9 ms·
Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay
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 https://forty.news (No signup required, it's only if you want the stories emailed to you daily/weekly)
- pryelluw 10mo agoGood idea and execution. Adding the metadata mentioned by others in the thread would improve. Otherwise this is a legit cool project.
- hu3 10mo ago> The system ingests raw newspaper scans and uses a multi-step LLM pipeline to generate the daily edition 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?
- culi 10mo agoMy Wikipedia Library membership gives me access to some cool resources that might be of interest: - 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
- mh- 10mo agoThat's very cool, but I lack the 500+ total edits on Wikipedia to qualify. 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?
- jonplackett 10mo ago> Secretary Rejects Emergency Antibiotics Ban in Animal Feed Health and Human Services 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
- culi 10mo agoIt'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. At the very least done more
- serial_dev 10mo agoIn a similar vein, I think even news from 40 years ago can teach us a lot. The players may be different, but the game is the same. 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.
- ioblomov 10mo agoI reckon that if there were a similar feed for the Roman Empire, the same would be true. The real issue is that human psychology hasn’t really changed in perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. The only thing that has is technology.
- muststopmyths 10mo agoSource or country of origin would be nice. “Opposition leader Aquino” in article without any other context could be confusing
- tclancy 10mo agoAre you under the impression there were a lot of opposition news back in the day if one was just brave enjfffff?
- andix 10mo agoWithout 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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 10mo agoI agree. Why does this need to be AI?
- bdangubic 10mo ago> It would be hard to detect completely AI hallucinated articles, without a possibility to check the authenticity of the content. you can check in a public library or https://google.com https://google.com
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- RobGR 10mo agoAn automated system was already made to collect and sort them, that system should provide it's sources. I can self-fact-check anything, but a system that could provide origin sources and didn't is just AI slop.
- netsharc 10mo agoI remember seeing "Germany 9PM News 30 years ago" reporting about the quite accidental opening of the Berlin Wall. This YouTube channel posts the news bulletin of 45 years ago, daily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS7E58zLcws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS7E58zLcws . For our American readers, it has the exoticism of 70's/80's Europe.
- oezi 10mo agoSome years ago I had a similar thing happening to me based on a friend who would gift me his finished The Economist issues with usually a 1 or 2 week delay. 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).
- jayknight 10mo agoI've wanted a way to listen to a local radio stations broadcast--including ads and dj banter--from this day X years ago.
- mh- 10mo agoThat would be really fun. Unfortunately, I'd be surprised if the recordings still exist from the pre-"it's all digital" era, which is more recent than most people would think.
- frizlab 10mo agoCool concept! 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.
- jonahx 10mo agoI like it. 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.
- tacone 10mo agoWoha! Cool stuff. Would be fantastic to be able to configure the number of years back.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- darkwater 10mo agoI like the idea vrry much, also because it brings up news from my childhood so it is cool to see them again now and compare with what I remember from back then. BUT, as others mentioned, you really need to publish the sources of each article.
- captn3m0 10mo ago> 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 I forgot what tab opened and I assumed that the report for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_171 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_171 was out. Took me a few minutes to realize this wasn't the same crash.
- philsnow 10mo agoAlso (unrelated to my knowledge): https://olduse.net/ https://olduse.net/
- nutjob2 10mo agoI like this because I can read the newspapers of my youth, when I couldn't read international papers like a can today, not that I read any papers. Fun fact: I emigrated on the Achille Lauro , half way around the world, over a decade before it was hijacked.
- jonathanstark 10mo agoWow, that's wild
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- treetalker 10mo ago“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
- TrevorFSmith 10mo agoA similar result can be found by reading coverage of events you witnessed or topics you know well.
- mh- 10mo agoReading mainstream coverage of tech is certainly what made me lose confidence in much of their other reporting. 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.
- graemep 10mo agoIts the same in many areas. You have just escaped Gell-Mann amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect 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.
- mh- 10mo ago> just escaped [..] 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.
