Nördnytt! 🤓Show HN: Now I Get It – Translate scientific papers into interactive webpages
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.
- jazzpush2 - 8888 sekunder sedanI 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
- larodi - 6782 sekunder sedanOne 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 - 7374 sekunder sedanThanks 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 - 12646 sekunder sedanWell, 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 - 20655 sekunder sedanSomeone 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...
- mpalmer - 9957 sekunder sedanMan. 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.
- vunderba - 24298 sekunder sedanNice 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.
- hackernewds - 14159 sekunder sedan"daily limit reached" on first attempt :/
- throwaway140126 - 28947 sekunder sedanA 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.
- leetrout - 31978 sekunder sedanNeat!
Social previews would be great to add
https://socialsharepreview.com/?url=https://nowigetit.us/pag...
- eterps - 18478 sekunder sedanhttps://nowigetit.us/pages/8cf08b76-c5bc-4a7b-bdb4-a0c15089e...
The actual explanation (using code blocks) is almost impossible to read and comprehend.
- ukuina - 24832 sekunder sedanNeat! I've previously used something similar: https://www.emergentmind.com/
- lamename - 33074 sekunder sedanI tried to upload a 239 KB pdf and it said "Daily processing limit reached".
- swaminarayan - 19924 sekunder sedanHow do you evaluate whether users actually understand better, rather than just feel like they do?
- ajkjk - 25962 sekunder sedancool 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.
- filldorns - 9256 sekunder sedanGreat solution!
but...
Error Daily processing limit reached. Please try again tomorrow.
- armedgorilla - 30536 sekunder sedanThanks 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.
- fsflyer - 30048 sekunder sedanSome 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.
- jbdamask - 21528 sekunder sedanI 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"
- jbdamask - 24690 sekunder sedanLots of great responses. Thank you!
I increased today's limit to 100 papers so more people can try it out
- leke - 17777 sekunder sedanDo you happen to know if LLMs have issues reading PDFs? Would they prefer EPUB format for example?
- cdiamand - 26957 sekunder sedanGreat work OP.
This is super helpful for visual learners and for starting to onboard one's mind into a new domain.
Excited to see where you take this.
Might be interesting to have options for converting Wikipedia pages or topic searches down the line.
- BDGC - 26691 sekunder sedanThis is neat! As an academic, this is definitely something I can see using to share my work with friends and family, or showing on my lab website for each paper. Can’t wait to try it out.
- DrammBA - 26195 sekunder sedan> I could just as well use a saved prompt in Claude
On that note, do you mind sharing the prompt? I want to see how good something like GLM or Kimi does just by pure prompting on OpenCode.
- - 25205 sekunder sedan
- TheBog - 24930 sekunder sedanLooks super cool, adding to the sentiment that I would happily pay a bit for it.
- toddmorey - 24729 sekunder sedanI’m worried that opportunities like this to build fun/interesting software over models are evaporating.
A service just like this maybe 3 years ago would have been the coolest and most helpful thing I discovered.
But when the same 2 foundation models do the heavy lifting, I struggle to figure out what value the rest of us in the wider ecosystem can add.
I’m doing exactly this by feeding the papers to the LLMs directly. And you’re right the results are amazing.
But more and more what I see on HN feels like “let me google that for you”. I’m sorry to be so negative!
I actually expected a world where a lot of specialized and fine-tuned models would bloom. Where someone with a passion for a certain domain could make a living in AI development, but it seems like the logical endd game in tech is just absurd concentration.
- onion2k - 26787 sekunder sedanI want this for my company's documentation.
- alwinaugustin - 19083 sekunder sedanThere is a limit for 100 pages. Tried to upload the Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures (REST - Roy T. Fielding) but it is 180 pages.
- sean_pedersen - 24274 sekunder sedanvery cool! would be useful if headings where linkable using anchor
- Vaslo - 26319 sekunder sedanI’d love if this can be self-hosted, but i understand you may want to monetize it. I’ll keep checking back.
- croes - 26997 sekunder sedanAre documents hashed and the results cached?
- jbdamask - 19112 sekunder sedanThe app may be getting throttled. If you're waiting on a job, check back in a bit.
- enos_feedler - 34059 sekunder sedancan i spin this up myself? is the code anywhere? thanks!
- relaxing - 15175 sekunder sedanI picked the “Attention is All You Need” example at the top, and wow it is not great!
Didn’t take long to find hallucination/general lack of intelligence:
> For each word, we compute three vectors: a Query (what am I looking for?), a Key (what do I contain?), and a Value (what do I give out?).
What? That’s the worst description of a key-value relationship I’ve ever read, unhelpful for understanding what the equation is doing, and just wrong.
> Attention(Q, K, V) = softmax( Q·Kᵀ / √dk ) · V
> 3 Mask (Optional) Block future positions in decoder
Not present in this equation, also not a great description of masking in a RNN.
> 5 × V Weighted sum of values = output
Nope!
https://nowigetit.us/pages/f4795875-61bf-4c79-9fbe-164b32344...
- nimbus-hn-test - 30740 sekunder sedan[dead]
- fancymcpoopoo - 10278 sekunder sedanPeople will do anything except work