Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay
Mood
informative
Sentiment
positive
Category
startup_launch
Key topics
News
Historical Events
Natural Language Processing
Productivity
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)
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- 01Story posted
Nov 22, 2025 at 1:47 PM EST
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Nov 22, 2025 at 3:37 PM EST
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Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
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?
- 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
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?
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).
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
you can check in a public library or https://google.com
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
It was far worse for the people on that cable car. It was awful then and still awful now.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If something isn't worth knowing about one month later, it 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.
TIL it works everyday!
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 -.-
Police Open Fire as 50,000 Protest Outside Pretoria
L.A. Times Archives
Nov. 21, 1985 12 AM PT
Makes 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.
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.
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?
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.
RIP to all those innocent people.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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/...
Yeah many of the things people thought were a big deal turned out not to be, but plenty of things did…
china in many respects a better steward of american nuclear technology than america
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 assume you select the stories automatically, but the time of the story might not be correct.
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.
Hmm, I like the idea. But interestingly, it immediately brought back my 40 year old anxieties.
The background that’s alleged to have inspired this may not have even taken place. And if it at all did then I reckon it ought to inspire further dread. You get the intellectual simulation of “Big Events” with as much fog present as is in news today! And the onset of the end begins to feel like a 40-year-long screaming halt to civilization as you knew it!
This bites!
[1]: Take this link to what I believe is the source for the story on The Order member Mark Franklin Jones’s testimony for example https://newspaperarchive.com/walla-walla-union-bulletin-nov-... (Hacker News does not allow images in comments so I can not point to the replication of the story on forty.news).
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 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.
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.
Any way to left justify the text? The full justification is a bear to read.
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