Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay

3 points by foxbarrington 2 hours ago

This started as a reaction to a conversational trope. Despite being a tranquil place, even conversations at my yoga studio often start with, "Can you believe what's going on right now?" with that angry/scared undertone.

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)