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 the Reagan Era and today. The parallels include celebrity populism, Cold War tensions (Soviets vs. Russia), and inflation economics.
The system ingests raw newspaper scans and uses a multi-step LLM pipeline to generate the daily edition:
OCR & Ingestion: Converts raw pixels to text.
Scoring: Grades events on metrics like Dramatic Irony and Name Recognition to surface stories that are interesting with hindsight. For example, a dry business blurb about Steve Jobs leaving Apple scores highly because the future context creates a narrative arc.
Objective Fact Extraction: Extracts a list of discrete, verifiable facts from the raw text.
Generation: Uses those extracted facts as the ground truth to write new headlines and story summaries.
I expected a zen experience. Instead, I got an entertaining docudrama. Historical events are surprisingly compelling when serialized over weeks.
For example, on Oct 7, 1985, Palestinian hijackers took over the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Reading this on a delay in 2025, the story unfolded over weeks: first they threw an American in a wheelchair overboard, then US fighter jets forced the escape plane to land, leading to a military standoff between US Navy SEALs and the Italian Air Force. Unbelievably, the US backed down, but the later diplomatic fallout led the Italian Prime Minister to resign.
It hits the dopamine receptors of the news cycle, but with the comfort of a known outcome.
Stack: React, Node.js (Caskada for the LLM pipeline orchestration), Gemini for OCR/Scoring.
Link: https://forty.news (No signup required, it's only if you want the stories emailed to you daily/weekly)
I opened this, only to be confronted by an article about the investigation into the downing of Air India flight 182, a terrorist attack that killed hundreds of people, including my childhood neighbour friends Brinda and Arti and their dad, Vishnu.
Forty years. What lives they could have led, people they would have loved and been loved by. For their family, so many years of grief.
Thank you for this project.
It’s especially painful to read about that again, with another horrific Air India tragedy having happened this year in India :(
RIP to all those innocent people.
> Secretary Rejects Emergency Antibiotics Ban in Animal Feed Health and Human Services
Secretary Margaret M. Heckler on Wednesday refused to impose an emergency ban on the use of antibiotics in animal feed. Mrs. Heckler denied a petition filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which had sought to shorten the process by asking the secretary to declare an 'imminent hazard' to public health. Declaring an 'imminent hazard' would invoke emergency powers and allow an immediate ban. The NRDC contended that routine, low-level use of antibiotics in animal feed is allowing drug-resistant bacteria to enter the human food chain, weakening the ability of drugs to fight human disease. The NRDC sought a ban on the use of small amounts of penicillin and tetracycline. Mrs. Heckler's decision does not end the matter permanently, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still can ban antibiotics in animal feed through administrative regulations. The issue of antibiotics in animal feed has already been under review at the FDA for more than eight years
Antibiotic resistance predicted all that time back
It's funny that this site's tagline is "Exactly 40 years back, these felt huge. See how they landed with time." but so many of these stories are still just as alarming. If anything it often feels like we should've cared more. At the very least done more
In a similar vein, I think even news from 40 years ago can teach us a lot. The players may be different, but the game is the same. Many of today’s wars and conflicts were already ongoing; big pharma, big food, oil companies, corruption in our institutions, manufactured coups… it all feels like nothing ever really changes.
But the things that do change can be evaluated with the benefit of hindsight, for example the policies promoted by Robert "monopolies are good actually" Bork and Reaganomics more generally. The Wedge didn't open by itself and we are now in a position to judge whether what trickled down was piss or gold.
Tinkle-down economics :)
I reckon that if there were a similar feed for the Roman Empire, the same would be true. The real issue is that human psychology hasn’t really changed in perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. The only thing that has is technology.
Yup, on this site today, I see stories about the Reagan/Gorbochav talks. The "not an inch Westward" promise made to the USSR about NATO being repeatedly broken is directly relevant to today's invasion of Ukraine. And I also see stories about Lebanon fighting to end occupation by US and Israeli forces which is quite relevant to the other major conflict the US is tangled up in
Indeed, and I think this is a diredt result of OP's pipeline. Part of the workflow involves asking an LLM to prioritize articles that readers in 2025 will find interesting in hindsight.
Yes unfortunately it to me the site replaces anxiety inducing news with depressing information. Current news: bad things are happening. 40 years old news: here are the bad decisions that led to bad things happening now.
> For example, on Oct 7, 1985, Palestinian hijackers took over the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Reading this on a delay in 2025, the story unfolded over weeks: first they threw an American in a wheelchair overboard, then US fighter jets forced the escape plane to land, leading to a military standoff between US Navy SEALs and the Italian Air Force. Unbelievably, the US backed down, but the later diplomatic fallout led the Italian Prime Minister to resign.
From the perspective of 2025, I can't help but think about the people I know today getting vocally angry about Israeli violence in the Gaza strip, and suggesting that this violence has implications for US politics - and I wonder how many of those people would be happy to throw an American in a wheelchair off a ship in the name of the Palestinian cause.
Reading the wikipedia article about this incident, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille_Lauro_hijacking , it seems like the hijackers murdered the guy in a wheelchair before they threw his body off the ship, and it's possible but unproven that they picked him in particular either because he was Jewish or because he was in a wheelchair. The hijackers involved were given long prison sentences, but many of them were released decades ago and have fought against US in other ways since then.
