NewsComb

A macOS app that transforms RSS news feeds into an interactive knowledge graph, enabling semantic search and multi-hop reasoning across your news sources.

Overview

NewsComb retrieves articles from your RSS feeds and uses LLM-powered extraction to build a semantic hypergraph — a knowledge graph where entities (companies, people, products, technologies) are connected by relationships extracted from the news.

Key Features

• RSS Feed Aggregation: Subscribe to multiple tech news feeds and automatically fetch new articles
• Knowledge Graph Construction: Extract entities and relationships using configurable LLM prompts
• Vector Search with sqlite-vec: Embeddings are stored locally using sqlite-vec, enabling fast cosine similarity search without external dependencies
• Multi-hop Reasoning Paths: Answer questions by traversing the hypergraph to find connections between concepts, even when they aren't directly linked

Reasoning Paths

When you ask a question, NewsComb doesn't just search for keywords — it finds reasoning paths through the knowledge graph. For example, asking about AI chip competition might reveal paths like:

NVIDIA → competes with → AMD → partners with → Microsoft → invests in → OpenAI

These multi-hop connections surface relationships that wouldn't appear in a simple text search.

Deep Analysis

The "Dive Deeper" feature uses a multi-agent workflow to synthesize insights with academic-style citations and generate hypotheses for further investigation.

Installation

1. Download the latest DMG from Releases
2. Open the DMG and drag NewsCombApp.app to your Applications folder
3. Eject the DMG

First Launch

Since the app is not signed with an Apple Developer certificate, macOS will block it on first launch.

To open the app:

1. Try to open NewsCombApp.app — macOS will show a warning that it cannot verify the developer
2. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security
3. Scroll down to find the message "NewsCombApp.app" was blocked to protect your Mac
4. Click Open Anyway

5. macOS will ask you to confirm twice more — click Open each time

After this one-time setup, the app will open normally.

Setup

Embeddings

NewsComb uses on-device Nomic embeddings by default for the knowledge graph — no external service required. Alternatively, you can select an OpenRouter embeddings model in Settings.

LLM Providers

NewsComb uses two separate LLM configurations:

1. Knowledge Extraction LLM — Used to extract entities and relationships from articles when building the knowledge graph
2. Analysis LLM — Used for answering questions ("Ask Your Knowledge Graph") and deep analysis ("Dive Deeper")

Both can be configured independently in Settings, allowing you to use different models for each task.

Recommended: OpenRouter

1. Create an account at OpenRouter
2. Generate an API key
3. In NewsComb Settings:
   • Knowledge Extraction: Select OpenRouter and use meta-llama/llama-4-maverick
   • Analysis: Use the same model or a stronger one (e.g., openai/gpt-5.2 for more nuanced reasoning)

The Llama 4 Maverick model provides an excellent balance of speed and quality for entity extraction. For analysis, you may want a more capable model if you need deeper reasoning, but Maverick works well for most use cases.

Alternative: Local Ollama

You can run LLMs locally with Ollama, but this will be significantly slower:

ollama pull qwen2.5:14b

Then select Ollama as the provider in Settings and use qwen2.5:14b as the model for both extraction and analysis.

MCP Server (AI Assistant Integration)

NewsComb includes a built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI assistants read-only access to your knowledge graph. This lets tools like Claude Code and Claude Desktop search concepts, explore relationships, discover reasoning paths, and run full RAG queries — all backed by your local database.

Available Tools

Tool	Description
query_knowledge_graph	Full RAG pipeline: keyword extraction, vector search, BFS reasoning paths, context assembly
search_concepts	Full-text search for entities/concepts in the knowledge graph
search_chunks	Full-text search over article text chunks
get_node_neighbors	Explore relationships connected to a concept
find_paths	Discover multi-hop reasoning paths between two concepts
get_themes	Browse HDBSCAN-discovered story theme clusters
get_theme_details	Detailed view of a specific theme (entities, exemplars, articles)
get_statistics	Knowledge graph counts (nodes, edges, articles, embeddings)
get_recent_articles	List recently ingested articles from RSS feeds

Architecture

The MCP server runs inside the app process and listens on http://127.0.0.1:63548. A lightweight bridge CLI (newscomb-mcp-bridge) translates between Claude Code's stdio protocol and the app's HTTP endpoint — the same pattern Xcode uses with its mcpbridge.

Claude Code ←stdio→ newscomb-mcp-bridge ←HTTP→ NewsCombApp (localhost:63548)

The app must be running before Claude Code connects (just like Xcode).

Building the Bridge

cd NewsCombMCPBridge
swift build -c release

The compiled binary will be at .build/release/newscomb-mcp-bridge.

Setup for Claude Code

Add the following to your project's .mcp.json file (create it in the repository root if it doesn't exist):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "newscomb": {
      "command": "/path/to/NewsComb/NewsCombMCPBridge/.build/release/newscomb-mcp-bridge",
      "args": []
    }
  }
}

Setup for Claude Desktop

Add the same configuration to your Claude Desktop settings file:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "newscomb": {
      "command": "/path/to/NewsComb/NewsCombMCPBridge/.build/release/newscomb-mcp-bridge",
      "args": []
    }
  }
}

Prerequisites

1. NewsComb must be running — launch the app before starting Claude Code. The MCP HTTP server starts automatically on app launch.
2. The app must have RSS sources configured and articles fetched
3. The knowledge extraction pipeline must have processed at least some articles (check Settings for extraction status)

Limitations

• All access is read-only — the MCP server cannot modify your knowledge graph or RSS sources
• query_knowledge_graph uses on-device Nomic embeddings by default (or OpenRouter if configured in Settings); other tools work without embeddings
• The bridge exits with an error if the app is not running

Credits & Acknowledgements

Research Foundation

This project is inspired by and builds upon the hypergraph reasoning approach described in:

HyperGraphRAG: Hypergraph-Driven Reasoning and Affordable LLM-Based Knowledge Construction

Buehler, M.J. (2025). A novel approach using hypergraphs for knowledge organization and reasoning, enabling multi-hop traversal and affordable construction via small language models.

The original Python implementation is available at: lamm-mit/HyperGraphReasoning

Technical Resources

• GRDBCustomSQLiteBuild — Invaluable guide for integrating sqlite-vec with GRDB in Swift, enabling local vector search without external services

License

MIT License — see LICENSE for details.