Show HN: Needle – An Explorable Map of the News
5 ryry 4 7/17/2025, 12:49:28 PM needle.news ↗
Hey HN! I wanted to know what was going on in cities/towns where my friends live, so I built Needle.
It uses an LLM + Open Street map to best estimate general locations of stories posted in the past day, and pin them on the map. For stories involving multiple places, I also wanted to show the relation between them.
It's still a little janky, and is limited to mostly Canadian sources of news at the moment, but I'm planning on expanding it shortly, as I'm keen to see what international sources are writing about my home city.
Let me know if you have any questions/feedback!
News tied to a specific place gets pinned there (like an article about the Blue Jays being pinned at the Toronto Skydome). For stuff in cities, or larger areas like states, it tries to place it within the bounds of the state randomly, and if that fails, a random radius (which I think is what's gone wrong here).
The problem though is with the Toronto Star reporting on news in Jersey. The way I'm going about this right now is a filter I'm calling "Lens" which is just the country. Right now the only lens is Canada, but I want these to be filterable so you can easily see what other places are writing, or just get home grown news (but again, something I'm struggling with how to represent it).