I mostly think of the Israel/Palestine conflict as one that I have no dog in - I'm not Jewish, Israeli, or Palestinian myself and have no ties to the region. Nonetheless, pro-Palestine political messaging is something that happens around me all the time today, and knowing that the conflict was happening 40 years ago and that some of the same things that were happening then are akin to what is happening now colors my opinion of what is happening now.
Maybe this is just my bubble, but the messaging I get is that Israel should stop murdering Palestinian civilians and not that Hamas is somehow righteous in their actions.
What I tend to see is mostly an overlooking of one side's actions while condemning the other side, with different people favoring different sides. So you have people who make excuses for Hamas like "they are just responding to an existential threat" while strongly condemning Israel, and people who make similar excuses for Israel while strongly condemning Hamas. Personally I feel that there are no heroes and everyone sucks in this situation, except for the innocent bystanders on both sides who are being caught in the crossfire.
Ok, the big problem in this whole thing is assymetrical nature of the thing. The Israelli military is a military funded and shaped by the US one, and it’s a mammoth in all the ways that matter.
Hamas, after years of being supressed, is a group of militants with handguns.
The Isrealli response to those terrorist with guns killing and abducting some of their people, was to flatten and impose collective punishment on the whole country that those people came from.
I have no issues with them defending themselves, but I do with the disproportionate nature of what has been happening.
It’s especially ironic because the jews are one of the few people in the world that should have learned that lesson.
Hamas was an aspiring near-peer military force with a conventional order of battle and a multilayered supply chain. It obviously was not "militants with handguns".
(It hasn't been militarily meaningful for over 18 months; you could call it that today! If what you are, principally, is angry about war crimes in Gaza, you have ample evidence to muster without telling fairy tales about what the situation was in 2023.)
You can avoid a lot of trouble by avoiding sentence structures where the subject is "Jewish people" and the verb is "should (x)".
> Hamas was an aspiring near-peer military force
This is beyond ridiculous. Israel is a nuclear-armed regional power with tanks, a modern navy, a state of the art air force, the best missile defence system in the world, and one of the best counterintelligence operations. It can project force thousands of kilometres away into Iran. Hamas is none of that.
Even on sheer manpower, sources from 2023 put Hamas at 3 to 30 times smaller than the IDF, depending on who you trust and how you count reservists. [0]
If Hamas had been a near peer to the IDF, the October 7th attackers wouldn't have been shootings and stabbings within 5 miles of the Gaza border, they would have been successful missile attacks on Tel Aviv or tanks rolling down the streets of West Jerusalem. Or do you think Hamas just wanted to start a limited war with border skirmishes and kept its real military might in reserve?
Perhaps "small arms" or "light weapons" would be more precise than "handguns", but Hamas's capabilities have always been closer to the latter than to Israel's.
[0] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231016-the-israel-ha...
> they would have been successful missile attacks on Tel Aviv
--- start quote ---
In January 2008 the border between Gaza and Egypt was breached by Hamas. It allowed them to bring in Russian and Iranian-made rockets with a larger range. In the first half of 2008, the number of attacks rose sharply, consistently totaling several hundred per month. In addition, Ashkelon was hit many times during this period by Grad rockets.
...
In 2012, Jerusalem and Israel's commercial center Tel Aviv were targeted with locally made "M-75" and Iranian Fajr-5 rockets, respectively, and in July 2014, the northern city of Haifa was targeted for the first time
--- end quote ---
> Perhaps "small arms" or "light weapons" would be more precise than "handguns"
Where "light weapons" are literally thousands of rocket launches against various targets in Israel.
Iron Dome exists due to "small lightly equipped militia" in Palestine.
Exceptionally well put. I had to comment that this is exactly my take on this and I couldn’t have put it better in such a palatable few sentences.
> Hamas, after years of being supressed, is a group of militants with handguns.
I can't believe people still peddle this bullshit. Hamas are a well organised and a well-funded terrorist organisation that is also the governing body in Gaza.
So anything from "back alley" support from Iran to fingers in hundreds of millions in yearly humanitarian aid. I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas had total funding near the same level as IDF.
You don't get a separate "rocket attacks on Israel" Wikipedia entry with "just guns": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_... You don't get to fire Russian- and Iranian-built Grad, Katyusha, or Fajr-5 and pretend "it's just a group of militants with guns"
Check out Israels geography. If those "militants with handguns" hadn't gotten themselves distracted massacring people at a festival, they may well have reached Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in a couple of hours. As it is it's practically a miracle there wasn't a mass uprising of armed palestinians in the West Bank and Israel proper.
Your "assymetrical" point is especially bizzare. Palestinian terrorists have shown nothing but tremendous willingness and enthusiasm for attacking jews with literally anything they can lay their hands on including screwdrivers and vehicles. The total imbalance of forces doesn't deter them at all. Why would they having more weapons or Israel less change anything?
The main reason large portions of the strip has been flattened is because Hamas built tunnels underneath it.
You say it's disproportionate, but spend a couple of hours reading up israels history and geography. You might arrive at some conclusions about the nature of Palestinian terror (if the parent story wasn't enough). I doubt you could come up with literally any other solution. The only one i can think of is a mass evacuation of the gaza strip. It would have prevented a huge amount of deaths.
I think the main lesson jews learnt from the holocaust is not to rely on the rest of the world to help them when they are in trouble. I have absolutely no idea why you would think they must prioritise the moral lessons they learned above their own safety.
The thing with Gaza is that HAMAS there had 20 years of unlimited power, wholly funded by the UN/US/Qatar aid. Gaza literally has no other significant income streams.
