Show HN: Feed of current articles for science lovers shortened to bullet points | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Feed of current articles for science lovers shortened to bullet points

bullets.tech

94 pointskemyd34 comments

Hi everyone!

I'm Dawid, the Founder and CEO of Bootstrap Shuffle during the day and a reader interested in science at any other time.

According to the study[1], emotional people (I am one of them) overestimate the knowledge they acquire by reading just the titles of articles shared on Facebook.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053168018816189

Bullets.tech is a response to it. This is a place where we publish summaries of articles for science enthusiasts. Five bullet points or less. The very essence of the article.

If you ever happened to share or like a science-related article after reading just the title, you will like our website :)

If the title of an article says that "a cure for cancer has been found", our summary will allow you to find out that the article is referring to one of the hundreds of tumor types and not in humans but in mice.

You can browse Bullets.tech:

1/ via the https://bullets.tech website

2/ By signing up to the weekly newsletter on the website

3/ Using the terminal https://www.npmjs.com/package/bullets-tech-cli

4/ on Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/bullets.tech/

5/ and the RSS feed: https://bullets.tech/rss/latest.xml

I am willing to collaborate with people with similar interests (science, technology, psychology, cosmos, history, medicine, nature) who would like to take part in developing this project as non-technical co-founders.

PS. I copied my post from Product Hunt because it explain a lot (i think)

Any questions? Maybe suggestions?

Thank you for this, that's really great! You are totally right: between the full article and the (often over-hyped) title, there is a sweet spot for a short, high signal-to-noise summary. Even the abstract is often too verbose or omit some important shortcomings of the article.

In some subreddits, users receive a lot of karma to do things similar to what you are doing. Usually making:

- a summary of the finding (the abstract in one sentence) - a summary of the methodology (which often tells if a study is solid or not) - context to understand if this is a breakthrough, an interesting but unpractical effect, a potentially misleading discovery

These are especially precious in environmental or medical research where one study may seem to say totally different things based on the overall context.

Hi. Thanks for this.

I'd love it if the "load more" button can work without javascript. A paginated link would we wonderful.

Can we get this for Tech and possibly other verticals?

For now, we’ll publish articles from various categories in one feed (science, technology, psychology, cosmos, history, medicine, nature - as mentioned above)

I like the idea, and am certainly going to keep it on my reading list. I would really appreciate some indication of the strength of the evidence in a paper though... Some combination of the quality of the methodology, statistical relevance (including sample size and size of effect), whether it falls in line with existing evidence...

Great idea! I want this feature in all news paper.

A browser extension that shows the Bullets.tech summary when you browse to an article that has been summarized would be very useful.

So these are all hand-summarized? Are there any guidelines or standards for summarization (what kind of information would be most useful, what wouldn't normally be included, how are articles found?), and if so, would you consider putting them on an "about us" page?

Also, who are the summarizers? Hand picked? Volunteers?

I'm not assuming any kind of ill-will or mal-intent, but how do I know that the bullet points will be any more useful that the title in terms of bias, other than goodwill?

I really really like the idea, and even the execution, so these are definitely just kind of nit-picks.

Yes, we are summarizing articles "manually". You raised a valid point (bias) and to be honest, I don't have an answer right now. We will create about us/FAQ page for sure. I need at least a few hours to think about it.

Suggestion: also add a link to the original research article (not just the newspaper article or press release etc. that's being summarized). This would be very helpful.

Heya, I really like it :) Like the top comment currently though I have a hard time with the font. Everything else seems great!

Running a neural network on paper abstracts can probably get you 80% of the way to removing the need for human submitters — figuring out the remain 20% is an exercise for the reader :)

This is reasonable if you want to summarize hundreds of articles and more :) We are summarizing only 2-3 a day (we'll grow but not much). I want to create a place where people will read all summaries, even if something is out of their field of specialty.

80% done, 80% to go!

The scary thing is this works no matter what the number is. I've had a few projects where I was 99% done... And 99% to go.

Disabling the Josephin Sans font makes it much more readable in Firefox on my FHD Dell laptop. The letters are too short and thick. I really wish designers use conservative values of font family, weight and size.

Top priority for me! Thank you for poiting this out

Second. This site will be a welcome addition to my morning read, but that rather unique font is taxing to my eyes.

https://bullets.tech/rss/latest.xml is the RSS feed (easy to overlook on the landing page).

To be precise, you can browse Bullets.tech:

1/ via the https://bullets.tech website

2/ By signing up to the weekly newsletter on the website

3/ Using the terminal https://www.npmjs.com/package/bullets-tech-cli

4/ on Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/bullets.tech/

5/ and the RSS feed: https://bullets.tech/rss/latest.xml

Seconded that this is super useful. I think it's great to start with high profile media outlets, but I'd encourage you to look towards more science-level publications as well, esp. Nature and Science.

Thank you. We will take your advice!

Would it be possible to add a feature to generate a high rez image(with your watermark) for sharing on social networks apart from twitter/facebook etc? i'm thinking of the ability to share to whatsapp

I have been looking at this all day trying to decide how I feel about it. At the very least it is temptingly informative, which I think makes it a success. I appreciate that the summaries are manual and if bias concerns you (it should and apparently does) then just acknowledging a potential bias would be taking an appropriate nod from the scientific community.

I really like the design. I do a lot of backend dev so I gotta ask, what goes into designing a aesthetically pleasing site like that?

I created Bullets.tech using my tool https://bootstrapshuffle.com

It's of course based on Bootstrap. I like to use an online builder to experiment with fonts/colors. I found fonts here: https://fontpair.co/

Probably, I changed only the primary color from the default Bootstrap palette. I used one from this palette: https://flatuicolors.com/palette/ca

I'm mostly backend developer like you. I experiment a lot to find something looking good!

As aitchnyu allready noticed you might need to think about what fonts you use and where. Josephin Sans could work fine for aside headers but you shouldn't use it all throughout the site if you care about readability.

Really like the clean design of the site!

Great idea, perhaps you could add a link to HN comments if the article is posted on HN :)

Hi Dawid, really useful resource! I would like to try a similar site for another industry/field. Can you tell me how you built the site/what theme you used?

Hi, sorry for the late reply. As I said in comments earlier, I created the theme by myself using https://bootstrapshuffle.com

Oh my science, this is AMAZING. I can't believe how I lived before, toiling through pages of PDFs to find the actual point of papers.

Thank you!

Very clean design. Thanks.

Thanks for the RSS feed!

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