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 26 days ago [-]
I added now the MedRxiv API, you can try it out and tell me if you notice something weird.
Miguel07Code 26 days ago [-]
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 25 days ago [-]
[dead]
sgdpk 25 days ago [-]
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 25 days ago [-]
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 25 days ago [-]
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.
qnleigh 24 days ago [-]
Yes I strongly agree with this. I also want to read the original abstracts.
Miguel07Code 25 days ago [-]
Thanks for the feedback, I think that it would be like having 2 modes with a toggle: unhingered summaries from local LLMs or the real summaries.
sgdpk 25 days ago [-]
Cool :) I am a scientist, so having an easier way to parse the abstracts would be most welcome. Keep up the good work.
Miguel07Code 25 days ago [-]
Thanks! 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.
25 days ago [-]
nialv7 25 days ago [-]
Funny 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.
Is it filtered to only talk about AI or all of current science interest is about AI ?
jasonjmcghee 25 days ago [-]
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 25 days ago [-]
Added!
Miguel07Code 25 days ago [-]
Noted, I'll add it now
Miguel07Code 26 days ago [-]
Yeah, I filtered it mandatorily about AI or computer science
xnx 25 days ago [-]
BRB going to create XTokTok so I can flip through TikTok for X clones.
bee_rider 25 days ago [-]
Eventually WaylandTok will be ready.
Miguel07Code 25 days ago [-]
That has potential..
qnleigh 24 days ago [-]
This 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 24 days ago [-]
Thanks! 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 24 days ago [-]
> an LLM implementation wouldn't be sustainable
Also not the right tool for the job. Not everything has to be a LLM.
qnleigh 24 days ago [-]
Yes 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 24 days ago [-]
Exactly, 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.
ks2048 25 days ago [-]
I 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.
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
About the behaviour of the scroll it's a bit buggy haha but I'll try to fix that, thanks for the feedback.
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.
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.
WikiTok - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723 - Feb 2025 (216 comments)
IMO it should show that it's searching cs / ai as prefilled search terms.
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.
Maybe I'll implement a basic recommendation algorithm locally, because right now, an LLM implementation wouldn't be sustainable.
Also not the right tool for the job. Not everything has to be a LLM.
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.
https://pdftobrainrot.org/
(I won't know for sure until I can find someone to explain the zoomer lingo.)
It looks good, though when I scroll up once on my trackpad it scrolls past 3-4 articles at a time.