HAMAS spent this time to build a network of tunnels below the streets, and to stockpile ammo/explosives. They could care less about the people, using them only as human shields. They also actively brainwashed the population: https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/b1fjucpdgg
So what would be a "proportional" answer from Israel? They don't have any good options.
> The Isrealli response to those terrorist with guns killing and abducting some of their people, was to flatten and impose collective punishment on the whole country that those people came from.
To give you the sense of scale, HAMAS murdered 1195 people, and they also took 250 people as hostages (somehow pro-Palestinian protesters almost never knew about this!). And 1500 people is a HUGE number for a tiny country like Israel (Jewish population of 7200000). Scaled to the size of the US, this would be aroud 70000 people, many times the size of 9/11.
Not to mention that as soon as the IDF pulled out, Hamas immediately started dragging Palestinians out into the streets and publicly executing them for “collaboration” crimes real or imagined. The #1 killer of Palestinians is Hamas itself.
It’s pure cowardice that they fight the way they do, mixing all their military equipment with civilian infrastructure like hospitals and schools, and they rely on propagandizing gullible Western liberals (as well as anti-semites) to get support for their murderous cause.
There is no way to fight them that doesn’t endanger civilians. And there’s no way for Israeli Jews to continue breathing without fighting Hamas. Anyone who doesn’t believe that is living in a fantasy.
There’s objective facts about the two combatants. One weighs more and hits harder. The bigger one argues that a fight is a fight, and should be allowed to use their full fury.
In full anarchy, the bigger person is rational. Regardless, the bigger person seeks to make some semblance of a case of why their perspective is not immoral, and they mostly can’t. It’s not both rational and moral (as much as they want delude themselves out of moral accountability), it is simply just rational which means one actor is truly psychopathic.
> Personally I feel that there are no heroes and everyone sucks in this situation, except for the innocent bystanders on both sides who are being caught in the crossfire.
Wow, what a daring and brave opinion. I'm in awe that you're willing to share it publically!
Like, a bunch of my local social media bubble has been talking about "media literacy" and "illiteracy" and related concepts and this is a great example.
If, for example, someone is telling you that a publically terrible act of violence by someone associated with palestine is probably a response to previous israeli actions, they are not, in fact, secretly trying to imply that the terrorist is a hero.
They're simply trying to explain the likely consequences of actions.
One of the things that I find most frustrating in certain types of discussions is the idea that we can't do something that will improve the lives of large numbers of people on the off chance that a bad person won't get punished or someone undeserving will be rewarded.
It's entirely probable that the solution that improves the lives of the most people in that region will also involve quite a few awful people not getting punished.
In this and so many things now I fear that we’re discarding the idea that “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”.
I’m not sure if I’d put the balance there, but certainly not at “it is better that a hundred innocents suffer than than one guilty person escapes”
Maybe Hamas should also stop killing them too
I mean obviously yes.
I think it varies. I've seen everything from people simply caring about the wellbeing of Palestinian civilians to rabid Hamas supporters and everything in between. I think it's easy to get stuck in an environment where you mostly see views that align with your own or are the complete opposite (with a corresponding dunk) and it's easy to get rage baited.
There’s a lot of ideological snap-to-grid.
This is a fantastic analogy for ideological preferences.
Also we're a bunch of strangers making very short comments, it's hard to convey the entire nuance of one's opinion on a complex topic.
It does not help that people feel passionately about these things on the basis on media reporting.
As I said in another comment, my own experience of living in two countries, and reading media from a few others, is that it inaccurate, sometimes wildly so. Sometimes dishonestly so - and dishonesty often comes from simple laziness.
News is often highly decontextualized, to our detriment. This site is a nice idea, because seeing echoes of today in old news is a starting point for adding a little bit of context back in. A lot of people live in a permanent rage-state induced by the simple good vs evil narratives that are so easy to spin when the context is obscured. These narratives break down when you start to piece together why events unfold the way they do.
I am Italian, that was one of the proudest moment in our history.
The Achille Lauro episode was an example of Italy choosing what's best for the region rather than what's best for the people across the Atlantic. Hundreds of hostages' lives were saved by the actions of the Italian Government that day.
For context, in the post WW2 era, hundreds of Italian civilians were killed in accidents caused by US military operations in Italy, and our spineless leaders did nothing. In many cases they actively helped covering up the truth. Two of many examples:
FWIW I was watching a warfare simulation game on YouTube yesterday, and the players were talking about the 1998 Cavalese cable. I remembered reports of it vividly; as a student pilot, one of my recurrent nightmares is of massive electrical cables everywhere, flying through that and trying to escape.
It was far worse for the people on that cable car. It was awful then and still awful now.
With that same logic me objecting to Iraq War I supported Saddam’s terror regime. Just because you think Israel actions are bloody genocidal war crimes does not mean that Hamas terror is justified or that some guy in a wheel chair should be killed. Yes, there is some young people who seem to get all of their information from social media and have absolutely no understanding of what is happening - they support Hamas, or claim that US have no dog in the fight.
Palestina-Syria was a term coined for the region by Emperor Hadrian after the destruction of the Second Temple, so 40 years is nothing in the timeline of this whole conflict. The modern Zionism goes back to the 19th Century and the Israel occupation and oppression of Palestinians at least to 1948. So no, this skirmosh at the sea gave you very litlle understanding of why things are like they are, why the violence continues and how US has been funding this conflict the whole time.
