Alternatives
Products that do what Last year I asked HN to do it, now I am doing it myself-JournalClub iPad does
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.
- 1NI
Understanding scientific articles can be tough, even in your own field. Trying to comprehend articles from others? Good luck. Enter, Now I Get It! I made this app for curious people. Simply upload an article and after a few minutes you'll have an interactive web page showcasing the highlights. Generated pages are stored in the cloud and can be viewed from a gallery. Now I Get It! uses the best LLMs out there, which means the app will improve as AI improves. Free for now - it's capped at 20 articles per day so I don't burn cash. A few things I (and maybe you will) find interesting: * This is…
Feb 2026 · nowigetit.us
- 2AH
2018 · upvote.pub
- 3IM
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
- 4AB
Hey HN, maker here. It was a serious 4-6 months of effort to build this. I have never poured as much love, attention and detail into a project before. So I really appreciate you having a looksie! The homepage has a fresh list of articles every hour and is open to all. Still, I recommend signing up so you can add stuff to your reading list and follow blogs. My initial plan was to monetize this with subtle ads, but that didn't work out as the traffic to the site isn't nearly enough for that. That said, I have a fair bit invested in this and I need your help figuring out a way to make this…
2023 · boredreading.com
- 5IR
This was my first attempt of making something truly appealing and useful. I've learned a lot and I'm pretty happy with the result. What do you think?
2011 · itunes.apple.com
- 6SR
Hey all, this is a small bookmarklet my partner made last week to save short summaries of long-winded web posts. Hopefully you can help others save time by sharing your TL;DRs with the world. You can also up/downvote the TL;DRs other users post. It should work with your iPad, too. http://tldrplz.com
2011
- 7AF
https://github.com/inoda/private_journal Built this to use myself, and I'm curious if anybody would be interested in using it. I'm also wondering if anybody has tips to make it more secure (I'm super super new to encryption and whatnot). The security is probably a bit overkill since chances are that nobody cares about what I'm journaling, but it is fun to implement from a code standpoint.
2019
- 8EM
Yesterday I decided I wanted to experiment with different ways of reading HN. After considering a few options, I settled on a Mac app and spent a couple of hours planning/sketching on paper. This morning I fired up Xcode and spent 4 hours hacking away and I must say I'm liking how it's looking. Since the project is in its very early stages, I though that it could be a very good time to get some feedback. I've posted a few screenshots at http://imgur.com/a/rCbVN and uploaded a binary at http://abra.rm-fr.net/~fiam/HackerNews.zip If you have some free time, give a try and let me know what you…
2011
- 9AI
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
- 10WB
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
- 11DR
Hi HN, Would love your thoughts on Open Paper Digest. It’s a mobile feed that let’s you “doomscroll” through summaries of popular papers that were published recently. Backstory There’s a combination of factors lead me to build this: 1. Quality of content social media apps has decreased, but I still notice that it is harder than ever for me to stay away from these apps. 2. I’ve been saying for a while now that I should start reading papers to keep up with what’s going on in AI-world. Initially, I set out to build something solely for point 2. This version was more search-focussed, and…
Dec 2025 · openpaperdigest.com
- 12HN
Since I got an iPad I was looking for a better Hacker News reading experience than the one you can get using the web version. On the iPhone I use the ihackernews.com web app (and soon going to try news.yc). It's decent for the iPhone, but it doesn't scale good on the iPad. To my surprise, when I checked there was no decent iPad app for HN (i.e. lacking ability to comment or vote, no readability support and more). I anyway wanted to give a try to iPad development, and was looking for an interesting project to work on. Making HN reader app seemed as a good candidate. Over the last weekend I…
2011
- 13HA
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…
2025 · hexle.ai
- 14AE
Right now it's a Nicotine patch for brain rot/doom scrolling. You still get the scroll, but with more meaningful content. WHERE I WANT IT TO GO: Users mark what they are interested in (e.g. AI, or Space or Whatever), and it should crawl the latest scientific articles, high quality YouTube videos, pods, present it in a format that fits you, in a nice feed. NOW: You can search for anything (e.g. "Sea Explorers" --> The app crawls Wikipedia or YouTube and pulls together a short feed (e.g. Columbus, Vasco da Gama etc.,). I'm using RAG so that I always can reference the original data source…
2025 · reelly.app
- 15OI
I'm trying to get the motivation up to actually finish building out a "real" product, and I found myself needing a "win" to keep my momentum up. So, I hacked out a little one sentence journal app last night. I experimented with a few UI things (e.g.., the autosaving of the sentence for today and so on), so it was a good learning experience also. You can check it out at: http://osod.im
2012
- 16HC
Hi, I installed that HN clone for all things science. Most likely there are already others out there already, but I thought it's worth a try. Let me know what you think about the idea and what features you would like to see...a search function is on its way...Thanks in advance! http://www.heurekalab.com
2011
- 17OO
Yeah I know I hate the name too but I wasn't about to pay up for odyssey.app. It's an open source project so feel free to poke around with it / fork it. I talk about it more on the marketing website, but a few of us have been using it for the past month and kind of fun. Obviously there will be a slew of issues / feedback / nits that come from this, but c'est la vie. GH is here: https://github.com/johnlarkin1/odozi
Apr 2026 · odozi.app
- 18AW
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
- 19FFetchnotes▲17
We just launched our startup tonight! It's called Fetchnotes, and it's a note-taking application for short notes like books to read, shopping lists and ideas. Check out our website at www.fetchnotes.com. We're on the web, Android, iPhone, Mac, Windows and Ubuntu — and you can even text or email in your notes. We were just covered in TechCrunch (http://tcrn.ch/IBfr9C), and we'd love for you to check it out and give us your feedback. You can send it to me (Alex Schiff) and my co-founder (Chase Lee) at [email protected], or use our UserVoice forum at fetchnotes.uservoice.com. Also, we're…
2012
- 20IM
It's dead simple. There's no fancy interface. Basic features are gone. That's all on purpose. If you're like me, you're always writing down ideas on pieces of paper. My webapp is like that, but for the internet. Let me know if you find it useful.
2012 · ideab.in
- 21WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 22NY
/ This is an old post in HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5360453), but could not get enough response, so posting again, A friend told me that 'Show HN' will help better. */ Hi All, (http://www.mistrics.com/) I made a project that helps in documenting Academic projects and sharing them with teachers. It also provides facility to ask questions. Students needs to simply create projects, after that just create task and documents under it. Also inviting others into team and so on.... In Indian colleges this process is all manual right now. And I am trying to get this process online. I am…
2013
- 23IB
My wife recently started her PhD and while she uses Zotero as a citation manager, she was really missing a tool for keeping track of what she's reading right now/has already read/needs to read next. This overwhelming experience might be familiar to other researchers working on a niche field where every paper is called pretty much the same thing So I built her Paperstack. It's basically Goodreads, but for research papers: - Save articles to familiar To Read/Reading/Read stacks - Tag articles with logical projects/chapters/whatever your system is - Get…
Jan 2026 · paperstack.ac
- 24PR
Hi HN, I've had the idea for a scholarly publishing site that could crowdsource the work of the journals using concepts borrowed from Github and StackExchange and recombined for years. I finally got enough runway to take about 6 months off of work to build it. This is the result. It's still in beta, but the core MVP features - review, reputation, responses - are all there. I'm sure there are as yet to be found bugs, because I'm on my own and I've always been terrible at testing my own stuff. Right now it's best treated as non-archival pre-prints with review. I'm starting my next full time…
2023 · peer-review.io
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