Hacker News Reader

Comment by imnotreallynew | Hacker News Reader

I’ve long wanted some sort of platform for reading somewhat simplified, summarized research papers on topics of interested. Something a little simpler than an original paper, but more accurate and in-depth than what you might find in a popular news article.

I haven’t found anything loke that yet, and I don’t know if it would be feasible to crowdsource summarized publications. AI summarization isn’t quite good enough yet.

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The Conversation[0] tries this. It aims more for 'accurate news stories written by/with academics' than 'simplified research papers' but definitely is trying to be credible yet accessible.

Sadly I've never written for them, as they've not got a huge audience and the career incentives in academia aren't really set up for this kind of accessible popularisation.

[0]: https://www.theconversation.com

I like this idea. When doing a literature review I make summary notes of the paper which I store with it. I use zotero for this which has an add-in (zotfile) that allows me to extract highlights and annotations I make in the pdf to separate notes; this is super handy. So, if those summary notes were somehow made public and organized and if many people did this, they would be a nice source of paper summaries from several perspectives.

I would recommend “news and views” from nature or review articles in general for a broad summary of a field.

If you're ok with videos, Two Minute Papers[1] is a great one for AI papers

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg

Something like Science News?

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