If you actually want to understand what this conflict feels for a regular Palestinian just trying to live, listen this interview: https://pca.st/episode/4f0099d2-2c6e-4751-b1e1-e0913fa25734
do you have any suggestions for those who want to understand what this conflict feels for a regular Israeli just trying to live
or Israelis 40 years ago today
or 75 years ago
or Palestinian Jews 100 years ago
etc
Here’s a good starting point for learning about the situation:
“Our Genocide” https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide
This book too:
“The 100 Years War on Palestine” https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Years-War-Palestine-Coloniali...
If you have read any newspaper or media publication for past 75 year, you have got their view. Or any of the several films Hollywood has produced about the subject, ever heard of Spielberg?
Read diaries of anyone heteronormative living in a collapsing empire.
The Israeli experience is swayed heavily by decades of supremacist propaganda which is unfortunately becoming baked into the religion. I've had a surprising number of conversations with Israelis about politics that at some point involved them mentioning Israelis being "god's chosen people."
Even Israeli progressives have to couch opposition to war in desire to get the hostages back, or they'll face incredible social blowback. Not to mention those with religious oppositions to serving in the military are propagandized as "not contributing to Israeli society," since the only valid way to do that is commit violence on behalf of the State.
A lot of Israelis who reference “God’s chosen people” aren’t claiming superiority in the way it’s often interpreted abroad. In Jewish tradition, “chosen” historically means chosen for responsibility, not privilege. The phrase “light unto the nations” captures this: it’s about modeling ethical behavior, justice, and compassion, not dominating or controlling others.
Understanding this helps separate the original ethical meaning of “chosen” from the way it’s sometimes misinterpreted in political discourse: it’s meant to be a call to moral responsibility, not a claim of inherent superiority.
Reminds me of the Frenchs and their "pays des droits de l'homme", although I don't believe it's been as operational as the "chosen people" in practice.
> chosen” historically means chosen for responsibility, not privilege.
> moral responsibility
Yes, this is identical to how it was stated by the three separate Israelis I had this conversation with that said it exactly this way.
I ask genuinely if you understand this:
Do you see how believing that a supreme being has granted "your people" a moral responsibility could easily lead to any actions "your people" do being ipso facto "moral" by definition of the fact it's performed by "your people?"
Do you see how just the mere separation of people into "chosen by god (even just to live better)" and "not chosen by god (not responsible for living better)" can easily create a supremacist ideology?
Do you understand that, from a scientific perspective framed in sociology and anthropology, there's no such thing as a Jewish person or non Jewish person in any externally consistent definition, that the definition is only enforceable by internal justifications, and that therefore it's arbitrary who is chosen and who isn't? And therefore exploitable by supremacists? See: e.g. Whiteness; Jews are white when it's convenient, and nonwhite when not convenient, same for Italians, Irish, Catholics...
Not to mention: Hassidic Jews in Israel refuse to participate in the military. Other Israeli Jews say this is traitorous to the Jewish people, not doing their part to keep Jews safe. Some Israelis say horribly racist things about Palestinians, comparing them to animals and openly calling for their extermination. Others don't. Which Jewish people are correctly implementing the moral responsibility set forth by the Jewish god?
You’re right that claims of being “chosen” can be misused, but in classical Judaism it means chosen for personal moral responsibility, not automatic virtue or supremacy. The phrase “light unto the nations” emphasizes modeling justice, compassion, and humility through your own actions. Anyone who interprets it as justification for harming others or claiming inherent superiority is a fringe distortion, not representative of Jewish teaching.
I remember someone sharing news about companies like Shell fearing boycotts. So they restructured and sold or moved the companies they had out of Israel. Turns out the news was dated several decades ago.
There were always peaks where different people held different opinions about the conflict. When they were startups, they'd be vocal about genocide or say, renting out stolen land on Airbnb. As they become bigger and raise more money, they start taking selfies with Voldemort.
> I wonder how many of those people would be happy to throw an American in a wheelchair off a ship in the name of the Palestinian cause.
Not sure I follow. Are you upset at the Pro-Palestinians? Today? Do you think that throwing a person in a wheelchair off a boat makes it ok to be silent about Israel's genocide? or makes Pro-Palestinians bad?
Your opinions of what is happening now should be a bit more comprehensive and in-depth than the opinions and perceptions of the public from 40 years ago. Social media as it is known today was non-existant. And news in mainstream media was well controlled and manipulated, and less independent, yet had the facade of professionalism and integrity. So there was a lot of news about Palestinians that just were not reported, and if they were reported, were in subdued form.
It's been going on for a bit longer than 40 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_co...
> From the perspective of 2025, I can't help but think about the people I know today getting vocally angry about Israeli violence in the Gaza strip
It's really just a question of if collective punishment is ethical, which I say it isn't, and whether genocide is ever justifiable, which I say it isn't.
> From the perspective of 2025, I can't help but think about the people I know today getting vocally angry about Israeli violence in the Gaza strip, and suggesting that this violence has implications for US politics - and I wonder how many of those people would be happy to throw an American in a wheelchair off a ship in the name of the Palestinian cause.
I'm quite unsure what this is trying to imply. Israel committed genocide in Gaza, this much is established, and even the skeptics about the word "genocide" admit at least "war crimes". How does knowing that there terrorists from that place murdererd a person in a wheelchair in 1985 change one's view about that?!
