
Show HN: TLDR This – Auto summarize any article or webpage in a click - radhakrsna
https://tldrthis.com/
======
blobster
Nice landing page. If you Google "summarizer", you will find dozens of similar
services for free. The mechanism behind it is very simple. A couple a years
ago I built one from scratch in about 2 hours, then I accidentally deleted it
and rewrote it in 15 minutes. Here's how most of them work:

1\. Split the text into words

2\. Rank each word based on how many times it appears in the text. For
example, a word that appears 10 times gets 10 points, and so on.

3\. Rank sentences based on the sum of the scores of each word inside them.

4\. Return the top N sentences by score (N is up to the user), in the order in
which they appear in the text.

For extra fancyness, exclude the most common articles and prepositions and
give 2 points to proper nouns.

Works surprisingly well.

~~~
bhl
You can use tf-idf [1] to achieve step 2 and that extra fancy part of
excluding commmon articles and prepositions: count the frequency of words in
the article, but divide it by the sum of frequencies from past articles.

Text summarization works as a good toy problem, because it leads to two harder
problems: 1. text extraction (how to distinguish content from non-content like
ads) 2. q&a (given text and a question about the text, how can you produce an
answer).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf)

------
thunderbong
I really want to like this. My points -

1\. From the articles I tried, the summaries seem to be very basic. They don't
seem to capture the essential points of the articles it is trying to
summarize.

2\. I tried the 'advanced summarizer' too. Here again, it seems to have the
same problem. Worse, it seems to skip parts of the article, especially if they
are beyond a certain length.

3\. The landing page is nice. But the product seems to be targeted towards
people who want to share a summary of a random blog post rather than try and
save time reading the article.

In my opinion, SMMRY, as mentioned in another comment and which I've used
since whenever, seems like a much better product. Additionally, SMMRY also
gives you the capability of expanding the number of lines of the summary in
case you've found the article interesting and want to read a few more details
of it, rather than the full thing.

SMMRY: [https://smmry.com/](https://smmry.com/)

------
txcwpalpha
Is there any thought put into considering if this type of service is actually
beneficial?

Of course on it's face it seems nice that it saves us time. But it's no secret
that the reduction of complicated topics into simplified one-liners leads to
less understanding and more misinformation spread.

In my opinion, this just makes that problem worse. There is often a reason
that texts aren't already shorter. If the author didn't intend for you to read
the details of something and instead wanted you to just read bullet points,
they would have just made the bullet points themselves.

------
dullroar
Didn't do a great job on this AP News article on coronavirus - only four
bullet points, two of them repeated:
[https://apnews.com/545af824f44a22f7559c74679a4f1f53](https://apnews.com/545af824f44a22f7559c74679a4f1f53).

~~~
radhakrsna
The Basic Summarizer has its restrictions. Try Advanced summarizer. It will
give better results.

~~~
jstummbillig
If the Basic Summarizer is meant to convince me to sign up for the Advanced
Summarizer, that's not gonna happen with the former providing unconvincing
results.

------
kdbg
While I didn't have high hopes to get a summary of a technical paper, since I
spend a good chunk of time every week reading some related to exploits and
mitigations for a podcast I host, I hoped this might help reduce time spent
trying to get an overall understanding before diving into the details.

It actually did better than I expected with the paper "Bypassing memory safety
mechanisms through speculative control flow hijacks" [0]

I copied and pasted the text from sections 3-7 (Case Studies - Conclusion) and
Section 2 on its own (describes the attack)

It did pull out some important statements, better than I expected. Probably
won't save me much time, but I was quite disappointed by the fact that the
Advanced and Basic versions were the same for both which kinda felt a bit
cheap to get the same results especially since it still cost to get that
advanced result. Maybe including information about how the basic version is
restricted and what the advanced does better would make it easier to know when
the advanced version won't be useful.

I also tested with a random write-up I'll be covering tomorrow "Breaking the
Competition" [1] I had higher hopes for this since it was more of a blog-ish
post. I did get different results for basic and advanced with this one, but
the result was basically non-sense, worse than expected, and worse than the
paper summary.

Overall, probably not something that I'll end up using, but technical content
also isn't the intended use-case which is totally fair. I'll also add that one
feature that I looked for immediately was API access as I'd have wanted to
integrate this into an app I use to plan episodes.

\- [0]
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.05503v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.05503v1.pdf)

\- [1] [https://medium.com/ctf-writeups/breaking-the-competition-
bug...](https://medium.com/ctf-writeups/breaking-the-competition-bug-bounty-
write-up-ca7cb7bc53f5)

------
stared
I did try to run it four times, and in each case the result was semi-random:
it looks like picking 4 random sentences that open paragraphs. There was not a
single case when I would consider the output useful-ish.

