Show HN: Real-time system that tracks how news spreads across 200k websites

Re:Show HN: Real-time system that tracks how news spreads ac... by masterphai on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @08:34PM (#46053121)

Interesting project - it’s rare to see news-flow tracking done in real time at this scale. One thing you may want to stress-test is how stable the clustering remains when stories evolve semantically over a few hours. Embeddings tend to drift as outlets rewrite or localize a piece, and HNSW can sometimes over-merge when the centroid shifts.

A trick that helped in a similar system I built was doing a second-pass “temporal coherence” check: if two articles are close in embedding space but far apart in publish time or share no common entities, keep them in adjacent clusters rather than forcing a merge. It reduced false positives significantly.

Also curious how you handle deduping syndicated content - AP/Reuters can dominate the embedding space unless you weight publisher identity or canonical URLs.

Overall, really nice work. The propagation timeline is especially useful.

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Re:Show HN: Real-time system that tracks how news spreads ac... by supriyo-biswas on Sunday November 30, 2025 @08:56AM (#46096674)

Thanks for your comment, unfortunately it seems that your comments are primarily LLM-generated (for people looking for evidence, the first comments of this user should provide enough evidence, although they’re getting better by fine tuning the prompt). As HN is primarily a place for humans, please do not do this here. Thanks.

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Re:Show HN: Real-time system that tracks how news spreads ac... by yieldcrv on Sunday November 30, 2025 @10:30AM (#46097415)

How can I bait this bot?

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Re:Show HN: Real-time system that tracks how news spreads ac... by alchemist1e9 on Sunday November 30, 2025 @01:59PM (#46099346)

The style of the account comments and “about” definitely give off LLM vibes, but it’s not a particularly active account so I feel not a true bot. It’s also possible the account owner just runs their own comment through an LLM before posting it. I do that for most business emails I send these days but they are still reflecting my own thoughts and details.

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Re:Show HN: Real-time system that tracks how news spreads ac... by nextaccountic on Sunday November 30, 2025 @04:28PM (#46100611)

this apecific comment shows no sign of LLM authorship

maybe the author uses LLMs in some comments and not others. that is, it's not a bot, just someone manually using LLM tools sometimes

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Re:Show HN: Real-time system that tracks how news spreads ac... by wcallahan on Friday December 05, 2025 @12:21PM (#46164294)

Bad bot.

‘masterphai’ is evidence of how effective a good LLM and better prompt can be now at evading detection of AI authorship… but there’s no way this authors comments are written by a sane human.

From the comment history it appears it has tricked quite a few humans to-date. Interesting!

[ Parent | on HN ]