May I remind you that Israel murdered over one hundred people in Gaza for over two years. Some of those were even in wheelchairs. Would you like a link to videos, uncensored ones? Double-tap attacks on hospitals? Maybe the screams will not let you sleep at night.
--
Nobody sane would perform the reasoning "Irish terrorists killed hundreds of British people in the 70s and 80s" ergo "the British army should destroy 85% of buildings in Ireland". But apparently s/Ireland/Palestine/ and it's a normal acceptable thing to say!
Finally, "suggesting that this violence has implications for US politics", of course it does. Israel is a major US ally and gets billions of dollars in funding. Of course it has implications on US policy, from diplomacy to finance.
Without mentioning the source of the articles, it's completely useless. It would be hard to detect completely AI hallucinated articles, without a possibility to check the authenticity of the content.
> It would be hard to detect completely AI hallucinated articles, without a possibility to check the authenticity of the content.
you can check in a public library or https://google.com
An automated system was already made to collect and sort them, that system should provide it's sources. I can self-fact-check anything, but a system that could provide origin sources and didn't is just AI slop.
If human-generated content like this did not provide source would that be called “human slop”? what about system automated by a human coder without help of AI, also “human slop”?
I agree. Why does this need to be AI?
Are you volunteering to transcribe it?
Surely there are Wikipedia articles about these events, or news articles from the time?
“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
A similar result can be found by reading coverage of events you witnessed or topics you know well.
Reading mainstream coverage of tech is certainly what made me lose confidence in much of their other reporting.
Back when tech was this niche thing 20+ years ago, media's illiteracy on the matter was forgivable. Now that it's omnipresent and represents a huge portion of the economy, not so much. Yet the accuracy of the reporting on events that I have familiarity with has barely improved.*
* Acknowledging that this is subjective and I don't have any way to quantify it.
Its the same in many areas. You have just escaped Gell-Mann amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Inaccuracy is a common complaint about science reporting.
If you look at how a country is reported in another country, it is often highly inaccurate. In my case its mostly been how Sri Lanka is reported in the UK, but I have also seen lots of inaccurate reporting of the UK in American media (and not restricted to any type of media or political side.)
I have seen quite a bit of inaccurate reporting of business and finance.
Lots of bad reports of survey data, especially related to things like religious and political attitudes. Often the result of badly (or dishonestly) crafted questions.
> just escaped [..]
About 20 years ago, haha, but yes. Am familiar with that term from Crichton.
> [..] UK in American media
If it's any consolation, much of the reporting I see on America in American media is also inaccurate.
> survey data
To me this is perhaps the most egregious bad faith reporting I see. The survey questions themselves are often designed in a way that will likely produce a given result, whether through malice or incompetence. Then the reporting on those results buries the actual questions asked.
I saw one recently, from the early 2000s, that said "majority of Americans cannot locate the Middle East on a map".
But the actual survey's findings were "the majority of Americans can not identify the Middle East on a map".
And what did it mean by that? It was a multiple choice question and if you failed to include the correct extent of North Africa that is regarded as the Middle East, you were considered unable to identify the Middle East.
Something like 85% correctly included Saudi Arabia.
Reading almost any mass media article on encryption makes me want to scream.
The classic Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect
A great way to do this is to subscribe to a weekend edition of a good newspaper.
Reminder that you can see last week's (or any day's) HN front page using the `past` link
This is really cool, but the tone about not feeling urgency is weird. These are monumental events worth studying and reviewing and reading these headlines even today feels like an adrenaline rush. All of this is still relevant for understanding our world.
I remember Leon going overboard. Too bad this is not adjustable, fifty years ago (the 70s) would be more interesting. Certainly a lot more bank robberies, hijackings and both domestic and international terrorism. Not to mention all the political and econ stuff.
Weird to see two wildly different news related to India.
One about a famous Indian charlatan (a.k.a "guru"; the guru industry is most flourishing these days):
> Rajneesh Pleads Guilty to Sham Marriages, to Leave U.S. Immediately
> Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh pleaded guilty Thursday to arranging sham marriages, agreeing to leave the United States immediately. In a plea bargain, Rajneesh received a suspended 10-year prison sentence and was fined $300,000, which includes $140,000 in prosecution costs.
and another about a well known (I guess across the world?) plane crash:
> Explosion Implicated in Air-India Jumbo Jet Crash
> India's director of air safety announced that an explosion in the cargo hold apparently caused the crash of an Air-India Jumbo jet last June, killing all 329 people aboard the flight from Canada to Bombay.
Note: this ^ was unseated as the deadliest act of aviation terrorism until 9/11 decades later.
I've always wanted a news source with a 4 week delay. This would filter out so much of the noise: rage bait articles about what a politician said, articles about what -may- happen that just promote doomscrolling... Wikipedia sort of does this, but you have to know which articles to look at (though on the upside, you get a lot more historical context).
If something isn't worth knowing about one month later, it probably wasn't news in the first place.
Well, there are monthly international newspapers and magazines. That you can even pay so they can afford not to have to rely on AI and have (hopefully) real journalists do the work. That are also available in digital form. I agree with you that the flood of streaming news is neither healthy nor helpful in creating priorities and perspective. Let's not starve the obvious alternative, as long as it still exists.
Ragebait sells.
If you really want to understand issues you will do it by spending the time (probably less time) you spend on reading the new on reading books instead.
Source or country of origin would be nice.
