Project Info

Winner

[Sponsor - n8n] Best Use of n8n

BasedNews

Inspiration

In an era of polarized media, Based News was created to give readers a clearer picture of political news. We believe that informed citizens make better decisions, and informed citizens need access to unbiased information.

What it does

Based News is an AI-driven news aggregate, built to filter out the bias and deceit from mainstream media and other outlets, by conducting deep analysis on all sides of reporting. We offer general summaries of trending headlines, free from political bias, political bias analysis on different news outlets covering a headline, and a view into the public's opinion on a topic through Youtube comments.

How we built it

Our tech stack runs deep. For development of our Full-Stack application, we used Next.js App Router, with Supabase and Prisma, deployed on Vercel. To build our analysis pipelines, we utilized N8N, Parallel Web Systems, Exa.ai, and some custom JS scripts that took FOREVER to get working. We've attached diagrams depicting the systems and pipelines used in this project.

Challenges we ran into

Where do we even start. Firstly, we entered the project with a completely different idea than Based News. Our first five hours of the competition were landing on the idea of Based News and researching how in the world we were going to build it. Another challenge we ran into was honing our N8N skills and building robust workflows that function the way we intended. Additionally, we also faced the challenge of speeding up some of our workflows and API calls. The worst challenge of all was gaining insight on how the public viewed trending news. Ideally, we wanted to scrape Reddit or X, but Reddit API required you to request access and the X api rate-limited after 100 posts (NOT ENOUGH DATA). Hence, we found a workaround... Youtube Comments!!! We built our own API server using the Youtube Data API and a secret Python library to scrape all the popular comments off of videos related to specific headlines.

Accomplishments we're proud of

An accomplishment that we are extremely proud of is the Headline Ingestion and Aggregation pipeline. It took the most time to complete and ended up working (almost) exactly how we wanted it to. Another accomplishment we are extremely proud of is collaborating on the same code base without any conflicts. Not running into any merge conflicts attributes greatly to the completion of this project.

What we learned

We are baffled by the number of technologies and concepts we worked with and learned about over the course of this competition. We want to give a huge shoutout to the boys at OpenNote, who taught us so much about vector stores and web search agents, which were essential to the core functionalities of our project.

What's next

BasedNews is barely an MVP. With the complex nature of the problem we are tackling, there are several bugs and inefficiencies in our systems. Our next steps are to finish and refine the core functions of the software, and optimize where we can.

Based News

A political news aggregator that provides neutral summaries with bias ratings and public opinion analysis. Built for CruzHacks 2026.

Live Demo: https://cruzhacks2026-kappa.vercel.app/

Features

Neutral Summaries - Direct, politically neutral summaries of the latest US political news
7-Point Bias Scale - Every source categorized from Far Left to Far Right
Public Opinion - Real-time sentiment analysis from YouTube comments

Environment Variables

Create a .env file in the root directory with the following variables:

YOUTUBE_API_KEY=your_youtube_api_key_here

You can obtain a YouTube Data API key from the Google Cloud Console.

Running the Public Opinion API (FastAPI)

The public opinion analysis feature requires running a local FastAPI server exposed via ngrok.

Prerequisites

Python 3.11+
ngrok account with a custom domain (or use the free tier)
OpenAI API key
install dependencies from requirements.txt

Start the FastAPI server

In one terminal:

cd python_public_opinion
OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_api_key uvicorn main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

Start the ngrok tunnel

In another terminal:

ngrok http 8000 --domain=bursting-satyr-genuinely.ngrok-free.app

The FastAPI will now be accessible at https://bursting-satyr-genuinely.ngrok-free.app.

API Endpoints

1. GET `/api/headlines`

Fetches paginated headlines from the database, ordered by date (newest first).

Query Parameters:

skip (optional, default: 0) - Number of headlines to skip
take (optional, default: 6) - Number of headlines to fetch

Response:

{
  "headlines": [...],
  "hasMore": true,
  "totalCount": 25
}

curl:

curl "https://cruzhacks2026-kappa.vercel.app/api/headlines?skip=0&take=6"

2. POST `/api/headline-sources`

Forwards a headline to an n8n webhook to fetch related news sources with bias ratings. Used to find additional sources covering the same story.

Request Body:

{
  "headline": "string (required)",
  "description": "string (required)", 
  "date": "string (required)"
}

curl:

curl -X POST "https://cruzhacks2026-kappa.vercel.app/api/headline-sources" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"headline": "Federal Judge Limits Immigration Enforcement", "description": "A federal judge issued a ruling restricting immigration agents.", "date": "2026-01-17"}'

3. POST `/api/ingest/headlines`

Ingests articles from 6 hardcoded RSS feeds (CNN, NYTimes, Fox News, ABC News, WSJ, LA Times) into the Article table. Skips duplicates based on link URL.

Request Body: None required

Response:

{
  "ok": true,
  "totalParsed": 120,
  "totalInserted": 15,
  "perFeed": [
    { "url": "http://rss.cnn.com/...", "title": "CNN US", "parsed": 20, "inserted": 3 }
  ]
}

curl:

curl -X POST "https://cruzhacks2026-kappa.vercel.app/api/ingest/headlines"

4. GET `/api/headlines/[id]/public-opinion`

Returns public opinion analysis for a specific headline. If cached, returns immediately; otherwise, orchestrates calls to YouTube search and FastAPI analysis endpoints, then caches the result.

