[HN Gopher] Show HN: Paper Time - Listen to abstracts of CS pape...
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Show HN: Paper Time - Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a
custom podcast
Author : pramodbiligiri
Score : 146 points
Date : 2021-08-06 11:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (papertime.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (papertime.app)
| woile wrote:
| Hey this is super nice. It would also be nice to somehow be able
| to see which label(s) the paper has. Thanks!
| Shindi wrote:
| I am not a PhD but I like to read cognitive science and astro
| papers. I was wondering if there is an annotated version of
| papers available? Like a rapgenius for academic papers.
|
| Anyone know if this exists?
| sidmitra wrote:
| Do you mean like Fermats Library? People can share annotated
| papers there. There aren't a lot of papers though, but i found
| some good ones outside of comp-sci recently.
|
| 1) https://fermatslibrary.com/s/why-stress-is-bad-for-your-
| brai...
|
| 2) https://fermatslibrary.com/journal_club
| [deleted]
| Shindi wrote:
| Yes, excellent! Thank you for sharing. This is why I love
| this community
| mpercy wrote:
| This is really neat. One piece of feedback is it begins and ends
| TeX expressions by saying "dollar" which is distracting. Probably
| best to strip the TeX syntax while retaining the expressions.
| Simple ones like O(1) should be understandable aurally, even if
| complex expressions may not be.
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| This is a great idea, thanks OP.
|
| I've been wanting to cultivate a habit of reading a relevant
| paper (or abstract) at some cadence, such as once a week. Can
| anyone recommend a way to find the important and/or influential
| papers in a given field? Maybe something similar to The Morning
| Paper.
|
| Edit: thanks everyone for the great suggestions!
| pm90 wrote:
| This is a good question, but I'm not sure if there's a good
| answer.
|
| One thing I liked about grad school is that there would
| literally be classes where students were assigned to read a
| foundational paper in the field and then discuss/write about
| it, so my personal go to has been to try and find "Intro to X"
| grad level courses and see their paper assignments (most
| professors tend to put most course material online).
|
| It's not something guaranteed to give you results but often I
| will stumble into interesting stuff I wouldn't have otherwise.
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| > This is a good question, but I'm not sure if there's a good
| answer.
|
| I think you've actually given a great answer here. This is
| essentially what I did in grad school as well and found it
| really helpful. I never thought to continue doing this in
| fields that piqued my interest. Thanks for the suggestion!
|
| While we're on the topic, here's the advanced distributed
| systems reading list from UIUC:
|
| https://go.cs.illinois.edu/CS525SP21ReadingList
|
| I took the class a number of years ago, but found it super
| interesting.
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| You can choose the topic you're interested in and either go for
| "test of time" awarded papers in the field, or pick up a list
| from a graduate course in any University. That way the
| professor would have done the curation for you.
|
| Just throwing out a link to one such paper based course
| (Datacenter Networkjng) from UC San Diego -
| https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/sp15/cse291-b/syllabus.html
| beakerbreaker wrote:
| You didn't mention what field(s) but Arxiv Sanity Preserver has
| top papers users have added to their libraries.
|
| http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/top
| vpj wrote:
| https://papers.labml.ai/
| dagw wrote:
| 2 minutes papers on YouTube is pretty good for physics
| simulation and AI papers. Plus you get a dude giving a quick
| explanation why the paper is relevant and important so you
| don't have to go in completely blind.
| heldsteel7 wrote:
| Great idea! How do you choose papers? Is it all free??
|
| Would be good if you could further narrow down from the topic to
| subtopics.
|
| A small glitch, when I deselect 'Select All' it doesn't clear
| topics.
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Papers are obtained from Arxiv.org on a regular basis. Their
| license for metadata allows one to build these kind of things
| (I am not a lawyer).
|
| Thanks for the bug report. Have to double check once I get to
| my laptop, but that's probably intended behaviour. Select All
| is a short for... Selecting all the topics. Once you uncheck
| it, you can select and deselect individual topics at will.
| Let's say I clear all the topics as you suggested, what should
| be displayed in the list of papers then? Anyway, wouldn't
| defend that dropdown too much, at this point!