“Opposition leader Aquino” in article without any other context could be confusing
Are you under the impression there were a lot of opposition news back in the day if one was just brave enjfffff?
> India's director of air safety announced that an explosion in the cargo hold apparently caused the crash of an Air-India Jumbo jet last June, killing all 329 people aboard the flight from Canada to Bombay
I forgot what tab opened and I assumed that the report for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_171 was out. Took me a few minutes to realize this wasn't the same crash.
Related: On https://olduse.net/ you can replay Usenet News with a 40-year delay.
I like the idea vrry much, also because it brings up news from my childhood so it is cool to see them again now and compare with what I remember from back then. BUT, as others mentioned, you really need to publish the sources of each article.
this is pretty awesome! would love to see a few different "sections" like Business, Culture, etc.
Also mixing and matching typography, especially for article headings, would go a long way. See e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/elections/...
Or for a direct link to (a small) 1984 image: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2016/11/01/front-pages...
Also maybe making the layout wider and more compact. And maybe, just maybe, picking 1-2 articles to have pictures.
You should probably also use a masonry layout like https://piccalil.li/blog/a-simple-masonry-like-composable-la...
Good idea and execution. Adding the metadata mentioned by others in the thread would improve. Otherwise this is a legit cool project.
> The system ingests raw newspaper scans and uses a multi-step LLM pipeline to generate the daily edition
This is neat! But I wonder about longevity of the project if it relies on scanning newspapers.
Do you have an endless suply? Perhaps there is some digital archive you could use?
My Wikipedia Library membership gives me access to some cool resources that might be of interest:
- Arcanum is the largest and continuously expanding digital periodical database from Eastern Europe, which contains scientific and specialized journals, encyclopaedias, weekly and daily newspapers and more
- NewspaperARCHIVE.com is an online database of digitized newspapers, with over 2 billion news articles; coverage extends from 1607 to the present from US, Canada, the UK, and 20 other countries.
- Newspapers.com includes more than 800 million pages from 20,000+ newspapers. The collection includes some major newspapers for limited periods (e.g., first 72 years of the New York Times), but mostly consists of US regional papers from the 1700s to the late 1980s. Free accounts through the Wikipedia Library include access to Newspapers.com Publisher Extra content.
- ProQuest is a multidisciplinary research provider. This access includes ProQuest Central, which includes a large collection of journals and newspapers, Literature Online, the HNP Chinese Newspaper Collections, and the Historical New York Times.
- Wikilala is a digital repository consisting of more than 109,000 documents in printed form, including 45,000 newspapers, 32,000 journals, 4,000 books and 26,000 articles concerning the history of the Ottoman Empire from its founding to the modern times.
Also most newspapers maintain their own archives, usually accessible online. Here's some I get access to: The Corriere della Sera (one of Italy's oldest and most read newspapers); The Corriere della Sera (a century of historical archives); The Times of Malta (Founded in 1935, it is the oldest daily newspaper still in circulation in Malta); ZEIT ONLINE (online version of Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper) — and quite a few more
NewspaperARCHIVE.com's cloudflare configuration is a bit paranoid
That's very cool, but I lack the 500+ total edits on Wikipedia to qualify.
My first edit was 20 years ago this month and at my current pace I'll be able to access that in another 588 years.
Is there some other way to pay [Wikipedia/WMF] for access to that bundle?
The 500 edits required for access to TWL is actually for all of the sites under the Wikimedia banner. If you're having trouble finding things to edit on Wikipedia, you can try their other sites such as Wikisource or Wikibooks.
On Wikisource in particular, it's fairly easy to make useful edits through validating proofread pages or proofreading simple pages (both of which can be easily found in the Monthly Challenge).
Nope, there's no way to pay for access to the bundle as it's meant solely for core Wikipedia contributors. However, many of these services independently offer paid access
Thanks, I figured as much. I looked at a few of the sites you mentioned and saw they have subscription offerings. I'm not shy about subscribing to stuff, but my use of it would be so seldom I can't justify it.
Maybe I'll just 10x how often I make edits so that I'm merely 59 years away from hitting 500.
Copyright issues will stop this soon. 40 year old newspaper articles aren't public domain yet in most countries. A gray area could be a newspaper that went out of business decades ago. Or maybe some government run newspaper that was public domain in the first place.
As OP said, these aren't the newspaper articles. They're AI generated stories based off the facts of the events.
As long as news was published on this day 40 years ago, why would supply matter?
Yeah... caused me to read up on the cold war and Mutually Assured Destruction, and it was just plainly insane. Something like, "If you built missile defenses then that would mean that you could be more motivated to attack first so if we even think that you're building missile defenses then we will have to build more nukes to compensate and that'll be worse for both so please stop researching how to defend yourself for both of our sakes"
The one that should probably really freak you out was/is the Soviet "Dead Hand" system. Who needs people deciding whether to launch?
This is great! but in my opinion it needs the links to the original stories. Also a version without AI generation would be preferred by myself. I could be interesting to have I toggle button on the page to toggle on /off the AI stuff.
> wondered if there was a way to satisfy the urge to doomscroll without the anxiety.
Hmm, I like the idea. But interestingly, it immediately brought back my 40 year old anxieties.
I remember seeing "Germany 9PM News 30 years ago" reporting about the quite accidental opening of the Berlin Wall.
This YouTube channel posts the news bulletin of 45 years ago, daily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS7E58zLcws . For our American readers, it has the exoticism of 70's/80's Europe.
