newscatcher

Productivity

news aggregation

SHOW HN2020

Legend

newscatcher

Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

github.com

#news aggregator#python news scraper#rss feeds#news api

420points
194comments
#77of 3,028 in 2020
Top 3%of 2020 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

20 positive, 44 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 16 critical, out of 80 comments about the project. Thread score +0.02.

Idea: 9 for, 9 againstExecution: 1 for, 5 againstDesign: 3 for, 0 againstPricing: 1 for, 1 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful metadata like language, topic and RSS URL.

    From 2 comments
    • The metadata of language, topic, rss url, etc, is nice work. For use outside of python, here's a gist with a sorted list of sites and a sqlite dump of the site data:…
      tyingq on HN
    • The demo gif is really long (a few minutes), but it's well worth watching and summarizes the capabilities of the library well. It'd be cool if you could register additional…
      anonytrary on HN
  • Demo gif summarizes the library well.

    From 1 comment
    • The demo gif is really long (a few minutes), but it's well worth watching and summarizes the capabilities of the library well. It'd be cool if you could register additional…
      anonytrary on HN

Objections

  • Mostly a wrapper over an RSS sqlite database, not real collection from any website.

    From 3 comments
    • > Programmatically collect normalized news from (almost) any website. By this you mean ... Fetch RSS feeds from the websites that we've hardcoded into a Python library? It seems…
      kingofpandora on HN
    • This doesn't "collect" anything, it's just a python package wrapped on top of a sqlite database. If you choose an arbitrary website that doesn't have information in said database…
      raziel2p on HN
    • This is literally just a sqlite db with rss feeds and a python script with a very misleading description. The real purpose of this post is to get traffic for their paid news api.…
      nojito on HN
  • Only RSS summaries, not full article text.

    From 2 comments
    • As others have noted, this doesn't seem to collect the full article text, just stuff that you would get from an RSS fee. From the title, I expected something more like…
      charlesdaniels on HN
    • How complete are the articles that are returned? Last time I looked into RSS news feeds a lot of sources would just put abbreviated / teaser content in and then try to get you to…
      nmstoker on HN
  • Description is misleading.

    From 1 comment
    • This is literally just a sqlite db with rss feeds and a python script with a very misleading description. The real purpose of this post is to get traffic for their paid news api.…
      nojito on HN

Requests

  • Provide a list of supported websites.

    From 1 comment
    • > "Almost any website" Is there a list of supported websites?
      gitgud on HN
  • Allow registering additional sources via API or config.

    From 2 comments
    • The demo gif is really long (a few minutes), but it's well worth watching and summarizes the capabilities of the library well. It'd be cool if you could register additional…
      anonytrary on HN
    • Why did you choose to ship the list of RSS feeds as an SQL database? This makes it hard to keep it up to date and submit pull requests with additional sources. Would it not be…
      0x006A on HN

Questions

  • How does it compare to newspaper3k?

    From 2 comments
    • There is a similar library for this called newspaper which I had used in my undergrad thesis. Not dismissing this work, but I am curious about what it is offering on top of it?…
      zzuko on HN
    • First, kudos to the OP. If you don't mind, would you compare and contrast it to newspaper3k?
      jerzyt on HN
  • How is content licensed and is RSS access free?

    From 1 comment
    • This looks like a cool library, but I have a question about the newscatcher API. How does the licensing work for the content? Seems odd (but great) that I can just read the news…
      fuball63 on HN
  • What does normalized news mean?

    From 2 comments
    • What is "normalized news"? What does that even mean?
      hitpointdrew on HN
    • What does the normalized news means? Able to query from a predefined RSS feed? Because I was expecting news coverage from different partisan source pointing to the same news event.
      pheme1 on HN

Alternatives named

  • newspaper3k

    From 2 comments
    • Depending on what you're trying to do, there's also newspaper3k: https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper It's quite easy to get "good" extraction for large numbers of…
      pmyteh on HN
    • There is a similar library for this called newspaper which I had used in my undergrad thesis. Not dismissing this work, but I am curious about what it is offering on top of it?…
      zzuko on HN
  • newsapi.org

    From 1 comment
    • Hi looks interesting and useful! What's the differences between newscatcher (python) vs. newscatcherapi.com? Is there any limit on using newscatcher (python) as shown in the…
      permanent on HN
  • Feedity

    From 1 comment
    • This looks great! I read your blog post about how open-sourcing helped you find testers, which is a great step for such tools. * Shameless plug *: Our web service, Feedity -…
      nreece on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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