How significance is scored
Every story gets a significance score from 0 to 10. It is the only thing that decides the order of the feed and whether a story is shown at all. The score itself is never displayed: the order is the signal.
Three questions, scored independently
- Event size — how big the event is in itself, regardless of reach. A central bank decision is a press conference; a scientific result is a paper or a demo. A result is not a rollout: the weight of what has not happened yet lives in the third axis.
- People affected — how many people the event really touches, on a ladder from tens to everyone without exception. Being aware of an event is not being affected by it: a broadcast's audience is not its scale. A warning, a forecast, a call, an opinion or unfinished negotiations are a statement; they bind almost no one and score low here, however large the subject.
- Future consequences — what the event sets in motion. First the largest plausible consequence, then a discount when the outcome is genuinely undecided. A finished event has spent its potential.
What must not move the axes: the fame of the participants, how familiar the country is, emotional charge, a striking photograph, outrage without consequences. A parliament falling in a country the reader could not find on a map is scored exactly like any other.
The arithmetic is not the model's
A language model reads the articles against a fixed rubric and proposes the three numbers. Significance — their mean, rounded to a tenth — is computed in code, not by the model; the formula is versioned and recorded with every revision of every story. The model never sees the threshold and never decides what is shown.
The threshold
The threshold is a setting calibrated against the live stream, not a constant. Once a story has been shown it stays in the feed while its score holds within a band just below the threshold, so a small re-scoring never makes it flicker. A story with no primary source, no document and no independent confirmation is hidden regardless of its score. Everything below the threshold is kept: reachable at its permanent address and through "Show N less important stories", just not shown by default.
"No important news" is a result
The number of stories in the feed is not fixed. A quiet day is what happened, not a failure, and the feed says so plainly.
Rebuilds are not re-scoring
A story is re-scored only when new articles about it arrive; the rest of the time the feed is merely rebuilt from scores it already has. The feed is rebuilt once a day at 02:00 UTC, and that build becomes the day's archive.
Forecasts
Probabilities come from Polymarket and are refreshed once a day. A market is matched to a story by a model and reviewed. The probability shown is the market's view, not ours, and is not investment advice.
Personal tuning
"My feed" reorders stories and adds some from below the threshold, but never hides what cleared it. Permanent pages, archives and everything a search engine sees show the one shared order.