~~~
radhakrsna
Can you please let me know the article that you tested it on? Maybe you could
try the advanced summarizer and see if it gives useful results.

~~~
stared
[https://p.migdal.pl/2020/03/02/types-tests-
typescript.html](https://p.migdal.pl/2020/03/02/types-tests-typescript.html)

[https://p.migdal.pl/2017/07/23/dating-for-
nerds.html](https://p.migdal.pl/2017/07/23/dating-for-nerds.html)

[https://p.migdal.pl/2016/03/15/data-science-intro-for-
math-p...](https://p.migdal.pl/2016/03/15/data-science-intro-for-math-phys-
background.html)

[https://medium.com/@szopa/train-for-a-mars-mission-how-to-
su...](https://medium.com/@szopa/train-for-a-mars-mission-how-to-survive-
social-distancing-while-working-from-home-with-your-kids-c9874ad0922a) (here I
admit that the first two are good)

~~~
radhakrsna
Thank you! Yes, it doesn't work that well on technical articles. We will try
to keep improving it.

------
ackbar03
You could try selling it to yahoo for a few billion dollars like some other
kid did with exactly the same thing

~~~
ErikAugust
Link: [https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/business/media/nick-
daloi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/business/media/nick-
daloisio-17-sells-summly-app-to-yahoo.html)

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
I love the idea. The implementation did not produce the expected results (
article shown on HN - [https://amp-economist-
com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.economi...](https://amp-economist-
com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.economist.com/science-and-
technology/2020/03/12/nuclear-power-plants-are-coming-to-the-battlefield) ).

That said. Keep at it. It seems like a viable and valuable service.

~~~
thunderbong
Using the advanced summarizer, I got this -

On March 9th America’s government awarded a trio of firms $39.7m to design
“microreactors” that can supply a few megawatts of power to remote military
bases, and be moved quickly by road, rail, sea and air. The idea of small
reactors is as old as nuclear power itself.

In July 1951, five months before a reactor in Idaho became the first in the
world to produce usable electricity through fission, America began building
USS Nautilus, a nuclear-powered submarine.

A report by the army in 2018 said that Holos, a prototype mobile nuclear
reactor, would be 62% cheaper than using liquid fuel.

NASA is developing smaller “Kilopower” reactors for space missions, designed
to power small lunar outposts.

------
6510
It sounds like a joke, I tried to reduce a technical manual but it didn't...
well... I don't really know how to expect anything. This however:
[https://www.latimes.com/world-
nation/story/2020-03-13/china-...](https://www.latimes.com/world-
nation/story/2020-03-13/china-japan-korea-coronavirus-reinfection-test-
positive) worked really well.

~~~
radhakrsna
It isn't really built for manuals etc. It is mainly for blog posts or news
articles.

~~~
6510
I didn't expect it to work for either.

------
personjerry
Interesting stuff. Have you succeeded in getting paying customers for such a
service? I've seen some similar free alternatives online, i.e. resoomer, smmry

~~~
radhakrsna
v1 of our service was free as well. v2 includes a basic summarizer which is
free and an advanced summarizer which requires payment. Just launched the
premium version, so waiting to see.

------
leshokunin
I’ve noticed an increase in services like this lately. What gives? Is there
some sort of ML serverless offering made available on GCP?

~~~
ericlewis
Not exactly “serverless” but I built something similar with AWS SageMaker,
which has elastic inference abilities. it’s rather fast to spin up and down.

Also, when it comes to summarization- you don’t really need to infer each run,
you can throw up a pretty simple caching system. Which means repeat requests
are far cheaper and faster.

I used cloudflare workers as a proxy / caching layer with KV in front of an
AWS lambda to do article extraction and SageMaker spinup (with a small cache
on the AWS side too- to catch in progress jobs)

~~~
leshokunin
That’s really interesting. Cool idea

------
RubenvanE
Awesome product! I was quite surprised at how good it summarized Dutch
articles as well.

Are you planning to launch an API anytime soon?

~~~
radhakrsna
Glad you liked it. Let me know if you have any feedback/suggestions. Yes, we
do plan to launch an API soon. Please message us here -
[https://tldrthis.com/contact](https://tldrthis.com/contact) and we will let
you know when we launch it.

