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Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

(research.google)
359 points FromTheArchives | 9 comments | 18 Sep 25 17:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.314s | source | bottom
1. anonfunction ◴[18 Sep 25 18:42 UTC] No.45293430[source]▶
Shameless plug but I made a similar tool called asXiv[1] which allows you to "ask" arXiv.org papers questions.

It also recommends questions on initial load that can help understand or explore the paper, here's a demo[2] from the popular Attention Is All You Need paper.

The code is all opensource[3], it uses the google 2.5 flash lite model to keep costs down (it's completely free atm), but that can be changed via env var if you run it locally.

1. https://asxiv.org

2. https://asxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762

3. https://github.com/montanaflynn/asxiv

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2. sieep ◴[18 Sep 25 19:28 UTC] No.45293909[source]▶
Seems legit, I'll have to try later. Just curious, why didn't you make this a commercial SaaS?
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3. dingnuts ◴[18 Sep 25 19:38 UTC] No.45294023[source]▶
maybe because every LLM provider has an "attach file" feature so you can attach a paper and then ask questions about it?

what's the value add of the wrapper that this person wrote at all?

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4. ohyoutravel ◴[18 Sep 25 19:43 UTC] No.45294080{3}[source]▶
Right. I do this all the time with Gemini. Add a pdf or a link and ask it whatever I want. It will even turn it into a podcast with two people discussing the entire paper that I can listen to on the tram to work.
5. rshanreddy ◴[18 Sep 25 20:03 UTC] No.45294284[source]▶
whoa this is fantastic. wish I had known about this earlier! just made a similar product for reading arXiv / epub / pdfs called Ruminate (www.tryruminate.com), would love to hear what you think
6. anonfunction ◴[18 Sep 25 20:29 UTC] No.45294620{3}[source]▶
I built it because it was tiresome to save the pdf, open a new window, add it and give a prompt.

Simply replacing the domain arxiv.org with asxiv.org does all that for me now.

Also it links to pages in it's answers and scrolls the pdf to it on click, allowing to view the pdf side by side with the chat.

7. dang ◴[18 Sep 25 20:44 UTC] No.45294776[source]▶
That looks interesting! I put your Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45212535) in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.
8. meander_water ◴[18 Sep 25 22:06 UTC] No.45295591[source]▶
This looks great. Just fyi this is also possible via alphaxiv's assistant. Navigate to a paper, click tools -> assistant.

[0] https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

9. 3abiton ◴[18 Sep 25 22:21 UTC] No.45295744[source]▶
How is that different than generic RAG though? Genuinely curious