Show HN: Needle – An Explorable Map of the News

5 ryry 2 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!

Comments (2)

appsDev · 23m ago

It sure is an interesting idea! Gives a new way to explore the news, honing in on places you've been or know people in. Nice work

ryry · 20m ago

Thanks! One of my favourite accidental things to come out of it was the "highlighting" of rural news. Stuff in a city like Toronto, which usually dominates my feed, gets kind of lost in all the other stories, while things in rural areas (which I never see) stand out.

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Comments (2)