Show HN: I built a tool to stop pretending I understood research papers

2 points by jjoe a month ago · 2 comments · 2 min read

I'm not a researcher. I'm just someone who gets unreasonably excited when a new paper drops in a field I have no business reading about. Protein folding? Fascinating. Quantum error correction? Sign me up. The problem is, jumping into a paper on topological qubits when your physics education stopped at "electrons go around the nucleus" is... humbling.

So I built PaperSplain for myself. It implements the Three-Pass Method – an actual academic reading technique where you read a paper three times at increasing depth. First pass: what's the paper about and why should I care? Second pass: what did they actually do, with attention to the figures that usually make or break my understanding. Third pass: what are the assumptions, limitations, and implications?

The idea isn't to replace reading the paper. It's to give me enough scaffolding that when I do read it, I'm not just pattern-matching words I've seen before. There's also a foundation survey that identifies prerequisite concepts I'm missing – turns out knowing what you don't know is half the battle.

The library already has a few hundred papers across different fields, and I keep adding more as I find interesting ones. You can borrow already analyzed papers or upload your own.