{"slug": "show-hn-back-me-up-find-papers-that-back-your-argument", "title": "Show HN: Back Me Up – Find papers that back your argument", "summary": "A developer released Back Me Up, a tool that performs semantic search across PMC, bioRxiv, medRxiv and arXiv to find published papers supporting a user-entered claim and returns a verdict. The developer states the project has no accuracy evaluations and was built as a throwaway evening project, with a frontend built using Sol and Opus. The tool was posted to Hacker News as a Show HN submission with 1 point and 0 comments.", "body_md": "Back Me Up is a tiny science-ish machine that finds published papers that back your argument. It stemmed from a conversation with a friend around life sciences, where we kind of landed at \"surely there’s a paper confirming most arguments\", i.e. coffee is bad, coffee is great, etc.\n\nYou enter a claim, e.g. \"drinking wine is good for the heart\" -> the system does a semantic search across a corpus (PMC, bioRxiv, medRxiv and arXiv) -> pulls in relevant quotes if they fit your claim, and gives you a verdict.\n\nFrontend was done with a combination of Sol + Opus, I spent a bit of time exploring different designs and landed on this slightly ridiculous printer that spits out your evidence.\n\nSome notes: - I have no accuracy evals, this was a throwaway thing I built, so no clue on reliability. It does pass the vibe test, so give it a whirl! - Initially built a RAG for a tiny set of PMC, but scaling that up seemed like a lot of work for an evening project. Luckily found an API that does the semantic search across the different sources.\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49709678](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49709678)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-back-me-up-find-papers-that-back-your-argument", "canonical_source": "https://backmeup.loomlabs.au", "published_at": "2026-09-15 08:57:08+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-15 09:09:54.433562+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "natural-language-processing", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Back Me Up", "PMC", "bioRxiv", "medRxiv", "arXiv", "Hacker News", "Sol", "Opus"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-back-me-up-find-papers-that-back-your-argument", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-back-me-up-find-papers-that-back-your-argument.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-back-me-up-find-papers-that-back-your-argument.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-back-me-up-find-papers-that-back-your-argument.jsonld"}}