No worries, I've just removed this, now you can read articles with no account needed. Honestly, thanks a lot for the feedback, that's the most valuable thing to have at this stage :)
> requires account to view more than homepage
No worries, I've just removed this. Now you can read all articles with no account needed. Thank you for the feedback :)
> had less information on the page
Is it a bad thing? I mean, I can add some sort of a setting to display more / less content in different density, is this what you'd want?
There's filters, there's search, there's buttons to toggle various things. There are tabs for different views. This all takes up 2/3rds of the display.
When I go to HN, there's a simple top bar, and then a list of articles. You are straight into what you came for.
It's like old reddit vs new reddit, old is plain but easy to see a lot of content. New is pathetic. HN is much better to look at. Make a science HN just like HN and you have a winner.
This is an interesting comparison. I think this depends on the age and habits of a particular user. I mean, I honestly don't like HN's design that much, it looks like a thing from 00's.
On mobile, about 70% of the screen real estate is dedicated to searching and filtering UI. At the bottom 30% of the screen, I can see 1 headline for an article.
When visiting HN about 90% of my mobile screen real estate is dedicated to content and I’m able to see the first 13 results.
As others have said, forcing a login is a huge barrier.
I wanted to see if any astronomy posts were on the front page, and when I didn't see any, I tried to check out the categories. But when prompted for a login/sign-up, I lost interest.
Assisted logins are any "Login with ____" options. Google, Facebook, Apple, et al offer this. Its a bad deal because they (to a degree) take control away from you and contribute to further unnecessary tracking. I have anecdotally also found it to be annoying in terms of disabling if I changed my mind and wanted to use my own username/address and generated password to more directly control my account associated with it.
Additionally, if your account with the assistee was ever terminated or restricted, you may have a bad time trying to (as I remarked about) get back in direct control of your account. I don't like having all these things daisy-chained. Its like to digital version of being under conservatorship or babysat. If you're not prone to phishing I would advise against it, although I would prefer resolving that cardinal sin in shorter order where possible and practicable.
No worries, I've just removed this, now you can freely read any article with no account needed.
> I tried to check out the categories
Hm, okay!
> But when prompted for a login/sign-up, I lost interest.
This is a one I cannot remove that fast (due to the way backend processes these categories), but I'm just curious, why did you loose an interest? I mean, yes, it requires login, and so?
1. The posts I'd find most interesting in the site are ones related to astronomy and applied machine learning. If there wasn't anything on astronomy (or physics) then I probably wouldn't use the site in the long run.
2.HN is a news aggregator. Most links that reach the front page have something interesting to offer. If I can't access the part of the site I find interesting, then I'll like go back to HN and find another post. (This isn't something I'd love to admit, but oh well.)
I thought you said above that you had removed the login requirement to view categories? I am still being asked to login. Or did I misunderstand? Would be nice to access categories without login necessary. Not seeing a reason that should be required?
Nope, I'm sorry if I was unclear, I was saying I've removed requirement to click on articles in the feed. This is a bit more complicated task with categories (due to some backend things I need to change), but I do understand the problem
A similar project popped up 6 months ago, "HN for research papers", I found it interesting as a physicist turned software developer, and still casually interested in science. It had traffic for a couple of hours and now the site is not even up.
The challenge with all these sites is always the same, how can you attract enough people so that there's a healthy discussion on at least some of the top items and how will you make people's attention worth it over HN / Reddit / Twitter.
So far, only seen it working out partly for lobste.rs, there, at least there's some discussion, but TBH I still ask myself how is that better than just going to HN or even Reddit, as the conversation is practically the same as here.
Is there an article explaining how it is like HN? I thought the algorithm here was upvotes plus some time constants and flagging mostly, what does "Let AI simplify articles, clarify terms, and help you do research" mean?
I like the idea of trying to produce decent composite review-level datasets of scientific papers if that's what you mean. I have way less objection to this than most AI because the results are supposed to be public and accessible in exactly this way.
Is it something revolutionary and amazingly useful like that, or is this more just deciding what to show you in a feed based on past history?
> what does "Let AI simplify articles, clarify terms, and help you do research" mean?
If you select a text from a paper and click on "Simplify" in a popup, it will try to tell you what it means. The "help you do research" is a more broad part thought huh
> Is it something revolutionary and amazingly useful like that
We (right now a team of two) plan to develop an AI-assisted peer review. What I mean is that we can use LLMs to check for some "bad things" in paper (like small sample size or some weird hypothesis etc) + analyze the comments and the users behind these comments.
> just deciding what to show you in a feed based on past history?
Surely not, but this is what we already have in the product right now
Sounds reasonably handy, do you rely on users to tell you if the LLM generated simplifications are misleading? It is clearly doing more than just popping up definitions of confusing words, kudos for that.
This makes me want a tool that lets the scientists (who obviously are fine writers but don't specialize in writing) write at whatever level of detail they want, and then shorten or lengthen it to different audiences. EXCEPT the actual authors would verify and publish specific alternates.
I think it's great to have a 3 page short paper for super experts in a short journal article (though I don't see why journal articles have page limits in 2023). I think it's better if that three page paper can be turned into a ten page paper that's way easier to read and which the authors actually vetted as accurately representing what they did.
> Sounds reasonably handy, do you rely on users to tell you if the LLM generated simplifications are misleading?
Not yet, but this is in our roadmap for sure
> EXCEPT the actual authors would verify and publish specific alternates.
