The NYT is unreadable without a subscription, but dropping it would throw away
real signal -- knowing the NYT covered a story is corroboration, and it feeds
importance. So sources carry a `paywalled` flag: they still cluster and
corroborate, but are never chosen as the link for a notification or a headline
when a readable report of the same story exists, and are marked in the UI.
Deliberately NOT doing paywall circumvention. The fix is to prefer a source you
can actually read, and to add outlets that do not have the problem.
Five free New York outlets added, all verified live: The City, Gothamist,
New York Focus, Documented NY and amNY -- independent and largely nonprofit,
covering the NYC politics the NYT was being relied on for. Hell Gate was probed
too and has no discoverable feed at any of the usual paths.
Includes an additive migration for the new column, since CREATE TABLE IF NOT
EXISTS will not add a column to a table that already exists.
Connor: too much world news, very little software/aerospace/urbanism/Cincinnati.
Measuring found three separate causes.
1. The digest ranked by max(interest, importance), and importance is largely a
"big world news" detector -- 22 of 28 slots were entered on the importance
axis. A personal reading list ordered by global importance is the wrong
objective. The bulk of the digest is now ranked by INTEREST, with a bounded
allowance (digest_importance_slots = 6) so a major event still makes the
record on a busy day.
2. No per-group cap, so conflict and diplomacy took 18 of 28 slots.
digest_max_per_group = 4, with unused capacity flowing back to the best
remaining items so a quiet day still fills.
3. HN maturation could never happen. Items came only from `search_by_date`,
which returns posts at 2-3 points; once one ages out of the newest window its
score is never refetched, so it can never clear the bar and HN's best content
was structurally invisible. 45 software clusters were sitting in
"aggregator-immature". Added the front page via the `search` endpoint, which
returns the crowd's verdict (measured: median 117 points, max 912) and whose
re-polling is what actually supplies maturation. hn_min_score 150 -> 100,
since a higher bar rejects most of the front page.
Digest went from 8 groups (conflict 10, diplomacy 8, software 0) to 13 groups
with a far flatter distribution, and the software slot is now
"Benchmarking Qwen3.8 27B quantizations" -- the local-inference material that
was asked for.
Process note: the first two attempts at this silently did nothing. I used
str.replace() without asserting the anchor matched, so a stale anchor wrote the
file back unchanged while reporting success, and I measured "no change" twice
before checking the file. Edits here now assert before writing.
Reading real clustered output caught a config error the tests could not:
Ohio Capital Journal and Kentucky Lantern are both States Newsroom outlets
syndicating the same national desk, and carried 10 byte-identical headlines in a
single poll -- more than any other source pair. Configured as separate buckets
they would have doubled the corroboration signal on every syndicated story,
which is exactly the failure the bucket concept exists to prevent.
Found by checking identical headlines across all source pairs rather than
spot-fixing the one noticed by eye. That sweep also confirmed the buckets
already set deliberately are right: BBC Top/World, Ars Technica/Science and
NPR News/Politics each share a bucket and each showed shared headlines.
Regression test added.
Second elicitation round. The significant correction is Connor's own framing:
"my actual war interest is low, but unfortunately all wars are important." The
click history looked war-heavy only because world-news feeds are war-heavy, so
geopolitics-at-weight-1.0 was reading the corpus, not the reader. Statecraft is
now its own block and armed conflict is five weighted bands (anti-imperial,
US-involved, Mideast/Israel, undercovered, general) routed mainly by importance.
New: space-aerospace at 0.95, the highest-weighted block -- Connor is an
aerospace engineer. Plus science-discovery, environment-ecology,
ohio-state-politics, left-movements, anticolonial-sovereignty, far-right-watch,
political-theory. Linux/ricing/neovim folded into software-systems.
Introduces `demote` blocks, distinct from hard vetoes, for categories adjacent to
real interests: crypto/AI hype sits next to AI regulation, culture-war outrage
next to far-right-watch, true crime next to criminal-justice policy. Hard-vetoing
those would take real stories with them -- the lesson from the Europa League
story that both a substring blocklist and a cosine threshold wrongly killed.
Sources 39 -> 56, all fetched and verified: space (SpaceNews, Spaceflight Now,
NASASpaceflight, NASA, ESA, Phys.org), Linux (Phoronix, LWN, It's FOSS,
r/unixporn), left/anticolonial (Intercept, Drop Site, Tribune, African
Arguments). Rejected on inspection: nature.rss is journal metadata ("Author
Correction: ...") and sciencedaily is a press-release mill.
Embedding stays English-only, measured rather than assumed: the same story in
Spanish and English scored 0.758 and 0.600 cosine against a random-pair p99 of
0.634, so one pair was indistinguishable from an unrelated article. Italy and
Mexico are covered by English-language sources instead.
Also fixes clustering performance: centroids are held in memory across a batch
instead of one SELECT plus a numpy rebuild per item, which had taken ~15 minutes
for 1,258 items.
Pipeline: fetch -> normalise -> embed (CPU) -> cluster. `news poll` runs a
cycle; `news sources` and `news clusters` inspect the result. Replay and the
live service share run_cycle so tuning and production cannot diverge -- the old
system's replay harness hardcoded default params and could never sweep the
thresholds it existed to tune.
Calibrated, not guessed:
- Cluster threshold 0.82, from reading real output. 0.70 merged "Solheim Cup
capsules" with "FIBA Women's World Cup Glance"; 0.82 gives clean groups (76
items on the AfD Saxony-Anhalt election, 27 on the Nepal tunnel rescue). The
old system produced 515 clusters of which 514 were singletons.
- Corroboration counts DISTINCT buckets, not feeds, so ten outlets reprinting
one wire story is one confirmation rather than ten.
Removed after measurement: a SimHash near-duplicate stage. It gave +1.2 bits of
separation on titles and -0.2 with summaries -- news duplicates are paraphrases,
which is the same lexical trap that sank the old Jaccard clustering.
Sources: all 39 fetched against the live web, not assumed. Dropped CBC (every
feed URL times out from this host) and Tech Policy Press (serves HTML at every
documented feed path). Fixed WVXU (index.rss is an empty stub; local-news.rss
works). Reddit moved to .rss because .json now 403s without OAuth, and its
intervals raised because it 429s after three quick requests. Deutsche Welle is
back: it ships RSS 1.0/RDF, which feedparser reads and the old hand-rolled
quick-xml parser could not.
connor