- Aperocky 10mo agoThere's one front page new that allude to events happening in December 7th and 8th despite dating to November 22nd. I assume you select the stories automatically, but the time of the story might not be correct.
- JuniperMesos 10mo ago> 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. 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 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.
- squigz 10mo agoIt's been going on for a bit longer than 40 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_co...
- V__ 10mo agoMaybe this is just my bubble, but the messaging I get is that Israel should stop murdering Palestinian civilians and not that Hamas is somehow righteous in their actions.
- 10mo ago
- npteljes 10mo ago>A reminder that urgency fades, context grows, and perspective is a habit. 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.
- samdoesnothing 10mo agoclicks on home page > 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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- qnleigh 10mo agoI've always wanted a news source with a 4 week delay. This would filter out so much of the noise: rage bait articles about what a politician said, articles about what -may- happen that just promote doomscrolling... Wikipedia sort of does this, but you have to know which articles to look at (though on the upside, you get a lot more historical context). If something isn't worth knowing about one month later, it probably wasn't news in the first place.
- graemep 10mo agoRagebait sells. 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.
- o_pax 10mo agoWell, there are monthly international newspapers and magazines. That you can even pay so they can afford not to have to rely on AI and have (hopefully) real journalists do the work. That are also available in digital form. I agree with you that the flood of streaming news is neither healthy nor helpful in creating priorities and perspective. Let's not starve the obvious alternative, as long as it still exists.
- moralestapia 10mo agoOne of my favorite website is the one that replays 9/11 live on 9/11 every year.
- sandblast 10mo agoCan you share the link?
- moralestapia 10mo agohttps://911realtime.org/ https://911realtime.org/ TIL it works everyday!
- jvm___ 10mo agoI like doing this with my local paper but from a hundred+ years ago. 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.
- BHSPitMonkey 10mo agoThat must be what inspired them to approach San Francisco's Central Subway in a similar fashion!
- samyk 10mo agosweet
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoWe didn't start the fire... as a service.
- wizardforhire 10mo agoYou know the rules… and so do I
- smallmancontrov 10mo ago"We Didn't Start the Fire" covers 1949-1989, it just barely manages to avoid both WWII and the fall of the USSR and therefore _understates_ its case, if anything.
- loloquwowndueo 10mo ago> uses a multi-step LLM pipeline LLM? Ok thanks but no thanks.
- anthk 10mo agoI just use this script in a terminal. It needs curl, lame and minimodem. Easy and quick on any GNU/Linux or BSD distro, or WSL2: #!/bin/sh curl -s http://internet-tty.net:8000/ITTY \ | lame --decode --quiet --mp3input - - \ | minimodem --rx rtty -f - -a --print-filter -i
- squigz 10mo agoWhat does this do?
- anthk 10mo agoIt gets news over RTTY (the ancient teletype, some sort of radio comms used by journalist, military and so on). Curl just downloads the HTTP stream to the standard output, as a music player would do with a online radio. The stream it's in MP3 format, so the terminal output it's piped (chained) to LAME's input. LAME it's an infamous MP3 decoder for Unix/Linux since the old Napster times. This part of the command, as you could guess, send the converted WAV data (raw audio, like the ones from music CD's) to the standard output and then that stream it's being sent to minimodem, which parses the RTTY signal in its own native format. RTTY signal in MP3 -> Convert it to a raw WAV -> decode the raw RTTY signal to a readable a TXT output. If you had a ham radio tuner (phisycal radio, with an antenna and the like) and you picked some RTTY signal at non-commercial radio frequencies, if you jacked a wire from the speakers' output from that radio tuner to the input of your sound card, you could do almost the same with just the Minimodem command, as you were already getting the audio format in WAV/RAW, and you could get the same news output with less effort.
- squigz 10mo agoNeat! I decided to play around with it (mostly, to be honest, because I was curious what it sounded like) - and it's really interesting to see it stream in a few bytes at a time
- kropot7 10mo agoWwwylyMowwDEmowwwyLowow64parOSpirayTSingooNowwnoWoEUsinQwertyoReSaiAS2en2nueroWwwyld*laiCookooBayseFromENai mcontent rawTar7&&syphaDEphANgolENgoLashRUqruDescryptLANgoWwwai!