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Hi all,
|
| I'm the original poster. I felt encouraged to do a Show HN for
| Paper Time after seeing positive feedback in a different, side
| projects related thread a few days back [1].
|
| I'll be around for a while so go ahead and ask me any questions,
| either around the idea or the technical parts.
|
| A big shout out to the folks on HN who responded with very
| pertinent resources about UI design a few months back [2], when
| I'd just started building this.
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28033440
|
| [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932020
| soothseer wrote:
| nice abstraction for listening to abstracts!
|
| would really like a "curated playlist" option. The ability to
| filter based on "Topics" is a step in that direction and a
| further vetting down of options will make the app more usable.
|
| nitpick: the TTS ends up pronouncing the markup as well. maybe
| the abstract can be cleaned before being passed through the
| TTS-generator.
|
| eg. for the line: "This paper concerns designing distributed
| algorithms that are {\em singularly optimal}"
|
| the "em" ends up on the audio and is confusing. refer:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02197
|
| (also, ability to permalink to the paper on the papertime.app
| will help.)
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Haha, had never thought of it as an abstraction over
| abstracts! Thanks for the detailed feedback.
|
| The TTS cleanup ought to become one of my top priorities.
| I've heard a lot of $k$ (dollar k dollar) is etc. I'm
| guessing it's LaTeX markup bleeding over into the abstract
| text rendering somehow.
|
| I am not able to figure out how to curate a list, since I'm
| just processing Arxiv papers as they come in! One option is
| to provide papers accepted at conferences.
|
| Another is to let people upvote, but I fear voting dynamics
| can get messy. Also, without sufficient users, voting isn't
| of much use.
|
| I'll see how I can implement permalinks. I'm not too familiar
| with doing that in single page apps so I need to work on it.
| Related question: would you like to be able to star/bookmark
| papers so that you can come back to them?
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| How come there are no Biology or Chemistry topics to choose?
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Hi LoveMortuus, I have started off with CS papers only, and
| that too only a small subset of that (that's why the
| website's tag line says CS Research). May come around to
| adding more in due course. Is BioArxiv a good source of
| papers?
| bArray wrote:
| Great work!
|
| Some other feature recommendations:
|
| 1. A daily RSS feed - perhaps it could compile them into a
| 'single' podcast.
|
| 2. Human voice uploads - allow readers to upload their own
| voice (would require moderation - but would solve most
| pronunciation issues caused by TTS). You could randomly assign
| some number of articles to each moderator to read.
|
| Again, great work - this has given me some ideas!
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Daily RSS feed sounds like a good idea. RSS used to have the
| concept of media enclosures or something. Perhaps if I can
| embed the audio into that, people can listen right there? On
| the other hand, that will have fewer people visiting the
| website :D Heh.
|
| 2. My somewhat long term product idea is to let the paper
| submitters volunteer to read out their abstracts, if they
| choose. But some amount of automated TTS will always remain,
| given the sheer volume of content.
| bArray wrote:
| > RSS used to have the concept of media enclosures or
| something.
|
| Yes, and 'show notes'. What you can do in theory is embed
| advertising there, or in the audio itself if you need to
| monetize.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| Nice, looks great! Could you give any thoughts on which of
| those resources in [2] were particularly useful for you? I have
| a similar backend background and interest in learning about UI
| design!
|
| BTW a small issue but opening and closing your FAQ modal seems
| to be pushing URL history - which means you have to hit back
| repeatedly to exit the page if you interact with it. It doesn't
| look like having the modal open and then going back closes it,
| so I think you could just drop the URL push without losing
| functionality.
