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Show HN: Transform any website or eBook into a research paper (no LLM required)

github.com

96 pointsjstrieb15 comments

I'm the author!

As some have guessed, I did, indeed, conceive of this for procrastinating and reading non-work materials at work.

I don't actually expect to use it, but it was one of those ideas that I couldn't get out of my head until I had it working. And after that, it wasn't too much effort to clean it up and lob it onto the Internet. Although, perhaps calling it "cleaned up" is a bit generous considering it's 1k lines of shell script.

Maybe there are some grad students or researchers out there for whom this will come in handy.

Given its mostly-unstated purpose, releasing it on Labor Day was a small joke for my own entertainment :)

For those of you who haven't read to the end of the README, its for procrastination. The idea is that if you, as a part of your work, read a lot of papers, but want to procrastinate secretly, you can convert a book or website you'd like to read to a paper, and thus it seems as if you're doing your work but instead you're enjoying your book.

Ah so this is what PhDs actually do!

In my experience, PhD students procrastinate _a lot_.

So, it is alike PhD Comics emergency button (see the bottom right corner of https://phdcomics.com/comics/).

Hm, I can't say I've ever wanted to convert to paper formatting; it's almost always wanting to convert from paper formatting, so that I can better read papers on my e-reader or such. What are you using this for?

> What are you using this for?

It's a mystery for me as well. It seems the author put quite some work in it, especially in the LaTeX template section, so surely there must be some use for it, I just fail to grasp it.

Actually, the LaTeX template took the least amount of work of anything! It's a very slightly modified version of the default Pandoc standalone LaTeX template. You can recover the original (or something like it, depending on your version of Pandoc) for comparison by doing the following:

    pandoc --print-default-template latex

QA testing on a few different computers to make sure it was portable was, by far, the most time-consuming part of the project.

This will come handy to every startup in the AI field where it’s common knowledge that the only way to make a press release is arxiv it.

Can someone enlighten me what's the actual use for this project? I can only imagine a student that wants to read some mundane stuff but their parents are watching so they pretend to study a scientific paper.

Anything else?

See this part of the readme: "Special shout out to the friends who suggested, as a follow-up project, making a browser extension to transform the current web page into a scientific paper. Sort of like Firefox reader mode, but for viewing Twitter when someone looking over your shoulder expects you to be doing something else."

It is useless. That's why it's interesting.

To those have made the noble decision to sacrifice years of potential earnings to advance the frontiers of knowledge, yet are lazy enough to spend that time reading a novel, we salute you.

Love the idea.

Plenty of personal open source projects I've wanted to attempt writing a more scientific explanation of.

> The text of the generated paper is the same as the text of the original document, but figures and equations from real papers are interspersed throughout.

It will still be the same text. I suggest you only use the readme ;)

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