. You see, I’m not a good “follower” of the news, and I “catch-up” fairly infrequently. When I do, I want to see the most important things I’ve missed in the meantime, not today’s top stories. I’d like to emerge from my metaphorical cave after a week, a month, or longer, and quickly see what I missed. That’s Old News. I built it for myself, but if you’re like me (statistically, you probably aren’t!) you may like it too. It is quite simple. Swipe to see recommended Hacker News stories and the app keeps track of what you’ve seen. When you come back you’ll see the top stories you haven’t seen yet, with a slow exponential decay of the score over time (a big story from yesterday is still more interesting than one from last month). In the future, I’d love to explore making that decay rate user-configurable so that you can decide how much you prefer newer vs. older news. Interesting for discussion, the app truly does get more useful the less you use it. If you check Hacker News daily, this probably won’t be useful at all! If you are like me, though, value per time used is super high. I’m really keen on this as a concept, and I think it’s worth more developers exploring it. Sure, it’s not great for “engagement” numbers, but I suspect there is a big latent demand for software that actively encourages us to use it less. Download Old News here: https://oldnews.mitchcrowe.com Caveats: - iPhone only (sorry!) - Probably missing features you consider “essential” for a news app (I like simple!) - No business model, just free hobby software
Does the same job
all alternatives →- FNForty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delayNov 2025 · forty.news · ▲443
This started as a reaction to a conversational trope. Despite being a tranquil place, even conversations at my yoga studio often start with, "Can you believe what's going on right now?" with that angry/scared undertone. I'm a news avoider, so I usually feel some smug self-satisfaction in those instances, but I wondered if there was a way to satisfy the urge to doomscroll without the anxiety. My hypothesis: Apply a 40-year latency buffer. You get the intellectual stimulation of "Big Events" without the fog of war, because you know the world didn't end. 40 years creates a mirror between…
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Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation. I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So…
Life & fun · 2022 · hexapipes.vercel.app
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We're building Parsnip to create a "tech tree" of cooking skills that allows anyone to level up on the building blocks of cooking knowledge while tracking their progress over time. It took us a few iterations to figure out the right product; here's the story of our latest pivot: [https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope] The goal is to create a personalized way to learn any recipe on the Internet, then use this as a springboard to help home cooks of all levels solve the problem of repeated meal planning in a 10x better way:…
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