This is also a good one, except that there's already 100s of millions of research papers that need to be summarized. But probably we can ask the audience / researchers themselves to verify summaries once we produce a summary for a particular paper
One of the first things I do when I test aggregator sites like this one is to look for the RSS feed. I may have missed something but I did not find one here - could that be added? It would make it much easier to integrate into my normal 'news flow' which is more or less entirely built around RSS feeds presented through Nextcloud News [1]. I can scrape sites which do not provide their own feed but that is tedious and just increases the load on those sites.
Nice idea, it has an incredibly narrow column for the content though - it makes it very hard to read and it's something like 80-90% waste screen real estate - @dndndnd check out https://i.imgur.com/XTx0jjc.png which I just took on a standard monitor and Firefox, no zoom / adjustments made.
65 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] thread- login necessary
- All sorts of content that distracts from the main message (AI, job boards, you name it)
- too much design (I like it) - requires account to view more than homepage (don’t like this)
> requires account to view more than homepage No worries, I've just removed this. Now you can read all articles with no account needed. Thank you for the feedback :)
That design was slicker for sure, but was more confusing and had less information on the page.
I guess we all value different things.
> had less information on the page Is it a bad thing? I mean, I can add some sort of a setting to display more / less content in different density, is this what you'd want?
When I go to HN, there's a simple top bar, and then a list of articles. You are straight into what you came for.
Exactly. Less flash, more substance.
When visiting HN about 90% of my mobile screen real estate is dedicated to content and I’m able to see the first 13 results.
HN: https://tools.pingdom.com/#629fe03213000000 Yours: https://tools.pingdom.com/#629fdff48e000000
Its HN vs yours 25 KB vs 305 KB and 7 requests vs 44 requests.
Besides that, looks very promising!
> looks very promising
Huh thanks! Do you have any ideas about features or anything?
I wanted to see if any astronomy posts were on the front page, and when I didn't see any, I tried to check out the categories. But when prompted for a login/sign-up, I lost interest.
Additionally, if your account with the assistee was ever terminated or restricted, you may have a bad time trying to (as I remarked about) get back in direct control of your account. I don't like having all these things daisy-chained. Its like to digital version of being under conservatorship or babysat. If you're not prone to phishing I would advise against it, although I would prefer resolving that cardinal sin in shorter order where possible and practicable.
> I tried to check out the categories
Hm, okay!
> But when prompted for a login/sign-up, I lost interest.
This is a one I cannot remove that fast (due to the way backend processes these categories), but I'm just curious, why did you loose an interest? I mean, yes, it requires login, and so?
Two reasons:
1. The posts I'd find most interesting in the site are ones related to astronomy and applied machine learning. If there wasn't anything on astronomy (or physics) then I probably wouldn't use the site in the long run.
2.HN is a news aggregator. Most links that reach the front page have something interesting to offer. If I can't access the part of the site I find interesting, then I'll like go back to HN and find another post. (This isn't something I'd love to admit, but oh well.)
Okay, gotcha, I think I have an idea how to fix this :)
> Most links that reach the front page have something interesting to offer.
Synthical has this functionality (I mean, "Top articles") in the right bar, but yep, I understand what you mean
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34780579
There's also a "HN for Golang", that site also has practically no traffic and discussions.
https://golangnews.com/
The challenge with all these sites is always the same, how can you attract enough people so that there's a healthy discussion on at least some of the top items and how will you make people's attention worth it over HN / Reddit / Twitter.
So far, only seen it working out partly for lobste.rs, there, at least there's some discussion, but TBH I still ask myself how is that better than just going to HN or even Reddit, as the conversation is practically the same as here.
Well, we're up, no worries
> than just going to HN
This is true, but HN is not focused on science
:)
Was this site implemented using Reflex? I see the same error here: https://reflex.dev/blog/2023-08-02-seed-annoucement/
I like the idea of trying to produce decent composite review-level datasets of scientific papers if that's what you mean. I have way less objection to this than most AI because the results are supposed to be public and accessible in exactly this way.
Is it something revolutionary and amazingly useful like that, or is this more just deciding what to show you in a feed based on past history?
If you select a text from a paper and click on "Simplify" in a popup, it will try to tell you what it means. The "help you do research" is a more broad part thought huh
> Is it something revolutionary and amazingly useful like that
We (right now a team of two) plan to develop an AI-assisted peer review. What I mean is that we can use LLMs to check for some "bad things" in paper (like small sample size or some weird hypothesis etc) + analyze the comments and the users behind these comments.
> just deciding what to show you in a feed based on past history?
Surely not, but this is what we already have in the product right now
This makes me want a tool that lets the scientists (who obviously are fine writers but don't specialize in writing) write at whatever level of detail they want, and then shorten or lengthen it to different audiences. EXCEPT the actual authors would verify and publish specific alternates.
I think it's great to have a 3 page short paper for super experts in a short journal article (though I don't see why journal articles have page limits in 2023). I think it's better if that three page paper can be turned into a ten page paper that's way easier to read and which the authors actually vetted as accurately representing what they did.
Not yet, but this is in our roadmap for sure
> EXCEPT the actual authors would verify and publish specific alternates.
This is also a good one, except that there's already 100s of millions of research papers that need to be summarized. But probably we can ask the audience / researchers themselves to verify summaries once we produce a summary for a particular paper
[1] https://github.com/nextcloud/news