Show HN: Now I Get It – Translate scientific papers into interactive webpages

Concept & Intended Use

• Service converts scientific PDFs into interactive, layperson‑friendly single‑page sites.
• Users see it as helpful for:
  • Quickly triaging more papers than they can deeply read.
  • Explaining work to non‑experts (friends, family, lab websites).
  • Internal documents (e.g., architecture docs) and potentially company documentation.
• Creator emphasizes it as a complement to papers, not a replacement.

Quality, Hallucinations & Evaluation

• Mixed feedback on accuracy:
  • Some users report it “worked” for them or for authors of processed papers.
  • Others find serious conceptual mistakes (e.g., in “Attention is All You Need”) and “plausible nonsense” on their own papers.
• LLM sometimes fabricates illustrative charts not present in the original; in at least one case this was acknowledged as a “conceptual” visualization, not extracted data.
• No formal evaluation of whether users actually understand better; tool is still experimental.
• Concern raised that output is far from hand‑crafted interactive explainers (Distill, redblobgames, NYT).

Technical Approach & Prompting

• Pipeline is fully automated: PDF in → HTML out, using a frontier LLM.
• Backend: S3 + CloudFront, DynamoDB for metadata, AWS Lambdas.
• Strict system prompt for:
  • Treating PDFs as untrusted data.
  • Blocking dangerous JS / external calls.
  • Producing metadata then a “really freaking cool‑looking” interactive page.
• PDF parsing is acknowledged as brittle; no chunking yet; hard 100‑page limit.

Costs, Limits & Monetization

• Current cap: ~100 papers/day; average cost ≈ $0.65 per paper, dominated by LLM spend.
• Users frequently hit “daily processing limit reached.”
• Ideas discussed:
  • Simple cost‑plus per‑paper pricing.
  • Donations tied to number of papers funded.
  • Charging for repository access instead of subscriptions.
  • Letting people sponsor specific papers.

Feature & UX Requests

• Light mode toggle; anchor links for headings; social preview meta tags.
• Better gallery organization and more examples across subfields.
• Possible integrations with citation managers (e.g., Zotero), deep‑reference “graph” exploration, and support for Wikipedia/topic pages.
• Interest in self‑hosting; some would pay for code access and run their own API usage.

Broader Reflections

• Some see this as another thin wrapper over foundation models and worry about value capture by a few big providers.
• Others argue LLMs enable a “Cambrian explosion” of short‑lived, creative software, where tools like this are early examples.