Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay (forty.news)
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)
78 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 85.0 ms ] threadThis 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?
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
“Opposition leader Aquino” in article without any other context could be confusing
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Fun fact: I emigrated on the Achille Lauro , half way around the world, over a decade before it was hijacked.
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
I assume you select the stories automatically, but the time of the story might not be correct.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, so I'm squinting my eyes and trying to imagine...Ok, so I'm an American in the 1940s just reading a news article about the discovery of extermination camps in Germany by allied forces. They just discovered these camps and they don't know yet quite how many people were killed. WW2 has just ended, information is just coming out, slowly. Incidentally I also subscribed to a magazine that prints daily news from 28-30 years ago and I coincidentally also just read, in a news items from 1915-1917, that some group of people calling themselves Zionists, whatever that means, killed a Swedish anthropologist in Palestine who was living with a Arab tribe that was being harrased by the group when attempting to intercede on the tribe's behalf.
And I'm supposed to think what exactly from these two tidbits of information? That Jews seem to have been on this violent chosen people gambit for a quite a long time and that the Nazis had a point?
Or maybe instead of answering that you can just ask the one in three Jews in New York who voted a pro-palestinian mayor into office why they didn't know any better. New York, incidentally a city that supposedly only rivals Tel Aviv in the number of Jewish residents residing in it.
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.
> 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.
If something isn't worth knowing about one month later, it probably wasn't news in the first place.
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.