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Posted by jbdamask 10 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 commentspage 2
ukuina 7 hours ago|
Neat! I've previously used something similar: https://www.emergentmind.com/
jbdamask 7 hours ago|
Cool. I hadn't seen Emergent Mind
jazzpush2 3 hours ago||
It's very bad in my experience. It hallucinates like crazy - e.g. something simple as enumerating the correct hidden dimension for a transformer-based model (same across all layers) it gets wrong often.
eterps 5 hours ago||
https://nowigetit.us/pages/8cf08b76-c5bc-4a7b-bdb4-a0c15089e...

The actual explanation (using code blocks) is almost impossible to read and comprehend.

jbdamask 5 hours ago|
Sometimes the LLM output isn’t great. If you uploaded the paper you can click Recreate. Otherwise just upload the PDF and see if you get a better response
lamename 9 hours ago||
I tried to upload a 239 KB pdf and it said "Daily processing limit reached".
jbdamask 9 hours ago||
Yea, looks like a lot of people uploaded articles today. I have a 20 article per day cap now because I’m paying for it.

I could change to a simple cost+ model but don’t want to bother until I see if people like it.

Ideas for splitting the difference so more people can use it without breaking my bank appreciated

jonahx 8 hours ago|||
You should just whip up some simple cost plus payment, with a low plus.

I'd probably use it now.

jbdamask 8 hours ago||
cool, thanks
lamename 9 hours ago||||
So far i really like what it does for the example articles shown. I want to test it on 1 or 2 articles I know well, and if it passes that test it's a product I'd totally pay for.
jbdamask 8 hours ago||
appreciate it, thanks
iterance 9 hours ago|||
What's the cost per article?
jbdamask 8 hours ago||
Avg cost $0.65
leke 9 hours ago||
metoo. I'm very interested to see what it can do.
jbdamask 7 hours ago||
thanks
swaminarayan 6 hours ago||
How do you evaluate whether users actually understand better, rather than just feel like they do?
jbdamask 6 hours ago|
I don't. Too new and I haven't fully committed to this idea yet.
econ 2 minutes ago||
For what it's worth it worked for me.
ajkjk 7 hours ago||
cool idea

probably need to have better pre-loaded examples, and divided up more granularly into subfields. e.g. "Physical sciences" vs "physics", "mathematics and statistics" vs "mathematics". I couldn't find anything remotely related to my own interests to test it on. maybe it's just being populated by people using it, though? in which case, I'll check back later.

jbdamask 7 hours ago|
Yes, populated by users. The gallery uses the field taxonomy from National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES)
filldorns 3 hours ago||
Great solution!

but...

Error Daily processing limit reached. Please try again tomorrow.

jbdamask 3 hours ago|
Sorry you hit this. 100 papers were processed today. Cost to me was $63.
arthurcolle 3 minutes ago||
Make this a paid service! This could go viral
armedgorilla 9 hours ago||
Thanks John. Neat to see you on the HN front page.

One LLM feature I've been trying to teach Alltrna is scraping out data from supplemental tables (or the figures themselves) and regraphing them to see if we come to the same conclusions as the authors.

LLMs can be overly credulous with the authors' claims, but finding the real data and analysis methods is too time consuming. Perhaps Claude with the right connectors can shorten that.

jbdamask 7 hours ago|
Thanks. I can guess who this is but not 100% sure.

Totally agree with what you're saying. This tool ignores supplemental materials right now. There are a few reasons - some demographic, some technical. Anything that smells like data science would need more rigor.

Have you looked into DocETl (https://www.docetl.org/)? I could imagine a paper pipeline that was tuned to extract conclusions, methods, and supplemental data into separate streams that tried to recapitulate results. Then an LLM would act as the judge.

fsflyer 8 hours ago||
Some ideas for seeing more examples:

1. Add a donate button. Some folks probably just want to see more examples (or an example in their field, but don't have a specific paper in mind.)

2. Have a way to nominate papers to be examples. You could do this in the HN thread without any product changes. This could give good coverage of different fields and uncover weaknesses in the product.

marssaxman 5 hours ago||
It would be fun if the donate button let you see how many additional papers your gift would enable. I'm thinking of something like the ticker you see on the right side of a GoFundMe page, where you might see "$175 donated today, 112 papers translated, credit for 96 papers remaining"; one might choose to donate $20 rather than, say, $5, if there were a clear connection to the benefit you were providing.
jbdamask 8 hours ago||
Really clever ideas!

Maybe a combo where I keep a list and automatically process as funds become available.

econ 1 minute ago|||
Could make a list of pending papers and allow others to pay for them.
wizardforhire 7 hours ago|||
In the interest of lists, quality and simplicity… I suggest anything from Fermat’s Library [1] mailing list… already curated.

[1] https://fermatslibrary.com/

jbdamask 7 hours ago||
Never heard of this. Thanks!
jbdamask 7 hours ago||
Lots of great responses. Thank you!

I increased today's limit to 100 papers so more people can try it out

jbdamask 6 hours ago|
I see a few people trying to process big papers. Not sure if you're seeing a meaningful error in the UI but the response from the LLM is, "A maximum of 100 PDF pages may be provided"
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