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Show HN: ArXivTok
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 https://github.com/Miguel07Alm/arxivtok.
For this project I was inspired by https://wikitok.vercel.app https://wikitok.vercel.app.
- dvaun 2y agoMight as well throw together HackerTok.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoI'll add it as a source too.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Rendello 2y agoYou 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 2y agoThanks for the feedback! I'll add Show HN then.
- i_love_limes 2y agoGreat 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/ https://www.medrxiv.org/? This is where a lot of medical research preprints, not arxiv
- Miguel07Code 2y agoI 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.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoI added now the MedRxiv API, you can try it out and tell me if you notice something weird.
- fc417fc802 2y ago[dead]
- hokkos 2y agoIs it filtered to only talk about AI or all of current science interest is about AI ?
- Miguel07Code 2y agoYeah, I filtered it mandatorily about AI or computer science
- jasonjmcghee 2y agoNot 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 2y agoNoted, I'll add it now
- Miguel07Code 2y agoAdded!
- eunos 2y agoAdd swipe feature next!
- Miguel07Code 2y agoThat would be nice, I'll add it to the roadmap.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoI think I have that now covered, you can try it out and tell me if it works if you want.
- Rhapso 2y agoI like this. Now i want a self hosted version i can point at a dozen sources mixed together.
- achierius 2y agoOut 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 2y agoYeah, I used Copilot instead of Cursor.
- dang 2y agoRecent and related: WikiTok - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723 - Feb 2025 (216 comments)
- dandaka 2y agoCould you please consider adding video generation? In TikTok style, but with content from Arxiv
- Miguel07Code 2y agoThat would be cool, I'll consider it!
- xnx 2y agoFeels like XTok is imminent: Browser extension that makes any site scrollable
- Miguel07Code 2y agoHahaha surely one is building it right now
- sgdpk 2y agoIt 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 2y agoMm 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.
- sgdpk 2y agoCool :) I am a scientist, so having an easier way to parse the abstracts would be most welcome. Keep up the good work.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoThanks! I'll text you here when I add the feature. It wouldn't be core, so I think that having two modes where you can read easily papers with LLms or not will be of great help.
- siktirlanibne 2y agoPlease 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.
- xnx 2y agoBRB going to create XTokTok so I can flip through TikTok for X clones.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoThat has potential..
- bee_rider 2y agoEventually WaylandTok will be ready.
- nialv7 2y agoFunny to think this is actually kind of similar to how ByteDance got their start. One of their first apps is called "Today's headlines", which is basically the TikTok format, but instead of short videos you are scrolling news article.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoWow, I didn't know that.. It's really ironic
- ks2048 2y agoI think you need AI to generate a video of a Gen-Z person talking about each, holding a little microphone. The paper could be the green-screened background.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoJust by imagining it, it would be a lot of fun haha.
- SonOfLilit 2y agoYou mean like this? https://pdftobrainrot.org/ https://pdftobrainrot.org/
- password4321 2y agoCan you show number of references as though they were number of favorites or likes?
- Miguel07Code 2y agoYeah, I'll add it quickly.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoAdded! Try it out.
- resonious 2y agoPretty weird UX to say "no papers found" before suddenly showing me a paper.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoI'll try to improve that in a moment.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoI'm rolling a new version up now, it'll be live in 2 minutes.
- qnleigh 2y agoThis is legitimately useful! How does it track what a user has already viewed? Is it just showing articles from the current day in order? If I get to a day I've viewed previously, will it start showing me articles that I've already viewed once? I've been hesitant to touch my filter search term since I don't want to start over. More customization to what papers it shows you could be very useful. You could keep track of user likes and employ a recommendation algorithm. Or better yet, the user could provide a custom prompt, which an LLM would use to filter and/or recommend papers.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoThanks! I don't track anything; it just shows sorted papers from the current date. Maybe I'll implement a basic recommendation algorithm locally, because right now, an LLM implementation wouldn't be sustainable.
- worksonmine 2y ago> an LLM implementation wouldn't be sustainable Also not the right tool for the job. Not everything has to be a LLM.
- qnleigh 2y agoYes definitely not. But I think this could be a legitimately good use case if it were implementable. Filtering based on keywords will throw away papers of interest, while a recommendation algorithm wouldn't give you much control over content. But a language model could probably do a decent job of ranking a days worth of papers based on relevance to a short description of your research interests. I'm in a field where there are 50+ postings a day, but only 5-10% are relevant to my focus. A good filter would save me a lot of tedium. But OP says it wouldn't be sustainable to implement, so that's that. Maybe will try this myself and see how it goes.
- Miguel07Code 2y agoExactly, I think that in this case using ML models that are experts in papers can be more useful and that type of models can run locally so it's the best option.