Love it! Interesting to read these, and you must have a good prompt underneath
I like doing this with my local paper but from a hundred+ years ago.
It's funny to read that the electric street car opening day was delayed because they built the tracks at the wrong gauge for the street cars. Beaurocratic mismanagement in the 1890's.
That must be what inspired them to approach San Francisco's Central Subway in a similar fashion!
Guys.. 40 years ago was the 80s :(
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-21-mn-2106-s...Police Open Fire as 50,000 Protest Outside Pretoria L.A. Times Archives Nov. 21, 1985 12 AM PTMakes me recall a similar story happening in our times in the world. The headline does not mention "Black". [Security force] indiscriminately is killing. World says nothing.
It’s in Pretoria, South Africa, so the context would’ve been immediately obvious to anyone reading at the time.
Considering how asleep the civil rights movement was in America over South Africa Apartheid, I don't think most people understood the context.
This is super cool. Can you make one that does 140?
I've read political books from the 70s. Nothing has changed at all in politics since then. Just what was going on in San Francisco at the time took over the whole country.
The last big change was the death of Stalin. He was a genuine threat to the world order being so incredibly capable and ruthless. After that things settled back into the current long slide to "the end of history." Xi's China seems to be opening up a new era of great power conflicts.
The Israelis and the Palestinians have been doing awful shit to each other for 80 years. All the arguments are the same as 50 years ago. Little has changed. Boring.
Some years ago I had a similar thing happening to me based on a friend who would gift me his finished The Economist issues with usually a 1 or 2 week delay.
When you read the news even one week later you already realize which stories didn't stay in the public's interest or didn't develop further and you just skip them, while those which did allow you to actually read the first hand accounts without much of the spin added afterwards.
It also removed most of the urge for being angry or sensational about stuff because you realize many stories aren't as bad as it seems on the day they are published (The Economist as a weekly publication does a lot of filtering of course anyway due to their publishing schedule).
There's one front page new that allude to events happening in December 7th and 8th despite dating to November 22nd.
I assume you select the stories automatically, but the time of the story might not be correct.
Cool concept!
I have a pet peeves to report: the dark vs. light mode switch should have three choices: light, dark and system. I just can’t believe how many sites don’t do that properly.
We didn't start the fire... as a service.
"We Didn't Start the Fire" covers 1949-1989, it just barely manages to avoid both WWII and the fall of the USSR and therefore _understates_ its case, if anything.
You know the rules… and so do I
Wow.
Given that I was around (though young) for that and still mostly forgot about it, I imagine "Star Wars," as a reference to the US/USSR missile thing is probably mostly COMPLETELY unknown to the youngsters?
TIL. Who was who?
Also (unrelated to my knowledge): https://olduse.net/
I've wanted a way to listen to a local radio stations broadcast--including ads and dj banter--from this day X years ago.
That would be really fun. Unfortunately, I'd be surprised if the recordings still exist from the pre-"it's all digital" era, which is more recent than most people would think.
Even in the digital era, I wonder how long radio stations keep full recordings of their broadcasts for
Not sure, but I'd be surprised if there's not a third party company that retains them all the way there is for broadcast TV.
I like it.
An interesting twist would be to somehow (not sure how) have a followup on the later importance of the news item, which was so worthy of news at that time. I'd guess the vast majority would be "not important by next year". You'd need a creative way to define and convey it, while still being accurate.
It says "Weather: Partly cloudy, 72°F". Normally, I'd ask "where" (not here in New England!) ... but in this case, "when"? Is this the weather from 40 years ago also? (and if so ... I guess "where").
>A reminder that urgency fades, context grows, and perspective is a habit.
That is such a great line. I also feel like 99% of the news is just noise, in terms of not adding anything actionable to our lives, nor is it growing our perspective.
In contrast, I really like Wikipedia articles about current events. They feel much more to the point than news articles.
I'd be good to see a top news of the months in the past 100 years :)
It requires access to HTML canvass to generate shareable links. Why? Fingerprinting?
40 years from now would be fun too. What would President Zuckerberg do?
Semirelatedly: if you're in a major US metro, your library card (which, where I live, you get online and in real time) gets you the archives of a bunch of major newspapers, plus your local newspapers. The suburban Oak Park, IL take on Nazism pre-WW2 was wild to read (online, after a very brief search). If you haven't, I recommend taking the 10 minutes to figure out what you can search through your library system.
I would like to add an RSS/Atom feed for this into my Elfeed setup without context/proper tags so I can confuse myself.
News cooldown
I like this because I can read the newspapers of my youth, when I couldn't read international papers like a can today, not that I read any papers.
Fun fact: I emigrated on the Achille Lauro , half way around the world, over a decade before it was hijacked.
Wow, that's wild
Given some of the ways we are still paying for the decisions of the Reagan administration to this day, this is not as reassuring as you make it out to be. If anything it just demonstrates how destructive a president and their administration can be and how the repercussions can be felt for decades.
Yeah many of the things people thought were a big deal turned out not to be, but plenty of things did…
Just a reminder that HN has a similar function with its 'past' link in the header/nav bar shown on most pages. For example, here is 15 years ago to the day:
The local daily newspaper has always a small column, somewhere in the middle, with the front page title from 10, 20, 30,..., 90 years ago.