- airstrike 10mo agothis is pretty awesome! would love to see a few different "sections" like Business, Culture, etc. 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/front-page-election-archive.html 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/43d39ce787b695fe705257b340b8e25ea2696098/08ELECT-1984-original.jpg 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-layout/ https://piccalil.li/blog/a-simple-masonry-like-composable-la...
- Agraillo 10mo ago> 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. 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/2up?q=knee-jerk https://archive.org/details/lost0000thom_j3f3/page/124/mode/...
- lsllc 10mo agoIt says "Weather: Partly cloudy, 72°F". Normally, I'd ask "where" (not here in New England!) ... but in this case, "when"? Is this the weather from 40 years ago also? (and if so ... I guess "where").
- andrepd 10mo ago> The system ingests raw newspaper scans and uses a multi-step LLM pipeline to generate the daily edition 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 -.-
- jonathanstark 10mo agoWouldn't the NYT or whoever object to someone reposting their articles?
- RobGR 10mo agoI think the NYT is involved in lawsuit claiming garbling them through an LLM is still copyright violation. In any case you could link to them and display the headline, and maybe the first sentence.
- inatreecrown2 10mo agoThis is great! but in my opinion it needs the links to the original stories. Also a version without AI generation would be preferred by myself. I could be interesting to have I toggle button on the page to toggle on /off the AI stuff.
- andrepd 10mo agoThe local daily newspaper has always a small column, somewhere in the middle, with the front page title from 10, 20, 30,..., 90 years ago. 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
- nashashmi 10mo agoPolice Open Fire as 50,000 Protest Outside Pretoria L.A. Times Archives Nov. 21, 1985 12 AM PT https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-21-mn-2106-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-21-mn-2106-s... 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.
- cindyllm 10mo ago[dead]
- evanjsx 10mo agoI would like to add an RSS/Atom feed for this into my Elfeed setup without context/proper tags so I can confuse myself.
- komali2 10mo agoI feel like the implication here is "see, it's not so bad, the world didn't end, not a big deal!" But plenty of these articles describe small events that absolutely contributed to world changing, and often world degrading, things. For better or worse the collapse of the Soviet Union completely changed the world and I've heard compelling arguments this had consequences as faraway as the weakening of Unions in America and the subsequent degredation of labor protections. Or the fall of one of the three world lowers led to one becoming far too powerful (USA) rather than having a somewhat more balanced tri-hegemony. 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.
- sylens 10mo agoYeah like one of the top articles today is Reagan arguing for tax reform, the spark that kicked off the insane inequality we deal with today.
- Forgeties79 10mo agoGiven some of the ways we are still paying for the decisions of the Reagan administration to this day, this is not as reassuring as you make it out to be. If anything it just demonstrates how destructive a president and their administration can be and how the repercussions can be felt for decades. Yeah many of the things people thought were a big deal turned out not to be, but plenty of things did…
- jrm4 10mo agoWow. 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?
- almosthere 10mo agoI guess it makes sense to skip the hurricane
- tptacek 10mo agoSemirelatedly: if you're in a major US metro, your library card (which, where I live, you get online and in real time) gets you the archives of a bunch of major newspapers, plus your local newspapers. The suburban Oak Park, IL take on Nazism pre-WW2 was wild to read (online, after a very brief search). If you haven't, I recommend taking the 10 minutes to figure out what you can search through your library system.
- NaOH 10mo agoJust a reminder that HN has a similar function with its 'past' link in the header/nav bar shown on most pages. For example, here is 15 years ago to the day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-11-22 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-11-22
- fortran77 10mo ago40 years ago I was 2 years out of college so I remember these stories well. It may be interesting to do 24/40/60 years ago so people of different ages can get a similar effective experience.