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Refactoring UI was a great resource that was recommended on
| that Ask HN. The authors have a book and some videos. Very
| actionable and systematic advice. That formed the basis of my
| understanding.
|
| For more specific techniques, the Learning Web Design 5th
| Edition (by Jenna Something) is very good.
|
| I skimmed Don't Make Me Think, which validated some of my own
| thoughts and helps you avoid silly oversights. I also read
| Design of Everyday Things but found it very lengthy and
| somewhat pompous. Not sure that I got much out of it.
|
| On that page someone has linked to a bunch of MIT material. I
| didn't check that out in detail. Might be good... I don't
| know.
|
| Thanks for the bug report on the modal. Would have never
| noticed as I navigate to my site directly and never click the
| Back button there.
| Valdy wrote:
| There are a lot of AI narrator services you can use to create and
| record custom podcast. There is one called narrationbox which I
| specially use to create Audio Books from ebooks. You can use it
| to record custom podcasts as well.
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Wow, that's neat. I hadn't heard of narrationbox.
|
| I'm also seeing a bit of what look like private podcasts taking
| off. It's probably a matter of time at this point.
| nuclearnice3 wrote:
| what do you see that are like private podcasts? intriguing
| phrase.
| [deleted]
| user_agent wrote:
| @pramodbiligiri, would you be willing to share a little bit more
| about how the thext-to-speech is utlized in your project?
|
| What provider do you use, the costs related to it, is it a real-
| time text processing, or maybe you have a bulk processing
| routine, opinions on different TTS providers? You know, things
| like that for everyone who'd like to try TTS in their projects.
|
| (We're talking about >3000 abstracts TTS-ed on the author's page,
| and that's not a trivial amount if one is for instance using
| external providers for the job).
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Sure, it's not exactly rocket science. I'm using Google Cloud's
| Text-To-Speech - https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech. You
| should be able to find the pricing details there. I'm guessing
| other cloud providers' TTS would be comparable as well? I
| haven't checked.
| nmstoker wrote:
| This is great. Thank you for sharing it!
|
| A couple of feedback points (which you may already be aware of):
|
| 1. I did occasionally find that not enough info was shown for
| papers to determine if they were really in my areas of interest,
| so perhaps it's worth a look to see how to show a bit more (my
| work around was to view the abstract but that kind of defeats to
| point!)
|
| 2. The ability to keep playing whilst you search further pages is
| cool. However I noticed if you search for a topic that returns
| lots of papers and you go on to a later page (eg you've navigated
| to page 4 for example) if you then search for different papers
| that return fewer hits you are shown a blank page, not necessary
| because there are no hits but because they don't populate four
| pages (in the example that I'm on page 4). I'd expect most people
| would want to return to the start of the results with each search
| If you end up in the above situation, you can jump back to
| populated pages but it's not what you'd typically expect as a
| user.
|
| 3. The abstracts often have "\n" sequences present as actual
| characters in the text, which don't match up with the actual line
| breaks - presumably they're left over from the source but it
| looks like they ought to be stripped out.
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Thanks for that awesome detailed feeeback.
|
| 1. Yeah, there's not much that the app itself can do about
| this. My intention is to make it dramatically easy to access
| the abstract so even if you're the slightest bit interested in
| the title you'll go check it out (on desktop you just have to
| hover over the abstract link to see it pop up).
|
| 2. This navigation + search issue is almost surely a bug. Not
| sure if I ever tested navigating ahead and doing a search, like
| you did.
|
| 3. Do you remember whether you saw it only on older papers
| (basically when navigated into further pages within some
| category)? Long story short, many of the older abstracts are
| littered with redundant \n characters because of a botched up
| Postgres data export + imports I did sometime back. Papers in
| the last week or so should be fine.
| imranq wrote:
| This is a really interesting idea! Audio definitely makes it
| easier to listen to papers on the go.
|
| One thing that's missing in the paper curation space is
| understanding the knowledge state of the user. Once we have that
| we should be able to build generative models that synthesize text
| that can get people to read papers much faster.
| SinghCoder wrote:
| If I click on play on multiple papers, all play simultaneously.
| Is this something expected or a bug?
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| That is a known bug. Actually I haven't even come around to
| fixing such issues yet.
|
| Another thing you should probably (not!) try: Click Play on a
| paper and click on Next/Prev :) The only way you can recover
| from that is by refreshing the page. Sorry about these rough
| edges as of now.
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(page generated 2021-08-07 23:02 UTC)