Show HN: Synthical – Like HN, but for Science | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Synthical – Like HN, but for Science

synthical.com

44 pointsdndndnd67 comments

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.

What do u think is the best login option with least friction? Google login, email link?

Although not the point of my comment (I don't want to sign in at all) -- I personally like a username/password the best.

Don't use assisted login services. Use a password manager with autofill if you need convenience.

Care to elaborate on using assisted logins?

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?

> why did you loose an interest?

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.)

> If there wasn't anything on astronomy

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

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

All good. I misunderstood! I realize it isn't necessarily a quick and easy thing to change. :)

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.

This is a really good point, thank you! Probably our mobile layout sucks

If you need help with that, let me know

Also, keep in mind that one of the biggest advantages of HN is how lightweight it is.

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!

Huhuh nice, no worries, I plan to work on this "44 requests" part (just had no time to do that)

> looks very promising

Huh thanks! Do you have any ideas about features or anything?

Do u think the small font on the HN header impacts useability?

I would love something like HN for science, but this is not it. Most crucially:

- login necessary

- All sorts of content that distracts from the main message (AI, job boards, you name it)

> login necessary I have just removed it, now you can read articles with no account needed

Nope. Still there at 2:17 pm EDT.

If you click on an article in a feed, it's still there? Because that's the thing I was referring to

HN is also a job board, the only difference is that the job ads are in the feed.

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

On iOS 15.3.1 Safari —- ‘’’ Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). ‘’’

Was this site implemented using Reflex? I see the same error here: https://reflex.dev/blog/2023-08-02-seed-annoucement/

Whoops! Nope, this is actually thanks to NextJS 13 and its hydration

Would love to see the site when this is fixed.

Is it fixed or not? I cannot confirm because I cannot reproduce

It’s not fixed

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.

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.

[1] https://github.com/nextcloud/news

Unlike HN, you need an account just to see the content.

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 :)

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.

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.

> now the site is not even up

Well, we're up, no worries

> than just going to HN

This is true, but HN is not focused on science

No worries, I have just removed it, now you can read articles with no account needed

Thank you. Much appreciated.

Be honest. As a scientist do you find all these titles readable at all? I don't think so.

Me too! We actually want to display simplified/summarized abstracts (using LLMs) instead of actual titles

Ehh, not really.

- too much design (I like it) - requires account to view more than homepage (don’t like this)

> I like it Thank you :)

> 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 :)

Can't click to view any categories without login though, so have to scroll the homepage hoping to find things of interest.

The streak thing is kind of patronizing.

I think we will redesign it in a way Apple Books does this (they also have a streak)

It's not like HN at all really

The UI was great.

Thank you :)

Now, where's the "It's like HN, but for hackers?"

When hackerone adds a news board

lobste.rs

looks cool! rss would b great ;)

I wish HN had a visual design that good.

One of the best parts of HN is the information density. The design on that site is the exact opposite.

Just curious, how would you increase an information density at Synthical without loosing readability?

I mean, HN is perfectly readable and much more dense. So I guess, copy HN?

I have some issues with this "HN is perfectly readable" statement, but I get your point, hopefully we'll find a way to fix this one :)

I find HNs design much simpler and easier to use, and fits more content on a screen.

That design was slicker for sure, but was more confusing and had less information on the page.

I guess we all value different things.

> more confusing Could you please elaborate?

> 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.

I won't promise we will find a way to fix this (because search (as an example) is a core functionality and cannot be moved elsewhere), but we will try

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.

> it looks like a thing from 00's

Exactly. Less flash, more substance.

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