YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The Philadelphia Inquirer built Scrape, an AI tool to surface hyperlocal news

39 points giuliomagnifico 3 days ago 13 comments

syntaxing 2 days ago | parent

I like this so much. Maybe I’m romanticizing but hoping tools like this give local news a chance against monopolies like Sinclair Broadcasting.

cyanydeez 2 days ago | parent

It'll merely generate hyper local bots that generate hyper local slop. The media landscape is downhill.

binarymax 2 hours ago | parent

Are search summaries slop?

ginko 2 hours ago | parent

Yeah

binarymax 1 hour ago | parent

It’s not a blanket ‘Yeah’. It’s a ‘sometimes’ and that sometimes depends on use. Distilling down a whole days worth of research is one of the best uses of AI.

irishcoffee 5 minutes ago | parent

My 12 year old told me that their friend group says "Oh I AI'd that" when they make a mistake, as a joke. Yet you trust AI to distill down a days worth of information in a 100% accurate way? When pre-teens already understand how unreliably they are?

mmooss 2 days ago | parent

> Early on, the team tried to balance quality with the high cost of searching many small, scattered sources. They discovered that prompting can implicitly control search depth and behavior, but only after trial and error.

I don't understand the cost here. The number of sources should be relatively tiny - it's not a general Internet search. The amount of data scraped would seem to be relatively tiny - how much data is there on suburban-county, PA?

tclancy 3 hours ago | parent

I think it’s more about how many different types of content you’re looking at. Public google calendars, Facebook event pages, personal sites, etc.

mrweasel 3 hours ago | parent

For the individual county it's probably not a ton of data, but multiply it up, it's a lot for all the counties in e.g. Philadelphia.

Normally there is data, meetings, events and so that you wouldn't report on in a newspaper, because it's really only relevant to maybe a few thousand people, but for those thousands it might be really important.

My city publishes a lot of stuff on their website, it's hard to find, relevant to maybe a thousand people, maybe less. The school board meetings, public utility companies, companies in general all publish massive amounts of information that's never surfaced, but is relevant to those living in the vicinity. Being able to collect all of this, sort it, assess it's relevans and produce hyper local news could be a massive boost for local grassroots movements and participation in local affairs and elections.

thephyber 3 hours ago | parent

Agree that the permutation becomes a problem, but the organization should be super simple: the state mandates the use of some standard index file format for all municipalities governments, not unlike how sitemap.xml works for a website index.

There is a community-run project that standardizes each election's results across states, counties, and precincts. It could be a template for local info releases.

calvinmorrison 3 hours ago | parent

http://www.mincedgarlic.org/inky.png

FL410 1 hour ago | parent

>The result: Scrape evolved from a small experiment to “load-bearing and critical infrastructure”

Please be satire

dec0dedab0de 31 minutes ago | parent

I'm still annoyed at them for shutting down philly.com