Path Parameters:

id - The headline UUID

Response:

{
  "summary": "Analysis of public sentiment...",
  "totalComments": 1500,
  "videosProcessed": 5,
  "cached": true
}

curl:

curl "https://cruzhacks2026-kappa.vercel.app/api/headlines/<HEADLINE_ID>/public-opinion"

Note: Replace <HEADLINE_ID> with an actual headline UUID from the /api/headlines response.

5. POST `/api/publicopinion`

Searches YouTube for videos matching a query string. Returns up to 5 most relevant videos. Used internally by the public-opinion endpoint.

Request Body:

{
  "query": "string (required)",
  "publishedAfter": "ISO 8601 date string (optional)"
}

Response:

{
  "videos": [
    {
      "videoId": "abc123",
      "title": "Video Title",
      "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123",
      "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/...",
      "publishedAt": "2026-01-17T12:00:00Z"
    }
  ]
}

curl:

curl -X POST "https://cruzhacks2026-kappa.vercel.app/api/publicopinion" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "immigration enforcement ruling", "publishedAfter": "2026-01-15T00:00:00Z"}'

6. POST `/api/publicopinion/analyze`

Forwards YouTube video URLs to a FastAPI backend (Python service) that scrapes comments and generates an AI-powered public sentiment summary.

Request Body:

{
  "youtube_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123", "..."]
}

Response:

{
  "summary": "Public sentiment analysis...",
  "total_comments": 1500,
  "videos_processed": 5
}

curl:

curl -X POST "https://cruzhacks2026-kappa.vercel.app/api/publicopinion/analyze" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"youtube_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"]}'

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                              Frontend                                    │
│                             (React UI)                                   │
└─────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────┘
                              │
                              ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                        Next.js API Routes                                │
├─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────────┤
│ /headlines  │ /headline-  │ /ingest/    │ /headlines/ │ /publicopinion  │
│             │ sources     │ headlines   │ [id]/public │ /analyze        │
│             │             │             │ -opinion    │                 │
└──────┬──────┴──────┬──────┴──────┬──────┴──────┬──────┴────────┬────────┘
       │             │             │             │               │
       ▼             ▼             ▼             ▼               ▼
┌──────────┐  ┌──────────┐  ┌──────────┐  ┌──────────┐  ┌─────────────────┐
│PostgreSQL│  │n8n       │  │RSS Feeds │  │YouTube   │  │FastAPI (Python) │
│          │  │Webhook   │  │          │  │Data API  │  │                 │
└──────────┘  └──────────┘  └──────────┘  └──────────┘  └─────────────────┘

Tech Stack

Frontend: Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS
Backend: Next.js API Routes, Prisma ORM
Database: PostgreSQL (Supabase)
External Services: n8n, YouTube Data API, Exa.ai
ML/AI: FastAPI Python service with OpenAI

Analysis

Compare with all teams

View

Metric

leo kildani
12
victor
2

Figures cover GitHub contributors during the hackathon window. A co-authored commit counts in full for each author, so per-member totals add up to more than the whole-team figures.

Technology

Found in codeClaimed only

CSSIn code
FastAPIIn code
Next.jsIn code
OpenAIIn code
PostgreSQLIn code
PythonIn code
ReactIn code
SQLIn code
Tailwind CSSIn code
TypeScriptIn code
SupabaseClaimed
VercelClaimed

10 of 12 appear in the indexed code. 2 claimed on Devpost could not be matched to code, which may simply mean the tool leaves no trace in the repository.

AI coding agents

No AI coding agent signals were found in this repository.

Detected from committed agent config files and commit authorship. Absence of a signal is not proof an agent was unused.

Codebase size

Source size

94 KB

Source files

Counts recognized source files only; vendored directories, binaries and lockfiles are excluded, so this is smaller than the repository on disk.

Project Info

BasedNews

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments we're proud of

What we learned

What's next

Based News

Features

Environment Variables

Running the Public Opinion API (FastAPI)

Prerequisites

Start the FastAPI server

Start the ngrok tunnel

API Endpoints

1. GET `/api/headlines`

2. POST `/api/headline-sources`

3. POST `/api/ingest/headlines`

4. GET `/api/headlines/[id]/public-opinion`

5. POST `/api/publicopinion`

6. POST `/api/publicopinion/analyze`

Architecture

Tech Stack

Analysis

Technology

AI coding agents

Codebase size

Structure

Interface

API & routing

Application logic

Data & schema

Languages

Dependencies

BasedNews

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments we're proud of

What we learned

What's next

Based News

Features

Environment Variables

Running the Public Opinion API (FastAPI)

Prerequisites

Start the FastAPI server

Start the ngrok tunnel

API Endpoints

1. GET /api/headlines

2. POST /api/headline-sources

3. POST /api/ingest/headlines

4. GET /api/headlines/[id]/public-opinion

5. POST /api/publicopinion

6. POST /api/publicopinion/analyze

Architecture

Tech Stack

Technology

AI coding agents

Codebase size

Structure

Interface

API & routing

Application logic

Data & schema

Languages

Dependencies

1. GET `/api/headlines`

2. POST `/api/headline-sources`

3. POST `/api/ingest/headlines`

4. GET `/api/headlines/[id]/public-opinion`

5. POST `/api/publicopinion`

6. POST `/api/publicopinion/analyze`