TL;DR AI

Learning and science

research paper summaries

SHOW HN2024

79points
51comments
#988of 3,515 in 2024
Top 29%of 2024 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

6 positive, 11 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 10 critical, out of 29 comments about the project. Thread score -0.17.

Idea: 6 for, 8 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Summaries useful for scanning lists of papers

    From 2 comments
    • Which is really what makes them useful. Abstracts are great at what they try to be, but the typical abstract requires a lot of attention to actually read. These summaries lend…
      wongarsu on HN
    • Presumably you read the summaries to find promising papers where you will read the abstract (which you then follow up by reading the figures, conclusion, discussion,…
      wongarsu on HN
  • Cross-referenced concept definitions idea appealing

    From 1 comment
    • Yeah that sounds awesome to me. It addresses one of the shortcomings of the conventional abstract style which is that nothing is cross referenced - most journals still disallow…
      rsfern on HN

Objections

  • Summaries are not real abstracts and lack structure

    From 1 comment
    • Want to point out that these one to two sentence summaries are not abstracts. They lack the structure and content of actual abstracts. Also how can they be community-written if…
      tokai on HN
  • Shallow knowledge distillation encourages FOMO

    From 1 comment
    • The problem with this kind of tool is the shallowness of knowledge distillation. Content on the internet should enlighten us, not feed us with 140-character TL;DR abstracts,…
      ofou on HN
  • Confusing title and domain name

    From 2 comments
    • Maybe consider a different domain and website title. From the comments here, it seems like several people are confused.
      latexr on HN
    • Can we change the title to something like "Show HN: 'TL;DR AI', community-written abstracts for research papers"? The name of the project, "TL;DR AI", seems to be causing…
      tel on HN
  • Only a few abstracts so far and no voting visible to anonymous users

    From 1 comment
    • Useful idea, but needs a lot more work IMO e.g. - Looks like there's just 7 abstracts right now. - Most of the abstracts are written by the author of the paper, so might not be…
      vvrm on HN
  • AI-generated summaries may be padded or biased

    From 2 comments
    • Please no. Generated TLDR includes useless fluff in my experience.
      smusamashah on HN
    • >they don't have to add anything that wasn't already expressed in the paper, limiting the need for creativity But how could we know they add nothing or missed something important…
      croes on HN

Requests

  • Change the confusing title

    From 2 comments
    • Can we change the title to something like "Show HN: 'TL;DR AI', community-written abstracts for research papers"? The name of the project, "TL;DR AI", seems to be causing…
      tel on HN
    • An admin might be willing to change it (: Could be changed to "TL;DR AI, a ..."
      ramon156 on HN
  • Add guidelines and documentation

    From 2 comments
    • Useful idea, but needs a lot more work IMO e.g. - Looks like there's just 7 abstracts right now. - Most of the abstracts are written by the author of the paper, so might not be…
      vvrm on HN
    • I think it’s an interesting idea. It could use a documentation page with some clear examples and some guidelines. Don’t use undefined acronyms, try to make it self contained,…
      rsfern on HN
  • Subject filters

    From 1 comment
    • Hi, sorry for the confusion It started as a TL;DRs platform for research papers on AI, ideated by Francois Fleuret on X, but when I started coding this (and of course already…
      yu3zhou4 on HN
  • Reddit-style voting and comments

    From 1 comment
    • This website would be cool if it can be turned into the format of a subreddit, i.e: 1. Each paper and its abstract as a post 2. Up/down vote arrows and a number 3. Comment section
      wuj on HN

Questions

  • Is this AI-generated or community-written?

    From 2 comments
    • I'm confused. It's supposed to be human-written abstracts of papers relating to "AI"? Or AI written abstracts for science papers in general? The examples seem to all be machine…
      pbhjpbhj on HN
    • The title was also generated by an AI?
      meindnoch on HN
  • Why is this not Show HN?

    From 1 comment
    • Want to point out that these one to two sentence summaries are not abstracts. They lack the structure and content of actual abstracts. Also how can they be community-written if…
      tokai on HN

Alternatives named

  • EmergentMind.com

    From 1 comment
    • If you're a fan of tldr-ai, you might also like my site, EmergentMind.com, which does something similar: it surfaces trending AI papers based on social media engagement…
      matt1 on HN
  • Structured abstracts in journals

    From 1 comment
    • I feel like this is basically already what people who promote their papers on twitter are doing. Other than Twitter or LinkedIn or something (I don’t really use either) I’m not…
      rsfern on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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