- firtoz 10mo agoYeah... caused me to read up on the cold war and Mutually Assured Destruction, and it was just plainly insane. Something like, "If you built missile defenses then that would mean that you could be more motivated to attack first so if we even think that you're building missile defenses then we will have to build more nukes to compensate and that'll be worse for both so please stop researching how to defend yourself for both of our sakes"
- tech2 10mo agoThe one that should probably really freak you out was/is the Soviet "Dead Hand" system. Who needs people deciding whether to launch?
- another_twist 10mo agoI will pay for this. Thank you.
- matt3210 10mo agoGuys.. 40 years ago was the 80s :(
- muzani 10mo ago40 years from now would be fun too. What would President Zuckerberg do?
- _dain_ 10mo ago>The Senate on Thursday approved a nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and China, allowing U.S. firms to provide China with materials and technology for its civilian nuclear power program. The Senate approved the agreement via a voice vote passage of a resolution with no debate before its passage. This approval happened amidst a long-running debate on a farm bill. The agreement had been shelved due to fears about China using technology to help other nations build atomic weapons. President Reagan's trip to China marked the initialing of the agreement last year. china in many respects a better steward of american nuclear technology than america
- graemep 10mo agoIt requires access to HTML canvass to generate shareable links. Why? Fingerprinting?
- lukasm 10mo agoI'd be good to see a top news of the months in the past 100 years :)
- lexoj 10mo agoNews cooldown
- technothrasher 10mo ago> wondered if there was a way to satisfy the urge to doomscroll without the anxiety. Hmm, I like the idea. But interestingly, it immediately brought back my 40 year old anxieties.
- maddmann 10mo agoLove it! Interesting to read these, and you must have a good prompt underneath
- kseistrup 10mo agoRelated: On https://olduse.net/ https://olduse.net/ you can replay Usenet News with a 40-year delay.
- narrator 10mo agoI've read political books from the 70s. Nothing has changed at all in politics since then. Just what was going on in San Francisco at the time took over the whole country. 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.
- com 10mo agoI opened this, only to be confronted by an article about the investigation into the downing of Air India flight 182, a terrorist attack that killed hundreds of people, including my childhood neighbour friends Brinda and Arti and their dad, Vishnu. 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.
- xp84 10mo agoIt’s especially painful to read about that again, with another horrific Air India tragedy having happened this year in India :( RIP to all those innocent people.
- crossroadsguy 10mo agoWeird to see two wildly different news related to India. 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.
- andai 10mo agoThis is super cool. Can you make one that does 140?
- beezle 10mo agoI remember Leon going overboard. Too bad this is not adjustable, fifty years ago (the 70s) would be more interesting. Certainly a lot more bank robberies, hijackings and both domestic and international terrorism. Not to mention all the political and econ stuff.
- tehjoker 10mo agoThis is really cool, but the tone about not feeling urgency is weird. These are monumental events worth studying and reviewing and reading these headlines even today feels like an adrenaline rush. All of this is still relevant for understanding our world.
- tolerance 10mo agoThere’s something eerie about this whole submission. From the preamble, the uninspired layout, the barely-functional page; all AI-tinted. It appears that the events that are displayed indeed happened but their accounts are virtually forged. Some of the details attributed to them cannot even be freely verified. [1] 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-19-1985-p-9/ 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).
- susiecambria 10mo agoLove this. Any way to left justify the text? The full justification is a bear to read.
- maverick98 10mo agoamazing idea, and the UI is very cool!
- LoganDark 10mo agoI'm not as interested in news from 40 years ago, but for years I've been wanting a news website that only talks about things that have already happened and not just things that are so promising or going to change the world or definitely absolutely going to come out eventually but that never actually do. I get so fed up of hearing for so long about promising exciting new stuff that never actually happens. And even of the stuff that does happen, the wait kills me. I'm so tired of getting excited and having to wait. Hacker News is practically my only source of any current events because of how everything else is full of hype and speculation and just exhaustion.
- mpercy123 10mo agothis is a great app. it's equal parts fascinating and terrifying to think what could have been, and how little headlines have changed over the years. well done with this! definitely gonna bookmark and visit often :)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo agoOtherwise known as "history"