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

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

The Hacker News discussion centers around a project that presents news from 40 years in the past, generated via an LLM pipeline processing raw newspaper scans. Three prevalent themes emerged from the comments:

1. Skepticism Regarding LLM Usage and Source Authenticity

Many users expressed strong reservations about the project's reliance on an LLM pipeline, voicing concerns that the AI rewriting process introduced inaccuracies, hallucination risks, or obscured the original sources, rendering the content less trustworthy than reading the original archival material.

"Without mentioning the source of the articles, it's completely useless. It would be hard to detect completely AI hallucinated articles, without a possibility to check the authenticity of the content." (andix)
"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 -.-" (andrepd)
"I could be interesting to have I toggle button on the page to toggle on /off the AI stuff." (inatreecrown2)

2. The Enduring Relevance of Past Issues

A significant portion of the discussion noted that reading news from decades ago often reveals that current global problems—such as political conflicts, economic policies, or social issues—are cyclical or have roots extending much further back than commonly perceived. This provided a sense of historical context that often felt alarming rather than comforting.

"It's funny that this site's tagline is 'Exactly 40 years back, these felt huge. See how they landed with time.' but so many of these stories are still just as alarming. If anything it often feels like we should've cared more." (culi)
"Many of today’s wars and conflicts were already ongoing; big pharma, big food, oil companies, corruption in our institutions, manufactured coups… it all feels like nothing ever really changes." (serial_dev)
"Current news: bad things are happening. 40 years old news: here are the bad decisions that led to bad things happening now." (tarsinge)

3. Access to Archival Data and Content Gating

The conversation quickly pivoted to how difficult it is for the average user to access deep historical archives. When one user mentioned access to valuable historical databases via a Wikipedia Library membership, others immediately lamented the contribution requirements needed to qualify, highlighting a general frustration with content being locked behind contribution thresholds or prohibitive paywalls.

"That's very cool, but I lack the 500+ total edits on Wikipedia to qualify." (mh-)
"Nope, there's no way to pay for access to the bundle as it's meant solely for core Wikipedia contributors." (culi)
"Can you make one that does 140?" (andai) [Requesting adjusted time frame, implying the current 40-year lock is arbitrary.]

🚀 Project Ideas

Source-Verified Historical News Aggregator (SVHNA)

Summary

A web service that curates and presents news articles from specific historical dates (e.g., 10, 20, 40 years ago) but strictly links to verifiable, digitized original sources (like NewspaperARCHIVE.com, ProQuest, or paywalled institutional archives accessible via library programs).
The core value proposition is delivering the historical context users crave without the LLM "slop" or unverifiable claims which drew heavy criticism.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Users interested in media literacy, historical research, and context-aware news consumption (e.g., those frustrated by AI-generated content or lack of sourcing).
Core Feature	Aggregation of historical headlines/snippets displayed alongside direct, clickable hyperlinks to the original digitized newspaper pages or primary source documents.
Tech Stack	Python/Scrapy for initial scraping/metadata extraction; A PostgreSQL database for indexing historical sources and linking URLs; React/Next.js for frontend presentation with robust source citation display.
Difficulty	Medium (Acquiring and maintaining stable, permissioned access to various paywalled historical archives is the main hurdle).
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

Why HN commenters would love it: Directly addresses the repeated and strong demand for sources: "Without mentioning the source of the articles, it's completely useless." and "a system that could provide origin sources and didn't is just AI slop."
Potential for discussion or practical utility: Could facilitate community discussion around specific historical journalistic ethics or compare LLM-generated summaries against originals. The inclusion of institutional access models (like the Wikipedia Library) might spark further conversation about making these archives more widely accessible.

Configurable Time-Delay News & Media Reader

Summary

A customizable, single-interface news reader application that allows users to set a specific time lag (e.g., 4 weeks, 1 year, 10 years) for digital content, filtering out immediate reactionary noise and hype while preserving genuine long-term signals.
The core value proposition is providing the psychological benefit of "news cooldown" by controlling temporal exposure to current events and media narratives.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Users (like `qnleigh` and `loganDark`) exhausted by immediate "rage bait," hype cycles, and speculation, who prefer to engage only with established, less volatile news.
Core Feature	User-configurable delay settings for filtering content streams (RSS, specified news sites, perhaps even social media digests) based on the original publication timestamp. Includes a "System" setting like the requested dark mode toggle.
Tech Stack	Go or Node.js backend for high-concurrency feed ingestion and time-stamping; Redis for caching delayed content; Frontend using Vue/Svelte for a clean, customizable UI (including the desired light/dark/system mode toggle based on `frizlab` feedback).
Difficulty	Low/Medium (The aggregation/filtering logic is straightforward, but maintaining reliable connections to numerous external feeds is ongoing work).
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

Why HN commenters would love it: It directly solves the desire to "satisfy the urge to doomscroll without the anxiety" (technothrasher) and aligns with the observation that "If something isn't worth knowing about one month later, it probably wasn't news in the first place" (qnleigh).
Potential for discussion or practical utility: Could lead to defining "signal decay rates" for different news categories (e.g., finance vs. international conflict) and integrating metrics on which topics survive the delay cut-off.

40-Year Archive Radio Broadcast Ingestor (Project Echo)

Summary

A tool or service dedicated to scraping, digitizing, and archiving non-visual broadcast media (radio shows, local news bulletins) from a fixed date N years ago, focusing on ephemeral content like DJ banter, local ads, and news summaries.
The core value proposition is capturing the "flavor" of specific historical moments beyond print, addressing the niche desire for audible historical context, including ads and local color.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Niche historians, nostalgia enthusiasts, and those interested in the ephemeral aspects of culture (e.g., users referencing listening to old broadcasts or missing local context).
Core Feature	Automated ingestion pipeline for available public radio/local station archives (or utilizing existing digital radio broadcast databases) tagged by date, offering audio playback functionality.
Tech Stack	Python for media pipeline management; Focus on leveraging partnerships/APIs for broadcast media archives; Web player using HTML5 audio element, perhaps with a secondary utility to extract metadata/transcripts using Whisper for searchability.
Difficulty	High (The primary challenge is legally and practically obtaining the actual full-fidelity recordings of decades-old radio broadcasts, as noted by user `mh-` regarding longevity/supply).
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

Why HN commenters would love it: It fulfills a very specific, nostalgic request mentioned by jayknight: "I've wanted a way to listen to a local radio stations broadcast--including ads and dj banter--from this day X years ago."
Potential for discussion or practical utility: This project would highlight the massive gap in accessible historical non-textual media preservation. Discussion could center around the ethics of archiving commercial broadcast content versus public domain print media.