It's always "funny" because it's often something like
90 years ago: 4kg onion found at local farm
80 years ago: Allied troops suffer massive casualties in a German counter-attack at Messina
70 years ago: The ren faire opens tomorrow
Woha! Cool stuff. Would be fantastic to be able to configure the number of years back.
>The Senate on Thursday approved a nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and China, allowing U.S. firms to provide China with materials and technology for its civilian nuclear power program. The Senate approved the agreement via a voice vote passage of a resolution with no debate before its passage. This approval happened amidst a long-running debate on a farm bill. The agreement had been shelved due to fears about China using technology to help other nations build atomic weapons. President Reagan's trip to China marked the initialing of the agreement last year.
china in many respects a better steward of american nuclear technology than america
I guess it makes sense to skip the hurricane
I will pay for this. Thank you.
I just use this script in a terminal. It needs curl, lame and minimodem. Easy and quick on any GNU/Linux or BSD distro, or WSL2:
#!/bin/sh curl -s http://internet-tty.net:8000/ITTY \ | lame --decode --quiet --mp3input - - \ | minimodem --rx rtty -f - -a --print-filter -iWhat does this do?
It gets news over RTTY (the ancient teletype, some sort of radio comms used by journalist, military and so on). Curl just downloads the HTTP stream to the standard output, as a music player would do with a online radio. The stream it's in MP3 format, so the terminal output it's piped (chained) to LAME's input. LAME it's an infamous MP3 decoder for Unix/Linux since the old Napster times. This part of the command, as you could guess, send the converted WAV data (raw audio, like the ones from music CD's) to the standard output and then that stream it's being sent to minimodem, which parses the RTTY signal in its own native format.
RTTY signal in MP3 -> Convert it to a raw WAV -> decode the raw RTTY signal to a readable a TXT output.
If you had a ham radio tuner (phisycal radio, with an antenna and the like) and you picked some RTTY signal at non-commercial radio frequencies, if you jacked a wire from the speakers' output from that radio tuner to the input of your sound card, you could do almost the same with just the Minimodem command, as you were already getting the audio format in WAV/RAW, and you could get the same news output with less effort.
Neat! I decided to play around with it (mostly, to be honest, because I was curious what it sounded like) - and it's really interesting to see it stream in a few bytes at a time
40 years ago I was 2 years out of college so I remember these stories well. It may be interesting to do 24/40/60 years ago so people of different ages can get a similar effective experience.
> uses a multi-step LLM pipeline
LLM? Ok thanks but no thanks.
One of my favorite website is the one that replays 9/11 live on 9/11 every year.
Can you share the link?
TIL it works everyday!
> 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.
Sometimes, a sense of time and real social interactions comes from small reflections found in nonfiction books of that era. Not 40, but 50 years ago-taken from a nonfiction book unrelated to politics: Lost! by Thomas Thompson , written in 1975. [1]
> Though he had opposed the Vietnam war, he considered himself a political moderate, certainly not a knee-jerk liberal who cried “fascist” at everything attempted by Richard Nixon
Honestly, I’m not expecting anything good from Trump in the coming years, but this line genuinely gave me hope that American democracy is still not in danger.
[1] https://archive.org/details/lost0000thom_j3f3/page/124/mode/...
sweet
> The system ingests raw newspaper scans and uses a multi-step LLM pipeline to generate the daily edition
Why would such a project possibly benefit for using LLMs to garble the text? Jesus christ the news are right there, just print them without rewriting them using a chatbot -.-
Wouldn't the NYT or whoever object to someone reposting their articles?
I think the NYT is involved in lawsuit claiming garbling them through an LLM is still copyright violation. In any case you could link to them and display the headline, and maybe the first sentence.
clicks on home page
> FBI Agents, White Supremacist Leader Engage in Deadly Standoff
> Police Fire on Black Protesters in Pretoria Suburb; Deaths Reported
> Something about Jewish people
> Communism
I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same eh.
I feel like the implication here is "see, it's not so bad, the world didn't end, not a big deal!" But plenty of these articles describe small events that absolutely contributed to world changing, and often world degrading, things. For better or worse the collapse of the Soviet Union completely changed the world and I've heard compelling arguments this had consequences as faraway as the weakening of Unions in America and the subsequent degredation of labor protections. Or the fall of one of the three world lowers led to one becoming far too powerful (USA) rather than having a somewhat more balanced tri-hegemony.
There's articles about the ongoing conflict against Palestine, the failure to resolve which through choosing escalation of settling and apartheid we still obviously feel today and which led to tragedies such as 9/11 and Oct 7 having fertile grounds to occur.
We see the application of "Reaganomics" (neoliberalism) in Western democracies so we can watch real time as regulations are turned into tools of Capital or defanged to allow corporations to run rampant, the dismantling of labor protections, and the beginning of privatization.
If anything this just teaches the lesson of "no actually the things that are happening really do matter." I say that as someone that doesn't read the news and believes that that makes me much less stressed out than other people I know who daily read the news. But for me it's less about reading the news or not and more about accepting lost causes - for example, I see the USA as a lost cause for a comfortable and safe life for the duration of my lifetime, and so I left, and now I don't really care about internal politics there the same way I don't care about starving children in Africa - well of course I care in my heart but in my mind I don't stress day to day about it because what can I do other than the occasional donation? So too for daily suffering in America and so I don't read about it to uselessly add to my sadness or stress.
Yeah like one of the top articles today is Reagan arguing for tax reform, the spark that kicked off the insane inequality we deal with today.