------
geuis
Did a fairly poor job on this Ars article
[https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/what-monty-
pythons-m...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/what-monty-pythons-
ministry-of-silly-walks-can-teach-us-about-peer-review/)

~~~
radhakrsna
You could try the advanced summarizer. It gives better results.

~~~
chrisan
Basic

* It's intended in part as a commemoration on the 50-year anniversary of the sketch, but also to draw attention to the need for a more streamlined peer review process for grants in the health sciences.

* "So, put together a Monty Python fan with a creative scientific mind and an expert in gait analysis, and this paper is what you get," Butler told Ars. Or, as they wrote in their paper, "It really is the silliness of the sketch that resonates with us, and extreme silliness seems more relevant now than ever before in this increasingly Pythonesque world."

* First aired on September 15, 1970, on BBC One, the sketch opens with Cleese's character buying a newspaper on his way to work—which takes him a bit longer than usual since his walk "has become rather sillier recently." Waiting for him in his office is a gentleman named Mr. Putey (Michael Palin) seeking a grant from the Ministry to develop his own silly walk.

* (Note: the name is spelled "Pudey" in the paper but we're going with the Wiki spelling.) Mr. Putey demonstrates his silly walk-in-progress, but the Minister isn't immediately impressed.

Advanced

* One of the best-known sketches from Monty Python's Flying Circus features John Cleese as a bowler-hatted bureaucrat with the fictional Ministry of Silly Walks.

* Waiting for him in his office is a gentleman named Mr. Putey (Michael Palin) seeking a grant from the Ministry to develop his own silly walk.

* For their own gait analysis, Butler and Dominy studied both Mr. Putey's and the Minister's gait cycles in the video of the original 1970 televised sketch, as well as the Minister's gaits from a 1980 live stage performance in Los Angeles.

* Butler and Dominy found that the Minister's silly walk is much more variable than a normal human walk—6.7 times as much—while Mr. Putey's walk-in-progress is only 3.3 times more variable.

* The sketch might be satirizing bureaucratic inefficiency, but Cleese's Minister is essentially engaging in a hyper-streamlined version of the peer review process in his meeting with Mr. Putey that (the authors concluded) resulted in a fair assessment.

------
elliotec
I tried this on three of my own articles. It worked very poorly. There’s a lot
of room for improvement before asking people to pay for it IMO.

I may try my hand at writing one with the reqs outlined in the top comment
just for a fun coding project.

~~~
radhakrsna
Yes, you are right. There is still room for improvement and we will keep
trying to make it better. The reason I added paid plans was to test whether
people would be willing to pay for such a service so that I can spend more
time in adding more features to it and making it better.

~~~
elliotec
Fair enough, decent business strategy!

------
rubyfan
I get an error. I’m on Safari mobile on iOS 13.4. I use content blockers,
BlockBear and Firefox Focus - not sure if that’s relevant or not.

Method Not Allowed

The method is not allowed for the requested URL.

~~~
radhakrsna
Thank you for letting me know. Are you using the extension or the web app?

~~~
rubyfan
We app from the Show HN link

------
burlesona
Hugged to death? Entering a url to summarize just results in an error for me.

------
fortran77
If you Google "summarizer", you will find dozens of similar services for free.
A couple a years ago I built one from scratch in about 2 hours, then I
accidentally deleted it and rewrote it in 15 minutes. Rank each word based on
how many times it appears in the text.

------
anewguy9000
some of the results had me laughing out loud. it would be super useful if it
worked though. its a Hard problem.

------
moneywoes
How did you make the landing page?

------
timonoko
This thing understands Finnish? Very strange. TLDR from this was quite
excellent: [https://sarastuslehti.com/2020/03/12/koronaviruksen-kayra-
on...](https://sarastuslehti.com/2020/03/12/koronaviruksen-kayra-on-
murskattava/)

~~~
radhakrsna
Yes, it works on quite a few languages. Glad you liked it. Let me know if you
have any feedback/suggestions.

~~~
timonoko
The article was a translation from English. The English summary was less good,
as it repeats same sentence twice. [https://www.takimag.com/article/crushing-
the-coronavirus-cur...](https://www.takimag.com/article/crushing-the-
coronavirus-curve/)

~~~
radhakrsna
Yes, that's because that sentence appears twice in the article. Advanced
summarizer gives a better summary for that URL.

------
jordanpg
It would be more useful to me if the authors of articles would provide the
tl;dr themselves.

------
sidechaining
How does this work?

------
kindly_fo
not bad, not bad

~~~
radhakrsna
Glad you liked it. Let me know if you have any feedback/suggestions.

------
radheradhe
Works great!

~~~
radhakrsna
Thank you!

