Show HN: ArXivTok
28 comments
·February 5, 2025sgdpk
It looks great. But it's missing one critical feature of "fast-food" apps like TikTok: the content is not easily digestible. Which is understandable, because scientific papers are dense.
Maybe a good idea would be to parse the abstract through an LLM to make it more understandable (maybe caching the results so it's not expensive)? Maybe also using some standard style, like starting with a couple of "dumbed-down" sentences of the article for the non-expert, and progressively explaining better.
Miguel07Code
Mm maybe running a local LLM for doing it would be a great idea, I'll try to do that and if it doesn't work well, I'll consider doing it with an API.
siktirlanibne
Please don't follow the original comments suggestion; I feel that "easily digestible" is not compatible with what makes the idea shine in the first place. Your suggestion delegating such functionality to a local LLM is quite nice as a choice but adding it as a core functionality is quite antithetical to leverage the arXiv part, without which everything reverts back to a bland and generic whateverTok format.
Although the suggestion seems to be aware of the fact and provides both a good reasoning and a quite good solution (progressively deepening explanations), the implicit information and nuance lost in a summary by an unreliable LLM would undeniably turn this from a useful and interesting idea to a cool party trick no one uses for more than 5 minutes.
sgdpk
Cool :) I am a scientist, so having an easier way to parse the abstracts would be most welcome. Keep up the good work.
null
i_love_limes
Great idea! The scrolling is a bit broken though. I can't scroll down the text on my trackpad without it going to the next article, and also it just a lot of articles with a tiny movement of the trackpad.
Otherwise it's a really fun idea! Can I suggest you also scrape from https://www.medrxiv.org/? This is where a lot of medical research preprints, not arxiv
Miguel07Code
I added now the MedRxiv API, you can try it out and tell me if you notice something weird.
Miguel07Code
I saw that medrxiv has an API so I'll add it too!
About the behaviour of the scroll it's a bit buggy haha but I'll try to fix that, thanks for the feedback.
fc417fc802
[dead]
dang
Recent and related:
WikiTok - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723 - Feb 2025 (216 comments)
dandaka
Could you please consider adding video generation? In TikTok style, but with content from Arxiv
Miguel07Code
That would be cool, I'll consider it!
xnx
Feels like XTok is imminent: Browser extension that makes any site scrollable
Miguel07Code
Hahaha surely one is building it right now
Rhapso
I like this. Now i want a self hosted version i can point at a dozen sources mixed together.
hokkos
Is it filtered to only talk about AI or all of current science interest is about AI ?
jasonjmcghee
Not sure why the author didn't say this, but that's _by default_. There's a search in the top right and you can do like `astro-ph` and it'll return papers from it, afaict by skimming the source.
IMO it should show that it's searching cs / ai as prefilled search terms.
Miguel07Code
Noted, I'll add it now
Miguel07Code
Added!
Miguel07Code
Yeah, I filtered it mandatorily about AI or computer science
achierius
Out of curiosity (since you turned this around so fast) -- I saw that the other author mostly used Claude/Cursor, did you do the same?
Miguel07Code
Yeah, I used Copilot instead of Cursor.
Rendello
You can add Show HN to the title, too.
It looks good, though when I scroll up once on my trackpad it scrolls past 3-4 articles at a time.
Miguel07Code
Thanks for the feedback! I'll add Show HN then.
eunos
Add swipe feature next!
Miguel07Code
I think I have that now covered, you can try it out and tell me if it works if you want.
Miguel07Code
That would be nice, I'll add it to the roadmap.
null
I made this, and it's fully open source so if someone wants to contribute here you have the url: https://github.com/Miguel07Alm/arxivtok.
For this project I was inspired by https://wikitok.vercel.app.