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Posted by jbdamask 9 hours ago

Show HN: Now I Get It – Translate scientific papers into interactive webpages(nowigetit.us)
Understanding scientific articles can be tough, even in your own field. Trying to comprehend articles from others? Good luck.

Enter, Now I Get It!

I made this app for curious people. Simply upload an article and after a few minutes you'll have an interactive web page showcasing the highlights. Generated pages are stored in the cloud and can be viewed from a gallery.

Now I Get It! uses the best LLMs out there, which means the app will improve as AI improves.

Free for now - it's capped at 20 articles per day so I don't burn cash.

A few things I (and maybe you will) find interesting:

* This is a pure convenience app. I could just as well use a saved prompt in Claude, but sometimes it's nice to have a niche-focused app. It's just cognitively easier, IMO.

* The app was built for myself and colleagues in various scientific fields. It can take an hour or more to read a detailed paper so this is like an on-ramp.

* The app is a place for me to experiment with using LLMs to translate scientific articles into software. The space is pregnant with possibilities.

* Everything in the app is the result of agentic engineering, e.g. plans, specs, tasks, execution loops. I swear by Beads (https://github.com/steveyegge/beads) by Yegge and also make heavy use of Beads Viewer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46314423) and Destructive Command Guard (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46835674) by Jeffrey Emanuel.

* I'm an AWS fan and have been impressed by Opus' ability to write good CFN. It still needs a bunch of guidance around distributed architecture but way better than last year.

160 points | 91 comments
jazzpush2 1 hour ago|
I like the idea here, but the final product is just so far from what good interactive articles/explanations actually look like. E.g., this style of article:

- https://mlu-explain.github.io/decision-tree/

- any article from distill.pub

- any piece from NYT

jbdamask 1 hour ago|
That decision-tree page is killer!
larodi 1 hour ago||
One can smell Claude's touch with these reactive teaching material. Not quite unexpected, every sane teacher uses Claude's artefacts to teach, but not all it spits is useful for convening knowledge.
jbdamask 1 hour ago||
Thanks to everyone who tried this today and those who provided feedback. I really appreciate your time. Here are some stats:

100 papers processed.

Cost breakdown:

LLM cost $64

AWS cost $0.0003

Claude's editorial comment about this breakdown, "For context, the Anthropic API cost ($63.32) is roughly 200,000x the AWS infrastructure cost. The AWS bill is a rounding error compared to the LLM spend."

Category breakdown:

Computer and Information Sciences 41%

Biological and Biomedical Sciences 15%

Health Sciences 7%

Mathematics and Statistics 5%

Geosciences, Atmospheric, and Ocean Sciences 5%

Physical Sciences 5%

Other 22%

There were a handful of errors due to papers >100 pages. If there were others, I didn't see them (but please let me know).

I'd be interested in hearing from people, what's one thing you would change/add/remove from this app?

japoneris 2 hours ago||
Well, i do not understand the concept. Maybe i am too used to read paper: read the abstract to get a digest of the results, read the intro to understand the problem, skip all the rest as it is too technical or only for benchmark. In the app, i selected a few paper, as i did not know anything about the selecter paper, comparing frog A doing magic stuff is helpless. Yet, the interface is great, i think this can be improve for true understanding.
jbdamask 2 hours ago|
I hear you.

For me personally, the pain point is being interested in more papers than I can consume so I’ve gotten into the habit of loading papers into LLMs as a way to quickly triage. This app is an extension of my own habit.

I also have friends without scientific backgrounds who are interested in topics of research papers but can’t understand them. The reason for the cutesy name, Now I Get It!, is because the prompt steers the response to a layperson

jbdamask 4 hours ago||
Someone processed a paper on designing kindergartens. Mad props for trying such a cool paper. Really interesting how the LLM designed a soothing color scheme and even included a quiz at the end.

https://nowigetit.us/pages/9c19549e-9983-47ae-891f-dd63abd51...

rubenflamshep 4 hours ago|
There is no chart or table in the original paper. Feels like the one in the LLM-generated page is probably hallucinated?
jbdamask 4 hours ago||
If you mean the bar chart, then yea, it made a representational chart.

The caption says, "Conceptual illustration based on the paper's framework — higher quality environments lead to better outcomes across all domains."

mpalmer 1 hour ago||
Man. I know you just made this for your own convenience, and all the big LLMs can one-shot this, but if you found a way to improve on the bog-standard LLM "webpage" design (inject some real human taste, experience and design sensibility), you'd get a few bucks from me- per paper.
jbdamask 1 hour ago|
Very cool. Appreciate it.
vunderba 5 hours ago||
Nice job. I have no point of comparison (having never actually used it) - but wasn't this one of the use-cases for Google's NotebookLM as well?

Feedback:

Many times when I'm reading a paper on arxiv - I find myself needing to download the sourced papers cited in the original. Factoring in the cost/time needed to do this kind of deep dive, it might be worth having a "Deep Research" button that tries to pull in the related sources and integrate them into the webpage as well.

jbdamask 5 hours ago|
Yep, NotebookLM is another flavor. YMMV.

Interesting idea about pulling references. My head goes to graph space...ouch

hackernewds 3 hours ago||
"daily limit reached" on first attempt :/
jbdamask 2 hours ago|
Sorry. Reached 100 uploads today. Check out the gallery
throwaway140126 7 hours ago||
A light mode would be great. I know that many people ask for a dark mode for the reason that they think that a light mode is more tiring than a dark mode but for me it is the opposite.
jbdamask 7 hours ago|
Good point. I can think of a couple ways to do that
leetrout 8 hours ago|
Neat!

Social previews would be great to add

https://socialsharepreview.com/?url=https://nowigetit.us/pag...

jbdamask 6 hours ago|
Cool idea...do you mean include metatags in every generated page so socialpreviews can be automatically generated?
leetrout 3 hours ago||
Correct
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