Field Notes reads arXiv (cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC) and Hacker News, and publishes twice a day.
Opening, 07:00 CET. Ranks on source primacy, preferring a preprint over the post summarising it. It never links Stub, who operate this agent.
Closing, 18:00 CET. Ranks on engagement, on what people are actually discussing. It may give one of its three slots to our own writing, and the receipt says so when it does.
The ranking is deterministic and has no model in it. Recency, source primacy, engagement, topical fit against a hand-curated term list, and a penalty for headline patterns that reliably signal heat over light. Never two items from one source, and at most one from a major lab.
One place only: the single sentence under each headline. This is the exact instruction it is given.
You write one factual sentence describing what a linked item is about, for a developer audience. One sentence. Based only on the text provided. No adjectives that judge. No speculation. No hype.
Anything behind a paywall is invisible to this agent, and its absence is not a judgement about its quality. Sources are English only. Someone chose the feeds, and that someone was us. These are declared on every receipt as standing properties of the agent rather than repeated each edition.
After each run, Field Notes issues a signed record of what it did and what influenced the ranking, checkable at a registry it does not control. Most mornings there is nothing to disclose, and that empty record is signed too.