Alternatives
Products that do what Hexle: A powerful way to search for papers and connect your ideas does
Hi all, I find literature searches to be slow and despite all the tools nowadays, it is difficult to map out vast areas of research and then connect my ideas to what I’m trying to do (e.g. writing a review, learning something new, planning a new project, assignments, etc). Some of my peers and teachers also found this to be a problem so I built this MVP app to help people not only leverage AI search capabilities but also go on to connect their ideas, map out research projects, cite various results and organise their “stream of consciousness” as they work. I’d love to get some feedback on it…
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I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...
2024 · embedding.io
- 3IM
As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for. I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4]. To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric. I would…
2024 · papermatch.mitanshu.tech
- 4IM
Hi, I'm a high school teacher from Australia and I've built what I'd like to think is a pretty nifty ChatGPT powered presentation tool for teachers. I'd love it if you could have a look at it and give me some of your feedback. I don't think there's much overlap with the HN crowd and school teachers, but I've been coming here for many years and thought I'd post here and see what you all think. Check it out if you have a minute and I'd be super happy to hear your feedback too. https://www.slidehero.ai/ You can jump in and have a play with the tool all you like ;) Cheers, Eli
2025
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I feel like LLMs can help me understand anything. However, after I get a summary, I can't dive in to parts that I find interesting; can't refer to original source easily and can't control context with chatbots. This is an attempt to solve for a complete knowledge consumption experience with AI . Please give me feedback!
Oct 2025 · kerns.ai
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Almost one year ago I asked HN if anybody is interested to make a Web app to make reading and finding scientific papers smarter [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1664648]. No one did, at least no one did what "I" think is the best way to approach this problem. A a few month ago I decided to do it myself.<p>Meet JournalClub iPad app (absolutely free), http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/journalclub/id443819334? I have a recommendation engine in the pipeline that I would introduce in the next update (hopefully in a month or so). I really appreciate any comments, feedbacks.
2011
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Over the past year, we’ve been frustrated with how clunky it is to manage research papers. So we built Ontosyn, a modern research paper reader, with clean ui, better in paper navigation (bookmarks, jumping back up after clicking on a reference), an integrated ai chat with useful tools such as recommending relevant papers that you can directly add to your library, and, of course, library functionality to keep everything organized. We launched a closed alpha last week, and our first users are quite pleased with it. One user asked for author-based search for paper recommendations yesterday, and…
Oct 2025 · ontosyn.com
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I saw this app youlearn.ai on YC and thought of building it. They are claiming to have 1M+ users with just one feature which is to convert your learning material into summaries, quizzes etc. I gave this a shot and cloned almost most of the features in just 9+ hours of continous vibe coding (with 20% manual though). Now I'm selling this on mvp marketplace. Might probably open source it in future or give it free.
2025 · ai-tutor.mvpwrappers.com
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Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.
2013 · github.com
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I built an AI-powered research agent designed to efficiently discover, summarize, and cite relevant academic papers based on user queries. As a university student, I've written my share of essays and have also served as a copy editor for our student newspaper. During fact-checking, I noticed that Google often prioritizes unreliable and unscholarly resources—such as Medium articles, Reddit posts, and LinkedIn content—in its top results over scholarly ones. For instance, searching "Transformers" yields six blogs and articles before finally listing the Vaswani (2017) paper. This makes gathering…
2025 · github.com
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Hey HN! Over the weekend (leaning heavily on Opus 4.5) I wrote Jargon - an AI-managed zettelkasten that reads articles, papers, and YouTube videos, extracts the key ideas, and automatically links related concepts together. Demo video: https://youtu.be/W7ejMqZ6EUQ Repo: https://github.com/schoblaska/jargon You can paste an article, PDF link, or YouTube video to parse, or ask questions directly and it'll find its own content. Sources get summarized, broken into insight cards, and embedded for semantic search. Similar ideas automatically cluster together. Each…
Dec 2025 · github.com
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Hey, I've made a pdf reader with ai assistance, you can quickly ask questions about the text and the images, and it will have context about all of your reading material so you can ask questions freely, try it now, I'm in open beta to find bug and get feedback. upcoming features: - Highlighting - Highlighting with Notes - Bibliography - Automatic Reference file opening - Improved UX and robustness currenlty alot of bugs so please let me know if you found any. feedback appreciated
2025 · pdf-hub.com
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I'm building out Kerns, as an AI environment for research. You can seed a space with a topic and multiple source documents, and complete your research completely in one space. There's interactive mindmaps for exploration, podcast mode, powerful source readers with original plus chapter level summaries that let you zoom into source on demand, a powerful chat agent that lets you control context and cite refs, and AI assisted note taking. My goal is to have one place to do research on any topic which minimizes manual context engineering, and jumping around between chat/notes/readers.…
Nov 2025 · kerns.ai
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Dear HN Community, I am a long time fan and first-time contributor. I just launched a developer focused semantic search platform and wanted to share it with the community. The idea is simple: upload structured or unstructured documents, select the fields you want to index and tag as metadata, and instantly get a clean search API you can use in your own app. Here is what it currently supports: - Manage your own tenants and projects - Upload .json and .txt files (support for .pdf, .docx, .xlsx, .yml, etc. coming soon) - Expose 3 APIs: search, upload document (embeddings), and delete document -…
2025 · aisearch.vpuna.com
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Do you have trouble keeping up with the latest advance in AI? I've built a recommender system to bring you the latest research papers in AI. Simply subscribe to the topics you're interested in, and the app will recommend you the latest research in that topic. The app is far from complete, but I'm seriously working to improve it. Please try it out if you have time, and send your feedback to: [email protected].
2023 · research-assistant-roan.vercel.app
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Hello everyone! I always found it hard to find new research papers outside of my usual bubble. I thought a random feed (with no recommendation algorithms) might be a fun way to explore. But I also didn’t want to waste time on completely unrelated stuff — so the idea of a fast, swipeable format came to mind. Wikitok was a real inspiration! But Arxiv and Open Review APIs weren’t as robust as Wikipedia, so I pulled the papers into a Postgres backend. Right now, I’ve indexed papers from a few recent ML conferences to see if this might be useful for others too. No signups required and it’s…
2025 · artok.app
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2023 · github.com
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I really struggle to keep my notes organised, and often can't make any sense of hand written notes after meetings. I did some experiments with Claude and ChatGPT where I blast random thoughts at them during a meeting or brainstorming session and then have them output a nice document that pulls it all together at the end. It worked incredibly well but it was a bit cumbersome to keep sending messages to the chat and telling the ai each time what to do. So I took the idea and built a tool, it makes it easy to throw random notes and voice recordings (images and document support on the way) and…
2025 · scatternote.com
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Hi HN, I’ve spent the last decade building hardware products like humanoid robots, 3D printers, and self-driving tractors. I needed a tool to navigate technical documents faster, so I created one with friends. This tool helps with component search, cross-referencing, comparison, and debugging. We’d love your feedback, whether you find it useful or not. Thank you! Try it here: www.convergelab.ai
2024 · convergelab.ai
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Finding “the best” camera lens, hiking trail, or Python database adapter requires digging through many search results and online discussions. You’re not going to trust the first result you see in a “top-10” marketing blog post. Often, you need to read dozens of articles and Reddit threads to establish consensus on whatever you’re looking for. This is hard work, so we have an AI do this research while you can watch in real time. The final result is a permanent article summarizing consensus views. Unlike closed chatbots, our articles are public by default so improvements submitted by our users…
2023 · chord.pub
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