top | item 44592779

Show HN: Needle – An Explorable Map of the News

8 points| ryry | 7 months ago |needle.news

Hey HN! I wanted to know what was going on in cities/towns where my friends live, so I built Needle.

It uses an LLM + Open Street map to best estimate general locations of stories posted in the past day, and pin them on the map. For stories involving multiple places, I also wanted to show the relation between them.

It's still a little janky, and is limited to mostly Canadian sources of news at the moment, but I'm planning on expanding it shortly, as I'm keen to see what international sources are writing about my home city.

Let me know if you have any questions/feedback!

8 comments

appsDev|7 months ago

It sure is an interesting idea! Gives a new way to explore the news, honing in on places you've been or know people in. Nice work

ryry|7 months ago

Thanks! One of my favourite accidental things to come out of it was the "highlighting" of rural news. Stuff in a city like Toronto, which usually dominates my feed, gets kind of lost in all the other stories, while things in rural areas (which I never see) stand out.

chrisxlucas|7 months ago

Zoomed in on NY (where I live) and oof... to be expected but quite bleak. Nice visualization

ibdf|7 months ago

I got New Jersey news written by Toronto Star pinned in the center of Philadelphia :)

ryry|7 months ago

Ah yes! So this is something I'm struggling with from a UX perspective (could use some feedback from anyone here).

News tied to a specific place gets pinned there (like an article about the Blue Jays being pinned at the Toronto Skydome). For stuff in cities, or larger areas like states, it tries to place it within the bounds of the state randomly, and if that fails, a random radius (which I think is what's gone wrong here).

The problem though is with the Toronto Star reporting on news in Jersey. The way I'm going about this right now is a filter I'm calling "Lens" which is just the country. Right now the only lens is Canada, but I want these to be filterable so you can easily see what other places are writing, or just get home grown news (but again, something I'm struggling with how to represent it).